New Giant Viruses Further Blur the Definition of Life • Hacker News Board

Re: New Giant Viruses Further Blur the Definition of Life

#81

Post by pluma » Tue, Mar 06, 2018, 4:36 PM UTC

Latty wrote: post #68

pc86 wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Society isn't one thing, so perhaps a better definition would be "Biology is the study of a complex thing?" Regardless, pedantry.

To continue the pedantry - what makes society not one thing, but a human one thing? That seems like a matter of perspective.

I was going to joke it's about medium sized things but size is not a reasonable distinction (neither absolute size nor number of "parts") and you quickly run into the problem how organisations (i.e. groups of humans acting together) or machines (e.g. a car) are fundamentally different.

I guess the definition really is pretty fuzzy and arbitrary. It's "obvious" why a bunny is biology and a car or company is not, but it's not quite so obvious why a virus or an android isn't.

Heck, xenobiology seems to be inherently problematic because alien life would defy all classification. Imagine the "xenomorph" from the Alien universe. Would that be considered a reptile? Is it even a vertebrate? What animal rights legislation would apply to it if any? Would a "grey" count as a person? We like to justify these laws with biological categories but what do we do when faced with situations where the categories break down?

EDIT: Is an artificial, viable sheep-human hybrid an animal or a human?

Re: New Giant Viruses Further Blur the Definition of Life

#82

Post by pluma » Tue, Mar 06, 2018, 4:42 PM UTC

Neeek wrote: post #8

sebazzz wrote: post #4

I never understand why viruses are not life. Bacteria are life because they are essentially a single-cell organism and act like any cell in our body: they consume energy and produce waste. Viruses may not be a cell, but they can be damaged, they die, and they appear to be more than a simple chemical process.

I thought the reason was that a virus has no means to reproduce without hijacking some other living thing's facilities with which to replicate itself.

So viruses are data but living things are code. Viruses are just malicious data that exploits unintended behavior of the code to replicate itself. Of course all code is just data.

It's similar to how it's difficult to argue whether a data format is a programming language (Turing completeness is an obvious but unnecessary and insufficient distinction). "Declarative programming languages" muddy the waters but most people would agree that a JPEG image is just data whereas a PHP script is a program.

Re: New Giant Viruses Further Blur the Definition of Life

#83

Post by jamesrcole » Tue, Mar 06, 2018, 4:42 PM UTC

nyc111 wrote: post #22

I consider legal entities such as corporations to be living organisms. So I don't agree that life is limited to organisms with a visible (biological) body.

There's two crucial questions left unexplained by your comment: what do you mean by 'living', and why does a legal entity fit that notion of living?

Re: New Giant Viruses Further Blur the Definition of Life

#84

Post by antiviral » Tue, Mar 06, 2018, 4:43 PM UTC

What if we could use the notion of entropy in a definition of life?

Living things use energy to prevent entropy (decay?) while they are alive.

On the other hand, natural, non-living processes do no such thing, and increase entropy as governed by the law of thermodynamics.

We could also use criteria such as growth, reaction to stimuli, and reproduction. However, crystalline structures also grow and chemical processes may produce more of a certain molecule. All of those seek some energy minimizing equilibrium without any mitigating mechanisms.

Re: New Giant Viruses Further Blur the Definition of Life

#85

Post by pluma » Tue, Mar 06, 2018, 4:45 PM UTC

dmurray wrote: post #48

felipemnoa wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>>Viruses are more like robots. A virus is just a computer program that needs a Von Neumann machine (CPU) to run on. Following this analogy we could define alive by saying that the combination of a program and a Von Neumann machine makes the entity alive.

Except that they really do have a physical manifestation (from the article, the cylindrical tail, the polyhedral box containing the genes, the fibrils on the outside). In some way they are closer to being the USB stick containing the computer program, that can reproduce onto other USB sticks but needs a host computer to do so.

Everything[0] has a physical manifestation. A computer program has a physical manifestation on its storage medium.

[0]: Let's not argue about whether it makes sense to say that abstract concepts also have a physical manifestation. Programs are concrete expressions encoded on a physical medium (whether using magnets, electrical charges or even the position of mechanical switches).

Re: New Giant Viruses Further Blur the Definition of Life

#86

Post by pluma » Tue, Mar 06, 2018, 4:56 PM UTC

infradig wrote: post #38

nyc111 wrote: post #22

I consider legal entities such as corporations to be living organisms. So I don't agree that life is limited to organisms with a visible (biological) body.

Only in the "Chinese room" sense.

The Chinese room argument builds on the premise that there is a meaningful difference between "simulating" intelligence and possessing it.

If you "execute" the program manually, you may still not understand Chinese, but the program still does. The room, including you and the program, is functionally a single entity that speaks Chinese. The human is an implementation detail as much as the grey matter is an implementation detail in a Chinese speaking human.

Searle's argument that the machine does not actually possess "understanding" is simply special pleading. Unless he can define "understanding" in a meaningful way, the difference between an "understanding" entity and a "simulating" entity is non-existent.

These arguments all boil down to unscientific armchair philosophy. I have no idea why people seem to accept them as meaningful other than that the people who came up with them or wrote about them are otherwise highly regarded -- but that's literally an argument from authority.

Re: New Giant Viruses Further Blur the Definition of Life

#87

Post by jquip » Tue, Mar 06, 2018, 5:19 PM UTC

nonbel wrote: post #63

mgeorgoulo wrote: post #61

I bet every biology student has struggled with the introductory "what is life" chapter, full of conflicting definitions. It is so difficult to define life because there is nothing to be defined. There are complex stuff and simple stuff. We tend to call things that exhibit a certain degree of complexity "alive", but that's just a word. Can't remember who wrote the perfect definition of Biology: "The study of complex t…

Yes, I logged in to say the same. There can be mutliple definitions of life, each useful for different purposes. It is like those people trying to figure out how many types of cells there are in the human body. There is no "right" or "true" answer, only useful ones. All these categories are artificial.

Much to fathom in those words... :)

Re: New Giant Viruses Further Blur the Definition of Life

#88

Post by ntumlin » Tue, Mar 06, 2018, 5:25 PM UTC

nonbel wrote: post #77

skissane wrote: post #66

Trying to define "life" is one of the central questions of the philosophy of biology. And the positions one takes in the philosophy of biology are inevitably going to be influenced by one's metaphysical positions regarding the problem of universals. A nominalist, a Aristotelian realist, a Platonist (etc.), are all going to approach the question "what is life?" differently. Sometimes when people discuss this topic, th…

>"Trying to define "life" is one of the central questions of the philosophy of biology." If this is true then "philosophy of biology" is a likely a total waste of time. It is obvious that life vs non-life is an artificial categorization that humans use because it is useful to them.

Maybe a better way to phrase the question then would be “What is the most useful categorization of life and non-life?”

Re: New Giant Viruses Further Blur the Definition of Life

#89

Post by jwilliams » Tue, Mar 06, 2018, 5:30 PM UTC

antiviral wrote: post #84

What if we could use the notion of entropy in a definition of life? Living things use energy to prevent entropy (decay?) while they are alive. On the other hand, natural, non-living processes do no such thing, and increase entropy as governed by the law of thermodynamics. We could also use criteria such as growth, reaction to stimuli, and reproduction. However, crystalline structures also grow and chemical processes…

That's true - and it's been used in a few contexts.

The issue is the context. i.e. Living systems do take in energy and organize. However, if you make the box a little bigger, it's still subject to entropy.

However, even drawing the box/context is useful!

Re: New Giant Viruses Further Blur the Definition of Life

#90

Post by tome » Tue, Mar 06, 2018, 5:36 PM UTC

factsaresacred wrote: post #76

tome wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Can't remember who wrote the perfect definition of Biology: "The study of complex things". There's a great deal of wisdom in that. Human society is complex, but it would not normally be considered biology.

Formal fallacy. That biology can be called 'the study of complex things' does not imply that all complex things fall under biology. It's silly to even have to point this out.

> That biology can be called 'the study of complex things' does not imply that all complex things fall under biology.

Doesn't it? How could it not? Can you give me another example from common parlance of the form "X is the study of Y" where many Y do not fall under X?