It's interesting how most "skepticism" is exposed for what it truly is, that being unwarranted assumptions and semantics that prop up weak models of reality and block out better fitting ones.
Anyways that's just my theory and a lot of the skeptics, like the people downvoting this right now, have already made the assumption against it without testing it for some reason.
Science can and will eventually solve everything, including life itself, but we need people to believe in the scientific process.
We can fairly confidently exclude this possibility. Dirac’s equation forbids it [1]. Or, in your specific language (which is good, don’t get me wrong): we have tested this hypothesis, countless times, and conclusively disproved it.
[1] https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/guest-blog/physics-and-...
The article literally states that Dirac's equation is incomplete at modeling the full situation.
But that's okay, since those are only important at high energies and/or short distances, very far from the regime of relevance to the human brain.
And the article makes the mistake of assuming that life force is the physical driving energy, instead of electromagnetic energy itself being directed by a life force.
There are lots of randomness in quantum physics. The life force would cause that to be more deterministic. Einstein himself was a proponent of the hidden-variable theory, famously stating that "God does not play dice".
Who are we to argue against Einstein?
> And the article makes the mistake of assuming that life force is the physical driving energy
No, it’s simply a tautology: if it interacts with physical entities, it’s physical. EM radiation itself is a physical phenomenon, so it doesn’t provide a magical escape hatch. It doesn’t matter what you call this mystical force; by virtue of interacting with a physical system it must be subject to rules of physics, no special pleading can change that.
> There are lots of randomness in quantum physics
Yes, but that is provably a fundamental property of quantum systems, not something we can ignore or manipulate nilly-willy. Your Einstein quote predates relevant experiments that disprove this hypothesis. “Who are we to argue against Einstein?” is therefore a classical argument from authority: we are arguing based on evidence (and new theoretical underpinnings) that Einstein, at the time he uttered the phrase, didn’t possess (in particular, Bell’s theorem). Your objection is exactly like refusing to acknowledge relativity, saying “Who are we to argue against Newton?”
Anyway, if you’re keen on an argument from authority then consider this: who are you to argue against the consensus of the smartest minds working in the field of neurobiology? I hope you can appreciate how this argument sounds less convincing if used against you.
But you missed the fact that they don’t allow you to violate causality. In the context of our discussion this means that they cannot be used to circumvent quantum indeterminacy because that would break physical causality.
Now, figure out a way to test it.
What is the proposed test methodology to test your hypothesis?
Any test of life should do. How do scientists tests for life right now?
Also, it could be multiple additional forces..
For example the chemicals in cell cytoplasm seem to function identically outside a cell as they do inside one. In the first case they are not part of a living organism but in the latter case they are, but this does not appear to make any difference to their properties or characteristics. What difference would you expect to see?
Are there microscopic Turing tests?
And cytoplasm isn't DNA/RNA itself.
They aren’t.
To quote: “No conclusive evidence exists that [nanobes] are, or are not, living organisms, so their classification is controversial.”
> Are there microscopic Turing tests?
No. That’s what we’re telling you. “Life” is not well-defined. The textbook definition you might have seen in school would misclassify fire as alive.
For a fun take on this, look up the comedy podcast (starring Professor Brian Cox) called “The Infinite Monkey Cage”, specifically all the episodes which ask if a (freshly picked) strawberry is alive and if not when exactly did it die.
You say nanobes aren't life, but then you say you don't know? Pick one.
“Life” is not well-defined. The textbook definition you might have seen in school would misclassify fire as alive.
Sorta pretentious to just define life to fit existing narratives when you don't have an explanation. We have to figure out more instead of stopping at what we don't understand.
Will check out the podcast. Love Brian Cox.
No, ben_w said that they “aren’t ‘determined to have life’”. That’s a very different statement.
But I’ll go out and say it: they aren’t life. Nobody is talking about nanobes any more. There is no research on nanobes in the life sciences. This is not a hyperbole, I mean that the number of articles published on nanobes in over two decades is literally zero. No single lab in the whole world is researching them. The last scientific publication on the topic, from 2001, was a review concluding that there’s nothing to it.
They were an embarrassing mistake that briefly made headlines.
> Sorta pretentious to just define life to fit existing narratives when you don't have an explanation.
I’m having trouble understanding where you’re going with this sentence.
I’m not defining life, I’m saying there isn’t a definition of life (that I know of) which seems satisfactory.
Also, I don’t think it would be pretentious to start with a definition that fits existing narratives, because that’s how most words work: a label for a bunch of examples, followed by a rule — a definition — which creates a pattern for those examples. Like fire “metabolising” oxygen and fuel to reproduce and “move”, but not being alive. When you find edge cases, either change the definition to fit the new data or create a new category for the new data [1]. I know that domain experts don’t use that previous definition of life for exactly the reason I gave, but last I checked “are viruses alive?” still got arguments.
Also also, treating life as a fifth fundamental force of the universe when chemistry explains all the components just fine is… well, literally pretentious.
[1] That’s just an IMO about language, of course: if language was that simple then NLP would be a solved problem.
No. Stating that chemistry explains all the components of life just fine is literally pretentious.
Maybe chemists should stop researching since they already explained everything?
To put it another way, what leads you to your conclusion? What evidence is it based on? What phenomena that we currently observe might such a thing explain, and how?
Name one biological proces which defies the laws of chemistry.
Saying:
> Maybe chemists should stop researching since they already explained everything?
Is like saying “Computer scientists should stop researching since they already explained everything in terms of NAND gates”.
There are many web sites that discuss the properties of living things, I’ve linked a decent one below. It might be useful to think of it in terms of a ‘running’ engine. If I switch a running engine off, or it runs out of fuel, or someone breaks it with a hammer it stops running. Being alive for an organism is analogous to being in a ‘running’ state for an engine. It’s not an attribute of any individual components, but rather a description of the behaviour of the whole system.
https://www.cliffsnotes.com/study-guides/biology/biology/the...
Do you really hold this as true? Wouldn't this to some lesser degree seem more probable and therefore less dogmatic?