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Is the emergence of life an expected phase transition in the evolving universe?

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Re: Is the emergence of life an expected phase transition in the evolving universe?

#381

Post by illuminant »

qingcharles wrote: post #376
illuminant wrote: post #361

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is amazing this (perhaps pithy) comment is so down voted, yet you do make one very appropriate observation. Without a body a consciousness cannot do anything. The obvious answer the so-called-science occult refuse to entertain is that consciousness is the universe inflecting itself and life is a subjective scope of potential capacitating this consciousness. Life is the vessel and consciousness the universe peering…

What's a body? It doesn't have to be anything more than ones and zeros.

Ones and zeros aren't a body. A body is the composition of matter (silicon or carbon or whatever) which has capacity for potential. Potential is where the magic happens. Ones and zeros are states which may be represented by potential.

Re: Is the emergence of life an expected phase transition in the evolving universe?

#382

Post by PaulDavisThe1st »

spiralx wrote: post #360
PaulDavisThe1st wrote: post #291

Earlier quoted context omitted.

potential energy is. IMO, largely a pedagogical tool. it's an explanatory position, rather than a thing. the rock, does, obviously "contain" energy thanks to e=mc2. but the notion that the rock is energetically in a different state as it sits on top of the mountain that when it sits at the bottom never sat well with me in high school, and it still doesn't, 45 years later.

I mean any type of energy is just as intangible as potential energy, so I don't see that the energy stored by doing work (i.e. interacting with one four forces) is that different to the idea of energy stored by being in motion. You never measure "energy" directly after all, but it's a useful abstraction - after all, everything in science is an explanatory position.

Yes, everything in an explanatory position. That's precisely the point I was trying to get to.

I just happen to consider the explanation that a rock sitting on top of a mountain having "potential energy" to be relatively content free.

There's always a tension in physics (or has been for a couple of centuries or so) between force-based explanation and energy-based explanation.The force-based explanation (gravity) of why the rock might move downhill makes vastly more sense to me than the notion that it has "potential energy". However, the force-based explanation is not always clearly the right one either.

Also, I wasn't referring to "the idea of energy stored by being in motion". This is precisely the hangup that trips up so many. An object doesn't have energy because it is moving. And it doesn't move because it has energy. The motion and the energy are the same thing, just two different ways of talking about the same thing. The distinction matters because the way we've developed the semantics of "motion" and "energy" in physics means that, for example, "motion" is not something that is transferred between objects, but "energy" is.

Re: Is the emergence of life an expected phase transition in the evolving universe?

#383

Post by marmaduke »

johngossman wrote: post #162

There is a whole genre of these, starting with (as mentioned in the paper's introduction) "What is Life?" by Schrodinger. I've been idly working my way through a bunch of them, including Monod's "Chance and Necessity" (dated but excellent), Nick Lane's whole series of books (notably "The Vital Question"), Nurse's "What is Life?" (good if you want to learn about yeast), Zimmer's "Life's Edge" (haven't finished it yet,…

Rosen's Life Itself is another, along with Maturana's work on autopoeisis.

Re: Is the emergence of life an expected phase transition in the evolving universe?

#384

Post by mensetmanusman »

scirpaceus wrote: post #324
p-e-w wrote: post #320

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That sounds like metaphysics. The Universe doesn't "want" to increase entropy, entropy increase is simply a consequence of applying basic statistics to matter and energy. There is no mechanism that actively explores various pathways for making entropy increase faster.

This is also an argument that didn't sit well with me when I heard Guillaume Verdon / Beff Jezos on his recent Lex podcast state that the universe wants to produce more entropy, and that life evolved the way it has because it's more efficient at producing heat and entropy than, say, a rock. Perhaps he said that loosely as a figure of speech, because it should be obvious (religious beliefs aside) that the universe doe…

If you believe that you can want something, and that you are a subset of the universe, then the universe wants something (in the form of you).

Re: Is the emergence of life an expected phase transition in the evolving universe?

#385

Post by vacuity »

mathewsanders wrote: post #364
vixen99 wrote: post #352

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So are the atomic accretions known as humans who have 'wants' part of 'pop science'? Free will? If not, our justice system needs massive reconsideration, an idea with which many people concur but (I would have thought) is unlikely to prevail.

Maybe you’ve read this already (I still have it in my stack to read so can’t give any personal review) but ‘Determined’ by Robert Sapolsky sets the argument that we don’t have free will and that the justice system is flawed because of that. https://www.newscientist.com/article/2398369-why-free-will-d...

I read the article and I have to say, it's disturbingly compelling. Although I think that while we are unable to demonstrate intricate puppeting of real, conscious humans or something like that, there's some "truth" or "weight" in our thoughts and feelings that are genuine and outside of the typical sphere that free will governs (or, lacking that, fails to govern). Like, even if it could've been predicted with 73% accuracy at birth and 98% by age 25, the fact that someone deeply loves someone else doesn't seem like something to be written off as "this was in your genes and environment". It might still hold true in some sense if full-on mind control is invented, but then you wouldn't know if the feelings are real or fake, meaningful though they feel.

Re: Is the emergence of life an expected phase transition in the evolving universe?

#388

Post by kozd »

mensetmanusman wrote: post #384
scirpaceus wrote: post #324

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is also an argument that didn't sit well with me when I heard Guillaume Verdon / Beff Jezos on his recent Lex podcast state that the universe wants to produce more entropy, and that life evolved the way it has because it's more efficient at producing heat and entropy than, say, a rock. Perhaps he said that loosely as a figure of speech, because it should be obvious (religious beliefs aside) that the universe doe…

If you believe that you can want something, and that you are a subset of the universe, then the universe wants something (in the form of you).

Isn't this a category error? Just because my stomach lining is wet doesn't mean I'm wet.

Re: Is the emergence of life an expected phase transition in the evolving universe?

#389

Post by gfarah »

lachlan_gray wrote: post #79

It's fascinating to me that the complexity of life always goes up. Outside extinction events, complex life generally seems to become more favourable over time. It's interesting that (to my knowledge) we don't see an ecosystem lose complexity in its entirety unless it's dying. Simple organisms make a bedrock for complex organisms, and while the complex organisms have more specific needs, they are better at exploring,…

I've long believed that as the overall entropy of the universe increases, life forms evolve greater information processing capabilities to adapt and thrive in increasingly disordered environments.

Re: Is the emergence of life an expected phase transition in the evolving universe?

#390

Post by ixaxaar »

jgarzon wrote: post #365
photonthug wrote: post #293

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've been on this same journey through the Santa Fe institute pubs on this topic, which all started in a weird place because I wondered what kind of bizarre scientific research outfit had cormac McCarthy on staff as an artist in residence apart from the rest of the conspicuously multidisciplinary luminaries. What a unique, strange, and special intellectual atmosphere they must have had going in their prime and hopefu…

Santa Fe institute pubs? I’m curious to go there is it open to the public?

https://www.santafe.edu/research/sfi-press

BTW these books were up on amazon India for like $10-$15 each (books with slight printing defects were being dumped in the 3rd world) so I lapped up the entire collection :P

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