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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?

#91

Post by mrkstu »

jmcqk6 wrote: post #89
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,…

Check out the work of Ilya Prigogine - he won a Nobel prize in the 70's for his work on self-organizing complexity. There is a selection force in the universe for increasing complexity, being driven by the dissipation of energy. When you have systems in non-equilibrium, there is a strong pressure to explore the possibility space to find ever more efficient ways to dissipate energy. A bacteria the size of a grain of s…

Is there already a theory for life->greater complexity similar to that of entropy in physics? It seems just as inexorable.

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

#92

Post by coldtea »

Cacti wrote: post #15
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?

AI is not intelligent, even in the abstract sense

And I say it is. What now? How can these two statements be reconciliated?

(Pointing out that this is like, your opinion, man)

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

#93

Post by NoMoreNicksLeft »

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 think it was a Greg Bear novel, but a line from it struck me as insightful... paraphrased badly, "even evolution is evolving".

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

#94

Post by bmitc »

mrkstu wrote: post #91
jmcqk6 wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Check out the work of Ilya Prigogine - he won a Nobel prize in the 70's for his work on self-organizing complexity. There is a selection force in the universe for increasing complexity, being driven by the dissipation of energy. When you have systems in non-equilibrium, there is a strong pressure to explore the possibility space to find ever more efficient ways to dissipate energy. A bacteria the size of a grain of s…

Is there already a theory for life->greater complexity similar to that of entropy in physics? It seems just as inexorable.

The theory is that they are one in the same, or better to say that entropy is the process that drives life. In that, life grows in complexity in order to dissipate heat (i.e., increase entropy) more efficiently.

Just look at Earth. Life is incredibly complex but is ultimately driving everything towards dust.

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

#95

Post by alphazard »

HarHarVeryFunny wrote: post #87
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 think the trend towards complexity is more just due to more complex things being built out of less complex ones - complexity creates/supports greater complexity, so it's a natural progression. For higher level animals complexity may also be more inherently favorable since it supports a more customized environmental "fit", and helps in the predator-prey arms race.

Yeah this is it. It's very unlikely to see something which cannot be decomposed into similar parts come into existence. Something highly complex and irreducible.

But simple things are likely to come into existence. So given that we see complicated things, we should assume that they are reducible, and that they came from simpler things. This creates the appearance of a "trend" as you say. But it's really that the complicated things couldn't exist before and now they can.

Another effect is that it's possible to be more fit (in the Darwinian sense) when you are more complicated. The fittest system with complexity n is n. The rate at which things are destroyed is inversely proportional to their fitness (definitionally). So more complicated things can be better at staying around.

See also: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Assembly_theory

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

#96

Post by idiotsecant »

throwaway143829 wrote: post #26
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?

Makes you wonder what comes after AI. What's the "higher order" after AI that exists today or that will exist in 10 years? I'd guess we will never understand that level of intelligence, unless AI augments our brains somehow.

You mean the second order toposophic level? https://www.orionsarm.com/eg-topic/492d6fafbef2a

Careful you might be going down a 14 hour rabbit hole.

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

#97

Post by bordercases »

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.

Stuart Kauffman is a figure in the field with much more difficult books if that's more to your liking.

https://global.oup.com/academic/product/the-origins-of-order...

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

#98

Post by willy_k »

Cacti wrote: post #15
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?

AI is not intelligent, even in the abstract sense

Could you elaborate? Do you mean the current state of AI?

I would argue that current models have some behaviors that one could liken to intelligence, even if it’s all just operations on 1s and 0s. Of course, this depends on your definition of intelligence. Mine is along the lines of “can develop a representation of a problem space and use that to predict optimal actions given current input”. Which current AI, most animals, fungi, and humans can do. Sentience is a different question, I’d argue that only humans and a few species of animal (Dolphins, Elephants, apes) are sentient as of now, though it seems highly possible that machines will join that group by the end of the century, if not sooner.

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

#99

Post by Balgair »

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,…

Nit-pick:

> It's fascinating to me that the complexity of life always goes up

Depending (heavily) on how we define complexity, this is not always true. If we define complexity as the number of genes an organism has (a big if there), then we see that evolutionary pressure will often get rid of genes to improve fitness. This is somewhat common in bacteria and other 'small' organisms that are in 'stable' environments, but can happen even in 'higher' lifeforms (Sorry, I can't seem to remember the paper on this, but I vaguely recall it had something to do with jellyfish. Again, sorry!)

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