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

arxiv.org

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

#71

Post by asow92 »

simiones wrote: post #65
asow92 wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When birds make nests outside of their base anatomical functions, are they "unnatural"?

No, because birds are not humans. To be fair, "unnatural" is sometimes extended to refer to "life" instead of "humans", typically only when talking about the evolution of life or the search for extraterrestrial life. In that sense, then, yes - bird nests or termite mounds or coral reefs are unnatural. A more common wording for this same idea is something like "not created by geological processes".

> We are, truly, Of Nature, not Above Nature.

What gives humans the special designation of their byproducts being unnatural?

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

#72

Post by yieldcrv »

mjburgess wrote: post #3

This is written like a literary academic blog article rather than an academic paper in the sciences. It's fully of literary free association and hyperbolic language, etc. At best it's a sort of mission statement for what would need to be a research programme with many many academic papers behind it. As it is, I'm not sure what the authors aim here is. It's a blog post.

like everything on arxiv

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

#73

Post by Koshkin »

haolez wrote: post #7
ta8645 wrote: post #5

Can't help but wonder, is AI an expected phase transition in the evolution of life in the universe? Is life really just the larval stage of a higher order intelligence?

In the context of the universe, I wouldn't call it "intelligence" versus "artificial intelligence". I would call it "organic intelligence" vs "inorganic intelligence".

That's reductionist. (Also, can't A.I. be "organic," say, like the OLED? :)

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

#74

Post by m3kw9 »

1970-01-01 wrote: post #44

Extra-terrestrial life remains a hypothetical. There is no empirical evidence it exists beyond Earth. Until we witness some kind of artificial signal, or break open an asteroid with fossilized life, or somehow visit extra solar worlds with it, or get an unexpected visit, we're simply left arguing about the math.

Is hypothetical but the minuscule chance there isn’t a single cell outside of earth is almost infinitely minuscule. Is like saying to your friend “you have a chance to win the mega billions lottery”. It’s meaningless to them because they round down to that you have no chance

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

#75

Post by prewett »

hamburga wrote: post #27

I sat in on one of Stephen Wolfram’s YouTube lectures on his new physics project, and asked him about his conception of life in the big picture of physics. His perspective was that (if I may take the liberty of paraphrasing him) there’s nothing particularly special about life from the perspective of physics. What we call life simply correlates to parts of the physical world that have the highest degree of complexity…

That sounds like saying that that Michaelangelo's Sistine Chapel paintings are nothing special in terms of information science; they just unusually have an unusually high entropy content.

Technically true in both cases, but if physics is irrelevant to life, why not just answer the that way, instead of taking all the life out of Life.

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

#76

Post by m3kw9 »

1970-01-01 wrote: post #44

Extra-terrestrial life remains a hypothetical. There is no empirical evidence it exists beyond Earth. Until we witness some kind of artificial signal, or break open an asteroid with fossilized life, or somehow visit extra solar worlds with it, or get an unexpected visit, we're simply left arguing about the math.

Let’s say you found previous life in mars, will you say then life outside earth and mars is hypothetical? And as you keep finding life in bigger orbits you keep repeating it and you’d be treated as a crackpot lmao

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

#77

Post by asow92 »

simiones wrote: post #65
asow92 wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When birds make nests outside of their base anatomical functions, are they "unnatural"?

No, because birds are not humans. To be fair, "unnatural" is sometimes extended to refer to "life" instead of "humans", typically only when talking about the evolution of life or the search for extraterrestrial life. In that sense, then, yes - bird nests or termite mounds or coral reefs are unnatural. A more common wording for this same idea is something like "not created by geological processes".

> "not created by geological processes"

Did life begin with the geological process of protein chains forming in geothermal vents? I don't know, but it begs whether it is natural or not.

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

#79

Post by lachlan_gray »

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, gaining, branching out. So they also kind of make a nest for the simple organisms by sprawling into the void and finding habitable niches that simple organisms wouldn't reach on their own.

On the time scale of technology, we began reaching out to other intelligences the second that we could, began trying to make them the second we thought we could know how. It's very reasonable to say that percolation is a defining property of life and intelligence.

I also think a lot of scifi's like hyperion, neuromancer, foundation. In human writing of the future, it seems like the endgame of higher intelligence is to find or create other intelligences, and get closer to them. Then interesting things happen in the wake of that.

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