A blip between 2 ethernal nothingness.
The antidote you are looking for is panpsychism.
Is there any experimental evidence for panpsychism?
What Is Life? (2019)
41–50 of 117 posts
Re: What Is Life? (2019)
#42Earlier quoted context omitted.
Computers and their programs consume energy in the form of electricity to do work. How is that not metabolism? I recall seeing a reference to a biological species that also consumes electricity. In addition, they use that energy to (often) lower internal entropy and replicate themselves. They evolve with the assistance of a symbiote (humans), and are subject to competitive pressures for evolutionary fitness. Mating i…
That's exactly the difference, computers consume energy, while metabolism is the process of creation (and of course, consumption) of energy. An unplugged computer won't start to autonomously break down and convert chemicals into electricity to keep itself running, hence it's not alive.
> An unplugged computer won't start to autonomously break down and convert chemicals into electricity to keep itself running..
You just described a laptop.
Re: What Is Life? (2019)
#43Earlier quoted context omitted.
Counterpoint: If viruses are alive then anything can be alive, given that some machine exists which would make copies of it. ie. if there was a shower-caddy copying machine, then suddenly shower-caddies could be alive. In a world with a different life architecture, viruses would likely just be random an uninteresting molecules.
>Counterpoint: If viruses are alive then anything can be alive, given that some machine exists which would make copies of it. >ie. if there was a shower-caddy copying machine, then suddenly shower-caddies could be alive. If the shower caddys underwent sloppy replication allowing for sufficient complexity to have ongoing evolution of their own copying mechanism, I see absolutely no problem with this at all. They will…
I think the easiest definition for life, as we know it on our our planet, is to take Dawkins' perspective from 'The Selfish Gene'.
Life is self-replicant genes and the various machines they build around themselves.
No more. No less.
Bacteria are the quintessential gene replication machine. Viruses make complete sense here, hijacking the machines of the bacteria to replicate their genes. The virus is definitely alive. It replicates just fine. It just uses machinery in its environment, found in other cells, to do this, rather than packing it around itself. If life is the genes, there's no paradox at all. A hitchhiker is no less a traveler for the lack of their own car.
Of course, when we think of life, we think of the meta-structures we see, multicellular coalitions of cells that specialize and depend on one another. And that's fine. It's what we interact with and what is important in our day to day existence.
The human body has something like 100 trillion bacteria in its gut, with only 10 trillion cells cooperating to be the human.
From worms to fish, to frogs, to lizards, rats, monkeys and humans, we are essentially a protective tube around the payload of cells found in the gut biome we carry around inside us, just as those cells are protective bubbles around the genes inside them.
Scientists continue to be surprised at the effects these multitudinous populations within us have upon us. But it's not really that surprising if you consider things from their point of view. We're spaceships, carrying them around in an artificial environment, purpose grown for them to thrive in. They send out chemical hormones into our blood stream to signal needs, and they and we have been shaped together over time, and to depend on one another. So we respond in a way similar to what was successful with prior generations of genes and the organisms that contain them.
Does that mean they control us? Obviously not in any intelligent sense. They do add to our wants and needs, creating part of our experience of being. Relatedly, fecal transplants have been used to quell intestinal issues, but too have they been looked at in regards to depression and other mental issues.
What then are we, in this cacophony that genetic replication expresses?
We are gestalts.
Our brains are certainly formed by the genes inside us, but those genes are found in many, and do not encode our experiences, nor our memories, nor our decisions on what wants and needs to value and follow, regardless of which feel better in any immediate sense. Genes have no art, nor science to them. They are mindless, yet from them we are. Minds born of untold trillions of that live mindlessly.
I find Dawkins' further considerations on the ideas of the 'meme', being a replicator that exists only as a pattern in our memories and communications, to be fantastic here, and possibly a perfect way of generalizing life itself.
Much of what we call our self is a selection and rejection by preference of ideas we are exposed to from other people. In our genes, we do not find our languages, nor the metaphors with which they express our experiences, designs and desires between each other. We do not find our sports, nor rules, nor borders, nor a hundred other things we consider daily. These things come from without. From other people. We transmit them to each other, and to our children, and they to theirs. These concepts are within us, perhaps define what we see as 'us', but are not any physical sense part of us. Society lives in our collective minds, encoded in ideas, that exist in brains that are collectives of cells all of which contain genes, genes which, alone in all this tumult, replicate nearly flawlessly with every generation. The containers change around them, but all life shares these uncountable perfect little clones within us.
Perhaps life will one day be generalized as any self-similar replicating pattern in space and time, with various plateaus and groups of life for our joyful categorization to file examples into.
But for now, in our situation, genes themselves remain the best and most accurate definition of life that I can imagine
Re: What Is Life? (2019)
#44Earlier quoted context omitted.
The antidote you are looking for is panpsychism.
Is there any experimental evidence for panpsychism?
I don't know much on the topic, but from what I've heard it can hinge on how you define consciousness. If consciousness is defined as processing of information, it can be inherent down to at least photon level.
I'm hoping somebody can chime in who can explain better than me.
Re: What Is Life? (2019)
#45In the book Sapiens there was an interesting thought that life is basically information that is trying to "survive". In the same way you can look at religion as some sort of information that spreads in people minds and without people it would ceise to exist or have even reasons to exist - the same way like a virus is just information that goes from host to host. Viruses can represent the simplest form of what life is…
I think religion is actually an evolved mechanism for perpetuating (human) life. I developed this theory when my wife and I visited some friends in rural Kansas. We attended their Christian church service and I was struck by the potential evolutionary advantages that would play out if the preacher’s advice was taken at face value: 1) Anti-LGBTQ rhetoric: if only a fraction of LGBTQ individuals were shamed into a heterosexual relationship, there’s a potential evolutionary advantage. 2) Stay-at-home mothers: encouraging marriage/reproduction as the end goal for women likely has evolutionary advantages. 3) Early marriage: again, likely evolutionary advantage.
I find it extremely ironic that the groups most opposed to evolutionary biology are likely a bi-product of those forces.
Re: What Is Life? (2019)
#46It was interesting to also read his previous article in "Is biology too complex to understand" [1], where he surmises that after the initial "physicsization" of the discovery process in biology, where you came up with the whole DNA, RNA, amino acids (codons), ribosome, protein and related discoveries, there is a lot of complexity left undiscovered and which may not have simplified/abstract solutions/theorems a la physics. This is exemplified with the reported 100+ articles per hour in pub med, which cannot be expected to be understood by a human (or groups of humans) to any significant extent to extend the boundaries of our understanding in a fundamental sense and the hope is that machines (ML) may help us in getting a better send of the discovery landscape and provide insights we may not be able to divine ourselves.
Which leads the the (my) question - what is the current level of development in ML theory & practice to "understand" a particular set of research articles to create a "knowledge database" which can then be used to ask questions about it or relate the consisting articles etc.I know some basic research in NLP like topic modeling, question answering, summarization, information extraction, etc. and perhaps some sort of causal reasoning can be applied, but is there enough progress in this so as to start meeting the goals he wishes for - i.e to be able to advance science by machine processing of research articles as an aid for further insights and research?
[1] https://berthub.eu/articles/posts/biologists-physics-envy/
Re: What Is Life? (2019)
#47"Life" is an english word. There will never be a definition of "life" that includes everything we want included, and excludes everything we want excluded, because there is no distinct corresponding physical thing that it refers to, nor should there be any expectation of one. It's just a word.
Re: What Is Life? (2019)
#48It was interesting to also read his previous article in "Is biology too complex to understand" [1], where he surmises that after the initial "physicsization" of the discovery process in biology, where you came up with the whole DNA, RNA, amino acids (codons), ribosome, protein and related discoveries, there is a lot of complexity left undiscovered and which may not have simplified/abstract solutions/theorems a la phy…
How many git repos are published per hour to github? It probably doesn't matter, practically speaking, for you to build cool things. Similar to the results from pubmed.
For a significant amount of synthetic biology, you don't really need NLP or anything. You literally just need to get good at parsing a bunch of XML and text databases, sprinkled with a little bit of data dumps + ML, to be better than the vast majority of engineering done in the field right now.
(Genbank + Uniprot + Rhea -> SQL database you can do some intense things with)
Re: What Is Life? (2019)
#49The analogy of the question "What is life?" with "What is a computer?" bring up interesting parallels. The author defines a computer as any device that has transistors, RAM, etc that is, the computing substrate. But there were devices that didn't use transistors, but used vacuum tubes or mechanical gears (like Babbage's Analytical engine), which I think are still computers. We have some good theoretical model of computers: like Turing machines. One possible definition of a computer is any device that is Turing complete.
I wonder what such a theoretical model of life would look like.
Re: What Is Life? (2019)
#50My own personal definition of life is the following, somewhat hand-wavy, theoretically weak, though pragmatically strong definition: Life is anything capable of sloppy self-replication in a sufficiently complex environment. Viruses are definitely alive. Something like Tierra [1], Avida[2], or modern variants[3] of mutating copying programs come close, giving rise to whole ecosystems of parasites and hosts and defense…
I’ve been intrigued by Artificial Life for a while; I feel like it’s the way forward for GAI. I think the ML approach leaves out a lot of what is required to develop interesting intelligence.
The main challenges I see are:
1) With any given simulation, it’s going to take a long time before something really noteworthy emerges, and until then how do you know you’re on the right track?
2) What is the fitness function? This has always stumped me. How do you create artificial resources and competition and life and death to drive evolution?