What is love?
What Is Life? (2019)
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Re: What Is Life? (2019)
#72Earlier 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…
No, it's not that they don't have their own machinery per se. It's that their life-ness depends on the context they are found in.
So on Earth, shower-caddys are non-living because there is not a machine which replicates them.
But in some other galaxy there could be a planet where organisms exist in which shower caddys can hijack their reproduction to produce more shower caddys.
Re: What Is Life? (2019)
#73In 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…
See also The Meme Machine, which is a book from the 90s (I think) that attempts to take Dawkins' idea of memes to its logical conclusion (and the book has Dawkins' blessing as evidenced by the fact he provides a foreword or at least a quote of praise/approval). I believe the author argues that memes are essentially a new form of life. Genes are the biological form of life that we're most aware of. Memes are basically the same thing, just in a different medium. I'm probably not doing the idea justice but that's the gist of it.
Re: What Is Life? (2019)
#74Re: What Is Life? (2019)
#75Earlier quoted context omitted.
"Life doesn't violate the 2nd law of thermodynamics" sounds similar to "magnetism does no work". Yet we know that magnetism creates macroscopic effects: a magnet can lift an iron nail, despite it does no work. The way it's explained is that magnetism somehow redirects other forces that do the work. My point is that something can do work without doing work "on paper" because all the work is done by others.
Where did you hear that magnetism does no work? I remember learning in school that the magnetic field does work on objects and the magnetic potential energy is converted into kinetic energy in the process.
There seems to be a bit of a rabbit hole here. It starts with the magnetic field interacting with charged particles only at right angles to their motion, meaning that it cannot do work on them. Work is done by electric fields that are induced by time-varying magnetic fields. Then there are objections that they can do work on magnetic dipoles (eg two permanent magnets rotating into alignment). This is countered with an objection that permanent magnets are actually a virtual coil from the current sheet orbiting the magnet's surface, so the former holds and work is done by induced electric fields. This is countered by the point that elementary particles with spin can have magnetic fields. Eventually the argument is declared a draw when someone points out that magnetic fields don't actually exist, and are just electric fields viewed from different relativistic reference frames.
Re: What Is Life? (2019)
#76What is love?
Haddaway - a late European philosopher - had that same question: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Pe5q_TdKbsk
Re: What Is Life? (2019)
#77A localized reversal of entropy.
Re: What Is Life? (2019)
#78A virus is a meta lifeform. It is life that operates given the existence of metabolising organisms. Life operates directly over the physical matter in the universe, a virus just operates a step above this.
Really like this "meta lifeform" idea. I'd suggest it might go further, even into the realm of language, story, and culture. Might there be a case for claiming language itself is another level of meta lifeform that has grown and evolved within the habitable neural landscape of our mind. Perhaps this is what separates us from animals. So obscure theories from computational linguists get pretty deep in this stuff. I ha…
You're describing memes.
Re: What Is Life? (2019)
#79Earlier quoted context omitted.
re: religion being evolutionarily advantageous. Totally. Though with your specific 3 points, I respectfully suggest you're missing the forest for the trees. The specific stories we tell through religion don't always matter as much as the aggregate power of enacting and conjuring them together. Sometimes strong-willed and stubborn groups are what was needed to thread a needle through an important time in history. Many…
I think this is why technology and science is the new religion we all live by. Technology has the potential to perpetuate information indefinitely. Organic life bootstrapped the path to inorganic life and beyond. Religion served its purpose and no longer feels relevant in light of technology and science.
I think we've lost something here. Shared delusions are delusions, but the important part was that they're shared. Unfortunately, science doesn't have the "shared" part - by itself, it doesn't build communities. In my experience, if you ignore the particulars of faith, most religions are essentially community construction kits.
We'll probably figure this out at some point - we need to, if we are to survive. Right now, the alternative community glues to religion are national identities, supernational identities (e.g. "I'm a citizen of EU" vs "citizen of country X"), and a wide variety of little identities we create for ourselves as we join groups we're interested in. But the problem with most of those is that they're detached from geography - so they're not particularly useful for building geographically-defined communities.
Re: What Is Life? (2019)
#80Earlier quoted context omitted.
You're dumb if you think that.
Panpsychism is definitely not dumb, but it's untenable and has unresolvable internal inconsistencies. If you want panpsychism without the contradictions, you'll have to look at analytical idealism.
I love this. A lot. Thanks for sharing.