
What is Life? by Erwin Schrödinger (1944) [pdf] - headalgorithm
http://www.whatislife.ie/downloads/What-is-Life.pdf
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atschantz
It's remarkable how much this still rings true today.

The idea that we should try and understand life as a battle against the second
law of thermodynamics has had a significant influence on many of today's great
thinkers - such as Friston [1] and Dennett [2], as well as countless others.

[1]
[https://royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/full/10.1098/rsif.201...](https://royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/full/10.1098/rsif.2013.0475)

[2]
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iJ1YxR8qNpY](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iJ1YxR8qNpY)

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jhallenworld
I've heard this called the "every refrigerator is a miracle" theory.

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throwawaylolx
I don't see anything on this phrase on Google Search

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8bitsrule
Wikipedia article:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/What_Is_Life%3F](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/What_Is_Life%3F)

"In the book, Schrödinger introduced the idea of an "aperiodic crystal" that
contained genetic information in its configuration of covalent chemical
bonds."

Good to see it available (a classic; not so easy to lay hands on)

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yesenadam
[https://archive.org/search.php?query=what%20is%20life%20schr...](https://archive.org/search.php?query=what%20is%20life%20schrödinger)

[http://libgen.io/search.php?req=what%20is%20life%20schröding...](http://libgen.io/search.php?req=what%20is%20life%20schrödinger)

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anton_tarasenko
Freeman Dyson reviews and extends "What is Life?" in his "Origins of Life,"
both a lecture[1] and a book.

[1]
[http://inspirehep.net/record/1268726/files/978-4-431-77056-5...](http://inspirehep.net/record/1268726/files/978-4-431-77056-5_5.pdf)

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ta1234567890
Our definition of life is very narrow, mostly self-referential. Life is
everything. Just because we can't consciously communicate with something it
doesn't mean it's not alive. Why wouldn't Earth be alive? How about the sun,
the stars and the universe?

We love separating things by arbitrarily naming and defining them, but the
universe is completely connected, we can't exist outside of it or disconnected
from it. If anything, the only life that exists is the entire universe and we
are just tiny tiny pieces of it with a very limited view and awareness of the
whole. Pretty much the same way we are made up of billions of cells that
likely have no way of perceiving the human body they are a part of (or "having
a conversation" with it).

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segfaultbuserr
I think you may be familiar with the Global Brain hypothesis
([https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Global_brain](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Global_brain)):
what if the Earth is a large network system? And you know, the network is the
computer...

Given the current empirical evidences we have, it's not particularity
persuasive, but an extremely interesting imagination and proposal indeed.

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neuronic
What if even stars in a galaxy form a communicative network, communication
meaning sending and reacting to signals on a purely physical basis which
doesn't translate to a meaning to us yet. Gravity waves, electromagnetic
signals, signals we are not aware of... I am not saying stars talk gossip but
that there could be a signal exchange and a systemic reaction. We see it in
practically all life forms on Earth and a in a way in the non-alive world as
well when you look at the climate, for example.

I mean, when I speak I physically interact and transmit signals through air
vibrations which we developed to both detect and interpret. Other perceptive
"life" forms would have a hard time telling what we communicate about as well.
Hell, we can barely if at all understand what other mammals communicate about
despite their biophysical systems being incredibly similar to our own. Plants
communicate with chemical signals and root/fungi networks.

Predicted pictures of the universe at large look eerily like the brain's
structure as well.

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hopler
Certainly everything with gravitational mass or electromagnetic energy
communicates with others via the waves and particles of physics. The question
is only in the complexity of these messages compared to biological and
psychological processes.

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erreJulian
I took a course on History of Science and I was pretty shocked to learn that
Watson, Crick and Wilkins were deeply impacted by this book. That type of
cross pollination between disciplines and generations of scientists is
fascinating.

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defnotarobot
I remember finding a first edition of this in my university library during
undergrad after reading the likes of Watson/Crick describe it as fundamental
in their path. What bowled me over was that each paragraph in that edition -
and so very likely the ones they read as well - was marked with a section
symbol (§), itself closely resembling a double helix. At the time it felt
profound that their conclusion was likely implied by the circumstances of
their beginning.

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bobbylox
A miserable pile of organic molecules. But enough talk...Have at you!

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captaincrowbar
What is life? A forkbomb implemented in hardware.

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goldenkey
Structure is opportunistic in the sense that it results from energy bleeding
out from the big bang into other fields, not only quantum fields but things
like position - thus we get large scale isotropy.

I followed Shrodinger's ethos to its limits and all I got was perfectly
isotropic relativistic spacetime foam.

I suppose that's what our universe will eventually decay into - and then what
happens is up to anyones interpretation (conformal cyclic cosmology or what
have you..)

I need to implement gravity, some type of coupling that can prevent
equipartition of states from happening so quickly.

In any case, nothing interesting happens in small universes by the process of
evolution. Evolution requires a balance between specifity of
search/selectivity and magnitude. Less specificity will require more brute
force magnitude. Just like any search of a space or data struct. Silicon just
doesn't have the magnitude that even a mole of molecules does. Not even in the
same ballpark.

The source is up here and easily portable to platform other than Windows

[https://github.com/churchofthought/ScatterLife](https://github.com/churchofthought/ScatterLife)

I need to update the video - the video is before I added a projection matrix
to fix the hexagonal skew.

Another framework but using complex valued cells:
[https://github.com/churchofthought/HexagonalComplexAutomata](https://github.com/churchofthought/HexagonalComplexAutomata)

