
How Do You Say “Life” in Physics? - dnetesn
http://nautil.us/issue/34/adaptation/how-do-you-say-life-in-physics
======
jveld
> For instance, there is no English translation for the Japanese wabi-sabi—the
> idea of finding beauty in imperfection—or for the German waldeinsamkeit, the
> feeling of being alone in the woods.

Writers who proclaim that English has no translation for word _x_ from
language _y_ , only to provide a matter-of-fact translation in the very next
clause/sentence always make me chuckle.

Or they provoke pedantic ire. Depends on how much sleep I've had. :p

~~~
jmcmichael
word != phrase

~~~
chatmasta
There is no such thing as "word" and "phrase" distinction across languages.
There are only ideas.

In written Mandarin, for example, there are only pictographic characters. Each
single character translates to an English word or phrase, but which it
translates to is completely arbitrary. It is extremely anglocentric to say
"English doesn't have a word" for a given Chinese character, if in fact
English has a phrase for it. The Chinese language has no obligation to
translate each character succinctly into a single English word.

In fact, one of the greatest strengths of pictographic languages is the high
degree of information density per character. More often than not, a pictograph
will translate to an English phrase, not an English word. For native Chinese
readers, inference comes naturally, as each character is built out of a set of
"radicals," each representing a narrowly defined idea, that act as the
primitive building blocks to convey a complex combination of their ideas
within one "character."

It's the ideas that matter.

~~~
jhedwards
I hate to be pedantic because I totally agree with the idea you're
articulating here, but it is misleading to describe Chinese characters as
pictographic. The correct term is "logographic" because they are graphic
structures that represent morphemes. There is a large variety of character
types, some of which are pictographic but most are not. My favorites are
characters that visually represent abstract ideas: 上 下 凹 凸 up down concave
convex

~~~
jveld
I recently realized that the logographic misconception about Chinese writing
probably stems from the pretty recent past when Classical Chinese was the sole
written form, and thus certain characters represented a common meaning to
speakers across dialects. Of course, it's still not historically accurate to
describe even Classical Chinese as purely "logographic" (for that matter, even
Egyptian hieroglyphs have phonetic elements), but at least it explains the
misconception somewhat

~~~
jveld
@jhedwards: My mistake - I guess I associated the term "logographic" with the
idea that modern chinese characters represent "ideas," which is mostly false.
My comment was aimed at the "pictographic" misconception, and was meant to
agree with yours, which I evidently read too quickly.

In modern written mandarin, each character corresponds to a spoken syllable,
which roughly corresponds to a morpheme, although sometimes it seems that
without the writing system to differentiate the vast number of homophones in
the language, the morpheme-syllable correspondence would get murky very fast.
Which is indeed a manifestly logographic element of the writing system

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grayje
Addy Pross wrote a similar paper in 2011, but the neologism then was "dynamic
kinetic stability"

[https://aeon.co/essays/paradoxes-of-stability-how-life-
began...](https://aeon.co/essays/paradoxes-of-stability-how-life-began-and-
why-it-can-t-rest)

[http://www.bgu.ac.il/~pross/PDF-10.pdf](http://www.bgu.ac.il/~pross/PDF-10.pdf)

[http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3843823/](http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3843823/)

The upshot is that life is its own state of matter, essentially a self-
stabilizing repeating pattern of matter and energy, like a waterfall or a
chemical clock.

~~~
agumonkey
Kinda reminds me of the old teleology.

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tbabb
This seems to be a really overcomplicated re-stating of Darwin.

There is no "lower level" at which to explain it: Things that are good at
making copies of themselves will tend to be more prolific. Restating Darwin in
terms of thermodynamics takes a simple idea and complicates it without adding
explanatory power, which makes it a poor theory.

Here is how you "say 'Life' in physics": Life is a pattern which obeys four
rules:

\- Reproduction: The pattern makes copies of itself. \- Inheritance: The
copies share traits of the original. \- Variation: The copies can be different
from the original. \- Selection: The success of the pattern making more copies
depends on the traits which it inherits.

That's it. A tree is alive. A person is alive. A stone is not alive. A virus
is alive.

And an idea is alive. It is a pattern in matter which replicates (I can tell
you an idea; now there's one in my head AND your head), it inherits (your idea
is similar to mine), it varies (you may reinterpret the idea, or combine it
with your own ideas), and it selects (you will spread ideas you think are
good, and discard those you think are bad). From this arises technology, or
religion. We may, with a twist of the mind, think of either as an organism in
its own right living in the habitat of human consciousness. (Perhaps all of
our species' success can be attributed to the fact that our brains support a
symbiotic form of life which can adapt far, far faster than DNA can).

And so by this definition even a solar panel is alive (and the "problem" of
physically differentiating the two evaporates); it is just a stranger form of
life that spends part of its existence as the plans for its production, coded
in the configuration of matter in its blueprints, computer files, and human
brains; and whose life cycle includes a stage where it is physically manifests
and makes it self useful to its human hosts by providing them electricity. Its
design is copied and mutated; some better at providing power for less effort,
and thus more likely to propagate and eventually out-compete weaker designs.

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mathgenius
The Nature article is here:
[http://www.englandlab.com/uploads/7/8/0/3/7803054/nnano.2015...](http://www.englandlab.com/uploads/7/8/0/3/7803054/nnano.2015.250__1_.pdf)

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javajosh
All persistent dynamic structures are fundamentally circular motion. And there
has to be an energy gradient to drive the motion against the resistence that
is required to reproduce.

So, imagine a torus in a bath of molecules such that the torus rotates in
proportion to the flux of light through it's hole. The torus rotates not like
a steering wheel, but around itself (called poloidal rotation), such that the
inside squeezes together and the outside expands. This might catch molecules
from the surrounding bath, expanding the torus, changing it's shape. It would
also tend to change it's relationship to incident light.

At some point, the torus could "shed" a second torus, roughly equal to it's
original, smaller shape, which would participate with the environment in the
same way, aggregating energy and matter to reproduce itself, until either all
light is consumed, all free matter is consumed, or both.

Anyway, I'm not sure if this is all that realistic - but I think it captures
the important quality of "life" when it comes to physics, mainly that life is
circular motion that has the general character of memory and reproduction.

~~~
alanwatts
>life is circular motion that has the general character of memory and
reproduction.

This is totally random but that bit reminded me of a quote from Black Elk
Speaks:

>Everything the Power of the World does is done in a circle. The sky is round,
and I have heard that the earth is round like a ball, and so are all the
stars. The wind, in its greatest power whirls. Birds make their nest in
circles, for theirs is the same religion as ours. The sun comes forth and goes
down again in a circle. The moon does the same and both are round. Even the
seasons form a great circle in their changing, and always come back again to
where they were. The life of a man is a circle from childhood to childhood,
and so it is in everything where power moves. Our tepees were round like the
nests of birds, and these were always set in a circle, the nation's hoop.

~~~
javajosh
That's lovely, but my meaning is a little more specific and technical, and
comes from the singular observation that Life cannot be constructed from
unbounded linear motion. The sun shines on the planet, making things move, but
gravity pulls it all down again. It's only "circular" in the same sense that a
human can be approximated by a sphere of water.

P.S. Would really like to know why the downvote.

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mchahn
My understanding of "life" has changed since I learned how biology at a low
enough level is mechanical. A virus is a mechanical structure with nothing
that we normally consider "alive". It arrives at a cell by accident, and its
mechanical structure happens to interact with the surroundings to literally
drill into the cell and then interact with its contents, again mechanically.

------
rumcajz
Can somebody explain what does Wittgenstein have to do with the whole thing?

~~~
unabst
If anything, the author could have gone into Wittgenstein more, but she did
cover a lot of ground... My stab at it:

Before Wittgenstein philosophers were obsessed with the factual nature of
words and tried mapping everything correctly (logically) with the natural
world. Except, they were failing.

Wittgenstein came in and basically said language was never designed to
represent reality, but rather is what emerges from the use cases between
people. Communication is a transaction ("game" in his words), and not some
mathematical or logical construct. It may have such properties, and the people
and the context are all real, so reality is involved, but language is not a
direct output, nor does it need to directly correlate to resist contradiction
or paradox -- which are abound in philosophy.

Except, for those who speak it, language is their reality. Those who cannot
overcome their own immersion can never see past their own words, which sums up
much of his opposition. They are all correct in their world and in their
words... except Wittgenstein was talking about how words and worlds worked.

In short, words can be arbitrary, and are constrained by the goal to
communicate and transact. This exact phenomenon which Wittgenstein described
as what we are doing is the phenomena England is describing as what biological
systems are doing.

It's all Dissipative Adaptation, with language being the unique construct for
every such system that emerges and sustains it all.

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jheriko
It's a shame there is a huge lack of technical details here... maybe there is
a profound thing that has been discovered, but I can't tell because the
article is vague and describes the mundane and obvious in a grandiose style.

~~~
d02
I wish they would put actual content in bold for those of us who aren't sure
it's worth it to wade through the endless fluff.

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noobie
Ah, Nautilus at it again. One of my favorite magazines! Any other proud
subscribers out thete?

~~~
tbabb
I am often disappointed with Nautilus. I find it tends to tout lofty or
revolutionary ideas, and frosts them with intellectual prose, but underneath
the article is surprisingly vague, content-free, and/or unscientific.

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trhway
non-live systems follow the entropy maximization gradient, ie. they maximize
entropy only locally. Live systems increase entropy beyond that is possible by
only following the gradient, ie. live systems maximize the total entropy
integrated over whole space-time path of the given system.

