What Is Life? (2019)
berthub.eu
berthub.eu
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.
I'd just never run across that idea before that book, but is there a specific place you came across it? :)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tulpa
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.
But by that definition, Han Solo and Bilbo Baggins are also "real". At what point do we simply use a different word for "physically exists"?
Although I would say that Star Wars has inspired a lot of space exploration, it's not nearly as viral as something like Christianity.
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."
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.
https://knowm.org/thermodynamic-computing/
> 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 find it extremely ironic that the groups most opposed to evolutionary biology are likely a bi-product of those forces.
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).
In case these things are of interest, there are some fields delving into this stuff: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/276494993_Structure...
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 :)
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.
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
Scott Ortman on Archaeological Synthesis and Settlement Scaling Theory https://complexity.simplecast.com/episodes/47
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.
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.)
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.
--
[0] - https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/12/17/the-toxoplasma-of-rage...
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.
Language as organism: A brief introduction to the Leiden theory of language evolution https://www.researchgate.net/publication/316659539_Language_...
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)
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 :)
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.
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.
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 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.
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 concept you reference is what he called "The Transcendental Object at the End of Time". See: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6XMz4hWR5i0
> ancient civilizations have figured out
How did ancient civilizations figure it out, if the human mind cannot comprehend it?
I thought it was pretty good.
> 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.
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?
[1] https://berthub.eu/articles/posts/biologists-physics-envy/
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)
I like the above "definition" from this YT video (This Ciliate is About to Die): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ibpdNqrtar0
Why does a computer program have to be sentient to be called alive?
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.
You just described a laptop.
And the execution of an algorithm that evolution programed is somehow 'special', probably because another algorithm says so.
I wonder what such a theoretical model of life would look like.
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.
I'm sure The Matrix used this very analogy.
I'm hoping somebody can chime in who can explain better than me.
* if it's pleasant, it's probably not a philosophical discussion
like most philosophical discussions
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.
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.
[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tierra_(computer_simulation) [2]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Avida [3]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Artificial_life
ie. if there was a shower-caddy copying machine, then suddenly shower-caddies could be alive.
In a world with a different life architecture, viruses would likely just be random an uninteresting molecules.
>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...
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
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.
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.
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 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.