In the book Sapiens there was an interesting thought that life is basically information that is trying to "survive". In the same way you can look at religion as some sort of information that spreads in people minds and without people it would ceise to exist or have even reasons to exist - the same way like a virus is just information that goes from host to host. Viruses can represent the simplest form of what life is actually trying to achieve. I am over simplifying that part of book, but it definitely gave me an interesting different look on life.
I think religion is actually an evolved mechanism for perpetuating (human) life. I developed this theory when my wife and I visited some friends in rural Kansas. We attended their Christian church service and I was struck by the potential evolutionary advantages that would play out if the preacher’s advice was taken at face value: 1) Anti-LGBTQ rhetoric: if only a fraction of LGBTQ individuals were shamed into a heterosexual relationship, there’s a potential evolutionary advantage. 2) Stay-at-home mothers: encouraging marriage/reproduction as the end goal for women likely has evolutionary advantages. 3) Early marriage: again, likely evolutionary advantage.
I find it extremely ironic that the groups most opposed to evolutionary biology are likely a bi-product of those forces.
re: religion being evolutionarily advantageous. Totally. Though with your specific 3 points, I respectfully suggest you're missing the forest for the trees. The specific stories we tell through religion don't always matter as much as the aggregate power of enacting and conjuring them together. Sometimes strong-willed and stubborn groups are what was needed to thread a needle through an important time in history. Many of the specific stories that emerged through that stubbornness might be no more than vestigial features -- feature that have no direct purpose, but as products of some underlying third factor.
For example, the old testament version of christianity was perhaps the right thing for that time, and the new testament person of Jesus was perhaps the right iteration of Christianity for that time. These stories suited the human network of the time, which perhaps had very different network structure -- the lawless chaos of man and nature during old testament times (in which strict codes were needed to gel society), vs the rigid and dominant social stratification and class conflict/divides of New Testament times (in which Jesus' teachings helped knit together a fractured social network).
Ah, I like where you're coming from. Thanks for the link; I'm definitely interested in exploring these topics further. Is there a name for this field of study? Perhaps just the sociology of religion? That seems to leave out the evolutionary biology perspective though.
No prob! "complexity science + <subject>" is usually a great starter for finding stuff from this angle. Complexity podcast by SFI is a wealth of knowledge, and had a recent episode about archeologists applying complexity thinking to history:
I think this is why technology and science is the new religion we all live by. Technology has the potential to perpetuate information indefinitely. Organic life bootstrapped the path to inorganic life and beyond. Religion served its purpose and no longer feels relevant in light of technology and science.
I think we've lost something here. Shared delusions are delusions, but the important part was that they're shared. Unfortunately, science doesn't have the "shared" part - by itself, it doesn't build communities. In my experience, if you ignore the particulars of faith, most religions are essentially community construction kits.
We'll probably figure this out at some point - we need to, if we are to survive. Right now, the alternative community glues to religion are national identities, supernational identities (e.g. "I'm a citizen of EU" vs "citizen of country X"), and a wide variety of little identities we create for ourselves as we join groups we're interested in. But the problem with most of those is that they're detached from geography - so they're not particularly useful for building geographically-defined communities.
> most religions are essentially community construction kits
love this.
What you wrote really resonates with me. Particularly the thinking on geographically-defined communities being important. I feel the full significance of this swap/migration (geographic => web) is not appreciated by most people (neither the builders of modern social networks, nor the participants), and we continue to bricolage our established geographic social networks with internet-based ones at our own peril.
I hate to sound melodramatic, but... increased tendency toward civil strife and failing democracies seems pretty dramatic to me
> Religion served its purpose and no longer feels relevant in light of technology and science.
Ah interesting. I personally wonder whether our challenges with conspiracies are related to the hole we're left with as religious belief starts to deteriorate. So I'm wondering if spirituality is still needed, if only as a rubber plug until we learn again how to use shared stories to more intentionally chart collective directions. Maybe a new form of spirituality will be the new plug in the end. But imho we need shared stories that occupy the evolutionary holes that religion previously filled, rather than dissolving the old plug only to have it re-colonized by cultural noise (like conspiracy)
I mean, civics is a quasi-religion in my thinking, it's just kinda weak. Not sure if we need something strongly to hold societies together :)
Additionally, at a more fundamental/basic level, I wonder about the social gap we're left with, sans religion. I'm probably biased by my Christian upbringing, but I can't help but miss the camaraderie I experienced growing up in a church. My wife and I just can't bring ourselves to knowingly participate in something that now feels intellectually dishonest.
I've heard this the other way round: religions that perpetuate reproduction (by discouraging contraceptives, encouraging child bearing, encouraging raising your children with the same beliefs, etc) have an evolutionary advantage over other religions, so religions are likely to have these traits after a few centuries.
See also The Meme Machine, which is a book from the 90s (I think) that attempts to take Dawkins' idea of memes to its logical conclusion (and the book has Dawkins' blessing as evidenced by the fact he provides a foreword or at least a quote of praise/approval). I believe the author argues that memes are essentially a new form of life. Genes are the biological form of life that we're most aware of. Memes are basically the same thing, just in a different medium. I'm probably not doing the idea justice but that's the gist of it.
I think you've made a good summary. And it leads to some interesting perspectives.
SSC classic, The Toxoplasma of Rage[0], explores this a bit. One fragment that burned into my mind is the few paragraphs reinterpreting the War on Terror as a parasite with multi-stage life cycle (like toxoplasma). To quote a part:
> From the human point of view, jihad and the War on Terror are opposing forces. From the memetic point of view, they’re as complementary as caterpillars and butterflies. Instead of judging, we just note that somehow we accidentally created a replicator, and replicators are going to replicate until something makes them stop.
Yes I've long thought that the actual unit of evolution is not the gene but instead the "pattern". Genes are merely a conduit for information. Even through artificial selection, we can "select out" genes we don't want. What remains? What survives? A pattern.
If I follow you, this is basically the notion of a "replicator" that Dawkins talked about at length (and maybe coined?) - if you haven't read The Selfish Gene, I recommend checking it out.
You might get a kick out of this post by a man who works adjacent to Sante Fe Institute folks. This guy takes it to the next level and makes you almost start to think of "non-living" things as "participating" in this dance of living with us as non-passive structural actors.
> For example, the [mud hut] structure’s inhabitant (also a volatile structure), may use the structure as a residence. If the structure succeeds in protecting the inhabitant from the degrading effects of the environment then the inhabitant will be better able to conserve energy, which may be directed toward the repair of the structure. On the other hand, if the structure fails to increase the inhabitant’s ability to dissipate energy, for example by requiring the inhabitant to spend more time on its repair than on obtaining food and resources (free energy), then the structure can be seen as participating in its own destruction (2nd Law). In the event of death or sickness of the inhabitant, the structure will decay back into the homogeneous state from where it came.
I don't think we have fully grasped what information really is yet, almost like fish that have just become aware of the ocean. After finishing James Gleick's excellent The Information (mentioned recently on HN), I came away wanting more. There doesn't seem to be more because humans haven't figured it out yet.
Santa Fe Institute! Highly recommend the Complexity podcast. So much good stuff that all dovetails with Gleick's stuff <3
My recent favourite contained an analogy by researcher Sara Imari Walker, who had this great line about how "If you want to understand gravity, you look to black holes, since they're the densest known objects where gravity acts insanely strongly compared to all other forces. In the same way, if you want to study information and how it operates in the world, you need to study life."
In George C Williams' book Natural Selection: Domains, Levels, and Challenges, he starts the book with some philosophical problems for biologists. One of my favorites is that he points out a sharp distinction between the "codical" domain and the domain of "interactors".
Interactors are the physical organisms that interact with each other and the environment. The codices are the information stored in the genes. He makes this point to emphasize that the world of information has its own rules that are different from the rules of physical bodies, and that the interactors seem to exist merely to ensure the continued propagation of the information.
This is how Jesus/Buddha/Mohammed are real, not because all the stories about them are true or that they are actually divine. But because they are actual self propagating ideas promoted by real physical people.
Neat! I haven't seen this idea out in the world much, but a book called "Object Oriented Ontology: A New Theory of Everything" kinda runs at this from a neat science-rooted philosophy perspective. It basically says that any philosophical framework needs to have just as much to say about fictional beings as it does physical, since fictional constructs certainly affect us.
I'd just never run across that idea before that book, but is there a specific place you came across it? :)
This is dancing on the edge of reality and metaphysics, I think the subject is fascinating since so much of our world is dominated by narratives.. real or imagined.
Interesting. In some circles of psychology and mythology, such as in reading Carl Jung and Joseph Campbell, there is an importance given to fiction because stories will affect people's lives in a profound way. The way I understand this view is that any information - whether objectively observed, or subjectively interpreted - which is meaningful deserves to be honored and understood.
Almost, Star Wars and LOTR are not really self propelling ideas that guide populations of people. The information is there, it's just not nearly as memetic.
Although I would say that Star Wars has inspired a lot of space exploration, it's not nearly as viral as something like Christianity.
Also religion is going through evolution, Christianity or Islam is just the result of many trial-error previous long forgotten religions which were less fit and were replaced by religions that spread faster. For example, it seems like mono-theistic religions were simpler and easier to understand - this is one shared trait between the most of the current "live" religions.
>life is basically information that is trying to "survive"
I've often had a similar thought. What if the panspermia hypothesis were true, what if it were the result of a deliberate action by some ancient alien civilization, and what if their objective was nothing more than to preserve some sort of "message" via the genetic code embedded within all living organism? Someday life evolves to the point where it is able to decrypt the message hidden within those base pairs and it's simply "Orgloxon was here! Stardate 173.4". The answer to the question "What is the meaning of life?" turns out to be that we're all just interstellar graffiti.
I often think that from instant zero of the first artefact that could be qualified as life form.. from then to us there's a common structure to solve chaos and persist in time. It's a looong inheritence chain.
but life and religion change overtime, so there isn't any single instance of "life" or "religion" you can point that is trying to survive - other than the whole concept of "life" and "religion" which feels like a non-answer
That's a problem with our categories, though. We assign static labels to pieces of a dynamic system.
All what we consider life is essentially one big ongoing chemical reaction. We are just repetitive patterns in it, and we see repetitive patterns in it, and we label these patterns. But these patterns are changing in a way imperceptible to us, until at some point we realize the thing we're looking at is different than what it was in the past.
Religion could be viewed in the same way. We see stable, slowly changing patterns in the information flow. Patterns that tend to turn noise into more copies of themselves.
It's also important to remember that when we say that some life form or piece of information is "trying to survive", we're anthropomorphizing it. The pattern doesn't have a will and isn't trying anything. The interactions between the pattern and the noise, or other patterns, tend to yield something similar to the original pattern in question.
(That's all a sophisticated way of saying that life is like Game of Life, where we identify interesting structures and give them a name - but in code, those structures don't exist in the first place. It's just a grid and a set of rules.)
I meditate like harari too, vipassana multiple times a year.. i wouldnt say its exactly trying, its surviving as it moves through time as matter, to end by transforming all its information into the medium, and begin again. - Its quiet astonishing to be this. Quite lonely to see our struggles as that, there is a senselessness to it, until irs greater sentience reveals itself .. then its terrifying, and that matures into surrender, which is peace. Moving from „it is this“ to „i am this“
A virus is a meta lifeform. It is life that operates given the existence of metabolising organisms. Life operates directly over the physical matter in the universe, a virus just operates a step above this.
Really like this "meta lifeform" idea. I'd suggest it might go further, even into the realm of language, story, and culture.
Might there be a case for claiming language itself is another level of meta lifeform that has grown and evolved within the habitable neural landscape of our mind. Perhaps this is what separates us from animals.
So obscure theories from computational linguists get pretty deep in this stuff. I haven't been able to stop thinking about this stuff since I read about it last year.
Heh thanks :) I'd venture it's more about "life-emerging" forces happening at all scales -- That all matter is slowly tending toward living when it sits in the blaze of an entropy-generating monster like a star.
Disclaimer: Did an honours degree in biochemistry, so perhaps I'm not so great at filling in the narrative space of my own mental leaps :)
The distinctions (between all the ways "meme" is used) are addressed pretty well in van Driem's papers and book chapters. In short, Dawkinsian "memes" are a very weakened version, mostly based on rote mimicking and copying. His meme was actually more strongly defined in the prior literature that he borrowed the term from and diluted.
The Leiden hypothesis leans on a harder version, in which memes are quite literally a new strata of life and our minds are co-evolved host organisms that straddle two layers -- a cyborg of biological and semiotic organisms. Our minds might be better conceived as akin to the fertile replication machinery of the biological systems below (ie. DNA polymerase) -- Where the linear packets of information are remixed and recombined after being delivered from the internal and external environment. And if there's some truth there, then it prompts lots of questions (e.g., about what is the most appropriate unit of life at the cultural/linguistic level. Because DNA polymerase is not what we normally consider "alive" -- we consider the aggregate cell alive. etc. etc)
Before all the details we need to arrive at the right ballpark and establish the basics. I know on my example that even though I got through school with good grades, I was still full of misconceptions due to a few key errors fed from teachers, bullshit pseudo knowledge I picked up from ufo+mystery magazines and TV edutainment.
So first, there is nothing special about life. Life doesn't break the normal laws of physics we use to describe everything else. Our naive concept is often along the lines of a game engine with inputs coming "from outside", from spirits or something. But there's no evidence of that. Living material is ordinary.
Physics teachers will explain that heat doesn't go from cold to warm places. If you ask how fridges can exist, they may say "well, heat doesn't go there by itself", invoking some kind of magic explanation. Now I know there are more precise phrasing in physics, but that's beside my point. We grow up with a concept that there are things that happen "by themselves" and there are things that happen due to living creatures' actions. In this implicit naive view that many, including past me hold, a fridge does an exceptional thing because it vaguely obeys our effortful engineering intentions. We make it do that, it doesn't do it out of its own nature.
Actually in primary school physics class when we learned the concept of forces, we learned different categories: magnetic, gravitational, "holding/mounting" force, friction force, muscle force... And we had to label the arrows in different everyday cartoons, like a kid pulling a sled in the snow: muscle force towards the kid, gravity down, holding force from the ground up, friction force backward. As if muscle force was some irreducible special magic phenomenon in physics. While correctly teaching basic school-level vector calculus skills they failed at teaching fundamental world view skills.
Because there's no distinction like this. Life doesn't violate the second law of thermodynamics.
Of course this article also doesn't claim that, but as I said, it's important to first arrive on the same page, in the same ballpark before the high resolution discussion.
"Life doesn't violate the 2nd law of thermodynamics" sounds similar to "magnetism does no work". Yet we know that magnetism creates macroscopic effects: a magnet can lift an iron nail, despite it does no work. The way it's explained is that magnetism somehow redirects other forces that do the work. My point is that something can do work without doing work "on paper" because all the work is done by others.
I remember learning in school that the magnetic field does work on objects and the magnetic potential energy is converted into kinetic energy in the process.
There seems to be a bit of a rabbit hole here. It starts with the magnetic field interacting with charged particles only at right angles to their motion, meaning that it cannot do work on them. Work is done by electric fields that are induced by time-varying magnetic fields. Then there are objections that they can do work on magnetic dipoles (eg two permanent magnets rotating into alignment). This is countered with an objection that permanent magnets are actually a virtual coil from the current sheet orbiting the magnet's surface, so the former holds and work is done by induced electric fields. This is countered by the point that elementary particles with spin can have magnetic fields. Eventually the argument is declared a draw when someone points out that magnetic fields don't actually exist, and are just electric fields viewed from different relativistic reference frames.
This deserves its own post on HN. Do you know what's the going theory about how magnetism induces the current loop? Something must tell electrons that it's time to move in the clockwise direction and that something moves at the speed of light.
It's a quote from wikipedia: an electron, moving in a magnetic field, experiences a force perpendicular to its trajectory, so the work - the dot product of the force and trajectory vectors - is zero.
I should probably add one unscientific remark (orthodox HN readers: proceed with caution). Per [...], the secret of organic lifeforms and the secret of intelligence are very different things. Organic lifeforms keep their shit together by balancing two kinds of magnetisms - od and ob - to direct the electricity - aour. Od is constructive, ob is destructive and aour performs all the action. That's somewhat similar to scientific notation: the H and B magnetic fields and the E electric field.
I think that's an insightful way to put things. While getting a chance to do some science with my kids during this crazy time, I was forced to put things into words and (relatively) simple terms for things that I always felt I was lacking knowledge, because of a similar type of teaching as you described. But as I began teaching some simple concepts, I for some reason had a better understand than I ever have, and was able to put them into very simple terms.
I feel like so many teachers are on autopilot with various topics that they don't know how to explain the most simple part of a concept, and instead make it infinitely more complicated and it seems magical.
The purpose of life is for the consciousness to realize that it is part of the whole. There is some form of an attractor force, outside of our immediate 3d world, that is attracting all self-aware sentient entities to become.
Applying western science and demanding evidence when it cannot be comprehended by the human mind is like the petulant child who asks why at the end of every sentence.
Terrence Mckenna is probably the only Westerner who has been able to articulate what the rest of the ancient civilizations have figured out independently.
The guy was really a master story teller, whether you take what he was saying seriously is up to you. Saying that, he did a lecture in New York when Giuliani was mayor and makes a quip about "the consciousness of Giuliani administration". I could not help being reminded of it when Giuliani resurfaced recently.
So you're making an assertion about something that the human mind cannot comprehend. Nice contradiction + random dig at people to make yourself feel superior.
Life can be defined in terms of entropy. The 2nd Law of Thermodynamics says it's always increasing, and it was once lower. The law only applies for closed systems, so if we generalize to any system sometimes entropy increases. Life is a system that consumes low entropy and transforms into high entropy [negative entropy]. From light to other life, life is consuming lower forms of entropy to then use it in its information processing systems.
Yes exactly. It's a great read. Here is the snippet about my other comment (p.25)
> Every process, event, happening -call
it what you will; in a word, everything that is
going on in Nature means an increase of the
entropy of the part of the world where it is going
on. Thus a living organism continually increases
its entropy -or, as you may say, produces
positive entropy -and thus tends to approach the
dangerous state of maximum entropy, which
is of death. It can only keep aloof from it, i.e.
alive, by continually drawing from its
environment negative entropy -which is
something very positive as we shall immediately
see. What an organism feeds upon is negative
entropy. Or, to put it less paradoxically, the
essential thing in metabolism is that the
organism succeeds in freeing itself from all the
entropy it cannot help producing while alive.
It was interesting to also read his previous article in "Is biology too complex to understand" [1], where he surmises that after the initial "physicsization" of the discovery process in biology, where you came up with the whole DNA, RNA, amino acids (codons), ribosome, protein and related discoveries, there is a lot of complexity left undiscovered and which may not have simplified/abstract solutions/theorems a la physics. This is exemplified with the reported 100+ articles per hour in pub med, which cannot be expected to be understood by a human (or groups of humans) to any significant extent to extend the boundaries of our understanding in a fundamental sense and the hope is that machines (ML) may help us in getting a better send of the discovery landscape and provide insights we may not be able to divine ourselves.
Which leads the the (my) question - what is the current level of development in ML theory & practice to "understand" a particular set of research articles to create a "knowledge database" which can then be used to ask questions about it or relate the consisting articles etc.I know some basic research in NLP like topic modeling, question answering, summarization, information extraction, etc. and perhaps some sort of causal reasoning can be applied, but is there enough progress in this so as to start meeting the goals he wishes for - i.e to be able to advance science by machine processing of research articles as an aid for further insights and research?
How many git repos are published per hour to github? It probably doesn't matter, practically speaking, for you to build cool things. Similar to the results from pubmed.
For a significant amount of synthetic biology, you don't really need NLP or anything. You literally just need to get good at parsing a bunch of XML and text databases, sprinkled with a little bit of data dumps + ML, to be better than the vast majority of engineering done in the field right now.
(Genbank + Uniprot + Rhea -> SQL database you can do some intense things with)
Life is metabolism, so a computer program or a silicon-based intelligence cannot be considered alive by current definition. Either we rework the definition or it will definitely not be alive. Also, sentience and intelligence are two very different things, I think we are very far from having ethical problems with switching off computers (if ever).
Computers and their programs consume energy in the form of electricity to do work. How is that not metabolism? I recall seeing a reference to a biological species that also consumes electricity.
In addition, they use that energy to (often) lower internal entropy and replicate themselves. They evolve with the assistance of a symbiote (humans), and are subject to competitive pressures for evolutionary fitness.
Mating is almost unheard of, but composition of parts is rampant.
That's exactly the difference, computers consume energy, while metabolism is the process of creation (and of course, consumption) of energy. An unplugged computer won't start to autonomously break down and convert chemicals into electricity to keep itself running, hence it's not alive.
You know what I meant, but in case it's needed, that's why I qualified my sentence with "autonomously". And no, a set of software/actuators to regularly plug the laptop into mains is not the same kind of autonomy, since it would just be the execution of an algorithm that a sentient being programmed. Without that, the laptop won't be subject to any necessity or pressure to harvest energy.
Well, but again the analogy does not hold water, there is big difference between a sentient agent programming a laptop (for which we have a complete causal/mechanistic account) and evolution, which is not sentient/self-aware and can only be said to be "following a direction". The only way I could steelman this argument is by assuming a telos in nature, in which case it would quickly become a religious argument. If life was just an algorithm to consume energy we would already be past the point of creating artificial life, while instead we have no clue of how it begins, with our best conjecture being abiogenesis which we have so far failed spectacularly to recreate in a lab. I am convinced that it is only matter of time before we have artificial life, but it will come in the form and shape of the regular metabolizing biological life.
The analogy of the question "What is life?" with "What is a computer?" bring up interesting parallels. The author defines a computer as any device that has transistors, RAM, etc that is, the computing substrate. But there were devices that didn't use transistors, but used vacuum tubes or mechanical gears (like Babbage's Analytical engine), which I think are still computers. We have some good theoretical model of computers: like Turing machines. One possible definition of a computer is any device that is Turing complete.
I wonder what such a theoretical model of life would look like.
The analogy goes deeper. Most of us are familiar with the spirit-soul-body concept. Descriptions of the three are very similar to concepts in CS: spirit is the algorithm or an idea - in this sense the spirit is immutable and the same for all devices, soul is the software - it's mutable, implemented in a particular language or framework and generally strives to be a perfect reflection of the spirit, and finally the cpu itself with all the machinery running electrons is the body - it's run by that almost immaterial soul, although no part of that machinery, not even a single electron, is a part of the soul. The connection between the three can be easily understood by CS folks, but is a great mystery for uninitiated (i.e. those who can't code).
There's even a striking analogy of good an evil. "The evil is affirmation of disorder" (Eliphas Levi) and that is bugs and poor chaotic design: software that embraces this disorder, gives up liberty and reason (aka the good) and becomes evil, for evil has neither liberty nor reason.
Technically correct, but the therapeutic ("antidote") aspect of panpsychism hinges on the critical choice of the meta-physics that you ascribe to 'IT'.
This doesn't fundamentally alter ssijak's point. Even applied to the whole of existence, that existence takes place between points of temporal indeterminacy. Even if this could be viewed as lengthening the "blip" it does so in the context that the given length of time between temporal indeterminacies is immaterial due to the nature of such indeterminacies and thus still remains, in effect, "blip"-like.
I don't know much on the topic, but from what I've heard it can hinge on how you define consciousness. If consciousness is defined as processing of information, it can be inherent down to at least photon level.
I'm hoping somebody can chime in who can explain better than me.
Panpsychism is definitely not dumb, but it's untenable and has unresolvable internal inconsistencies. If you want panpsychism without the contradictions, you'll have to look at analytical idealism.
An unpleasant philosophical discussion* about the multiple definitions or the lack of even one proper definition for one annoying word. It has no meaning! No matter how we define life or being alive, the atoms, reality, physics, chemistry don't change. Say we decide a virus is properly alive -what does it matter? What does that decision affect?
* if it's pleasant, it's probably not a philosophical discussion
I think it's reasonable to recognize genetic replication as being a defining feature of life on earth as we know it today, without ruling out discovery or invention of other possibilities in the future.
If you brought me a blob of something and ask me whether it contained "life," I'd analyze it for DNA or RNA. In the absence of those things I'd look for a preponderance of chirally selected molecules.
Exactly. From cause-and-effect point of view, it's a single chemical reactions. When we categorize living things, we're just putting labels on recurring fractal patterns we observe in that reaction.
"Life" is an english word. There will never be a definition of "life" that includes everything we want included, and excludes everything we want excluded, because there is no distinct corresponding physical thing that it refers to, nor should there be any expectation of one. It's just a word.
My own personal definition of life is the following, somewhat hand-wavy, theoretically weak, though pragmatically strong definition:
Life is anything capable of sloppy self-replication in a sufficiently complex environment.
Viruses are definitely alive. Something like Tierra [1], Avida[2], or modern variants[3] of mutating copying programs come close, giving rise to whole ecosystems of parasites and hosts and defenses, etc. though perhaps they are lacking the "sufficient complexity" necessary so as not to stall out and stop evolving much. Chemistry provides such a massive environment of complexity that it's hard to replicate elsewhere, though I'd argue it's hardly impossible.
The problem with this article's definition is that, with near certainty, the first progenitor lifeform on earth did NOT utilize ANY of the DNA/RNA protein translation machinery they state are necessary to meet their definition of alive. You can find some surpringly good statistical analyses of this assertion in an unlikely ally: creationist statistical arguments. They prove pretty definitively that life didn't begin with a transcriptase protein popping into existence.
What are the problems with my definition:
The big theoretical hole: You could concoct some hypothetical scenario where something I'd definitely agree is alive replicates using some star trek technology that doesn't allow for the "sloppy" part. W/e, I consider this pragmatically irrelevant.
The second big objection: It allows us to consider many things as "alive" that most would say are not. In my opinion, this is actually a major strength.
Ok, but what about things like crystals?
Personally, I consider some type of self-catalysing crystal or quasicrystal to be one of the most plausible forms of original life on earth. That said, they seem to be lacking the "sufficient complexity" aspect. However, are they really? I'm not so sure. Is it possible for a particular pattern of crystal defects to bring about a replication of sorts of that defect pattern elsewhere in the crystal during crystallization? That may be enough complexity particularly when you consider substitutions (when one element in the crystal lattice gets swapped for another). If some type of pattern of crystal defects or quasicrystal or something developed sufficient self-catalysing ability to bring about a form of sloppy self-replication, it's likely that's enough for life provided that the environment allows it under entropy considerations.
I think it's desireable for there to be a zoo of definitions of life. Life isn't a precise mathematical concept, but a family of related concepts.
Self-replication is almost essential, but it's not hard to imagine a future AI that is highly dynamic, intelligent, etc, but does not create copies of itself.
Metabolism is pretty universal. I'd define it as a process that consumes free energy. Arguably viruses don't satisfy this definition. Computers do satisfy it. Most probably don't consider the sun to be alive though, despite it consuming vast amounts of free energy.
Minimizing internal entropy is an interesting one because it's not objective, it requires a model to define entropy. Something can look to us to be high and increasing entropy because we're using the wrong model to understand it. Viruses are static though, so they are definitely not decreasing internal entropy.
>Counterpoint: If viruses are alive then anything can be alive, given that some machine exists which would make copies of it.
>ie. if there was a shower-caddy copying machine, then suddenly shower-caddies could be alive.
If the shower caddys underwent sloppy replication allowing for sufficient complexity to have ongoing evolution of their own copying mechanism, I see absolutely no problem with this at all. They will rapidly evolve to become much more conventionally life-like.
I find the notion that viruses aren't alive to be totally absurd. They replicate themselves, evolve continuously into an ever-branching tree of different niches, etc.
Is your objection that they don't have their own copying machinery?
Should mistle-toe not count as alive even though it depends on a tree to live? Hell, it appears it's even missing most of the genes necessary for it's mitochondria to produce ATP[1] so if it's somehow hijacking ATP production from the host tree, it clearly has no ability to reproduce on it's own. What about a human male? They have no replication ability without a female host "machine" to make copies of themselves. Are they therefore not alive? I think your objection rapidly descends into absurdity if you closely examine your definitions.
> In a world with a different life architecture, viruses would likely just be random an uninteresting molecules.
In such a world, a virus would not exist. In the same notion, in a world without sources of sugars, starches, and proteins, you would not exist. If you happened to blink into existence in this same hypothetical as a virus, you would be an equally uninteresting collection of molecules that would rapidly disappear.
[1]https://www.quantamagazine.org/the-mystery-of-mistletoes-mis...
No, it's not that they don't have their own machinery per se. It's that their life-ness depends on the context they are found in.
So on Earth, shower-caddys are non-living because there is not a machine which replicates them.
But in some other galaxy there could be a planet where organisms exist in which shower caddys can hijack their reproduction to produce more shower caddys.
I think the easiest definition for life, as we know it on our our planet, is to take Dawkins' perspective from 'The Selfish Gene'.
Life is self-replicant genes and the various machines they build around themselves.
No more. No less.
Bacteria are the quintessential gene replication machine. Viruses make complete sense here, hijacking the machines of the bacteria to replicate their genes. The virus is definitely alive. It replicates just fine. It just uses machinery in its environment, found in other cells, to do this, rather than packing it around itself. If life is the genes, there's no paradox at all. A hitchhiker is no less a traveler for the lack of their own car.
Of course, when we think of life, we think of the meta-structures we see, multicellular coalitions of cells that specialize and depend on one another. And that's fine. It's what we interact with and what is important in our day to day existence.
The human body has something like 100 trillion bacteria in its gut, with only 10 trillion cells cooperating to be the human.
From worms to fish, to frogs, to lizards, rats, monkeys and humans, we are essentially a protective tube around the payload of cells found in the gut biome we carry around inside us, just as those cells are protective bubbles around the genes inside them.
Scientists continue to be surprised at the effects these multitudinous populations within us have upon us. But it's not really that surprising if you consider things from their point of view. We're spaceships, carrying them around in an artificial environment, purpose grown for them to thrive in. They send out chemical hormones into our blood stream to signal needs, and they and we have been shaped together over time, and to depend on one another. So we respond in a way similar to what was successful with prior generations of genes and the organisms that contain them.
Does that mean they control us? Obviously not in any intelligent sense. They do add to our wants and needs, creating part of our experience of being. Relatedly, fecal transplants have been used to quell intestinal issues, but too have they been looked at in regards to depression and other mental issues.
What then are we, in this cacophony that genetic replication expresses?
We are gestalts.
Our brains are certainly formed by the genes inside us, but those genes are found in many, and do not encode our experiences, nor our memories, nor our decisions on what wants and needs to value and follow, regardless of which feel better in any immediate sense. Genes have no art, nor science to them. They are mindless, yet from them we are. Minds born of untold trillions of that live mindlessly.
I find Dawkins' further considerations on the ideas of the 'meme', being a replicator that exists only as a pattern in our memories and communications, to be fantastic here, and possibly a perfect way of generalizing life itself.
Much of what we call our self is a selection and rejection by preference of ideas we are exposed to from other people. In our genes, we do not find our languages, nor the metaphors with which they express our experiences, designs and desires between each other. We do not find our sports, nor rules, nor borders, nor a hundred other things we consider daily. These things come from without. From other people. We transmit them to each other, and to our children, and they to theirs. These concepts are within us, perhaps define what we see as 'us', but are not any physical sense part of us. Society lives in our collective minds, encoded in ideas, that exist in brains that are collectives of cells all of which contain genes, genes which, alone in all this tumult, replicate nearly flawlessly with every generation. The containers change around them, but all life shares these uncountable perfect little clones within us.
Perhaps life will one day be generalized as any self-similar replicating pattern in space and time, with various plateaus and groups of life for our joyful categorization to file examples into.
But for now, in our situation, genes themselves remain the best and most accurate definition of life that I can imagine
I’ve been intrigued by Artificial Life for a while; I feel like it’s the way forward for GAI. I think the ML approach leaves out a lot of what is required to develop interesting intelligence.
The main challenges I see are:
1) With any given simulation, it’s going to take a long time before something really noteworthy emerges, and until then how do you know you’re on the right track?
2) What is the fitness function? This has always stumped me. How do you create artificial resources and competition and life and death to drive evolution?
I've given a lot of thought to this over the years too and come to a very similar conclusion. GAI really probably needs to create itself.
I think that intuition was at least partially confirmed by the successes of GAN's. ...not every problem can be solved that way, per se but it's a good starting place.
The big challenge here though IMO is computational! If you're going to use genetic algorithms to create organisms, you have to then let each of those organisms train themselves. It sounds computationally expensive. And the search space is absolutely massive! It will take some really intelligent effort to bring it down to a level that's feasible.
On that note though, the other thing is that I'm convinced that you also need to include for GAI is fundamental structural arrangements as evolvable parameters. You can argue that this is unnecessary mathematically, but IMO, a little bit of intelligent structure can make the same number of neurons a lot more efficient to train. We see this confirmed in some of the more successful deep learning pipelines. Different components of the whole system get specialized training which gives structure to the whole system.
From an artificial life standpoint, I thought about just offering resources based on correct answers to questions, with exponentially greater resources awarded to harder questions. Questions though would need to be generated in situ of course to avoid memorization.
