Hacker News Reader

Comment by sabellito | Hacker News Reader

Is this your area of expertise? I'm asking because making this distinction does sound useful to me, but I'm no biologist nor philosopher.

View on HN

The philosophical name for this concept is panpsychism.

Personally, I’m a panentropist (my own creation) - I hold that the spectrum of life/consciousness varies depending on the level of entropy. So a flame has a higher level of consciousness than a piece of paper and oxygen molecules. But when you combine them they increase their level. It’s weird but it might be correct - doesn’t address issues of the hard problem of consciousness however

That’s pretty interesting. The more possible states a system has, the more room for consciousness.

The ultimate organism is then either civilization itself, or the whole universe, depending on how you want to draw the line.

> The more possible states a system has, the more room for consciousness

That is one of the postulates of Integrated Information Theory, which aims to give an account of how consciousness can arise from physical substrates. (The idea seems closely related to the concept of entropy.)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Integrated_information_theory

A living being is a machine designed to reduce entropy, the opposite of your hypothesis

We are the universes own entropy minimization function. And are the product of a local equilibrium.

A living being is a machine designed to reduce localized entropy. In decreases internal entropy while creating greater external entropy.

That still doesn't rectify the conflict. The living being is reducing local entropy -- meaning it's less conscious than if it maximized local entropy per gp comment. Or put in real terms, lighting yourself on fire likely does not make you more alive/conscious even though it definitely increases your entropy.

If anything, it seems like the reversal of entropy would be a better description of life. To make paper and oxygen from fire would have higher consciousness than a fire itself

I didn't say it wasn't useful. My comment is in terms of physics rather than biology or chemistry. i.e. in physics, there is little difference but complexity between a rock and a human.

I don't think that many physicists would agree. There's this whole idea if entropy in physics, which is basically a valuation of information in a system, and humans would be much more complex when looking at that than a rock. There's also a lot more interesting stuff going on inside a human body than there is for a rock.

> There's also a lot more interesting stuff going on inside a human body than there is for a rock.

Yes, it's complexity, that's my point.

> There's this whole idea if entropy in physics

I am aware, you're assuming it's not related, whereas I would say it very much is.

What does complexity mean, exactly? How does it demark the line between living and not, is there a threshold, and what is the threshold?

There’s also a lot more interesting stuff going on inside a car, a computer, or the planet earth that is made of rocks, than there is for an individual rock. Our solar system is extremely complex, yet is not alive. So complexity doesn’t seem to mark the line between living and non-living things at all.

Saying life is “complexity” seems reductionist and almost information-free, it doesn’t really explain or even shed any useful light on the difference between living things and non-living things, since there are plenty of examples of high complexity, low-entropy inorganic objects & systems. We can synthesize complexity all day, but we don’t know how to synthesize life yet.

One interesting aspect is that living organisms are in thermodynamic non-equilibrium, while most dead matter always evolves towards equilibrium.

> One interesting aspect is that living organisms are in thermodynamic non-equilibrium

On what scale? Can you provide some sources/references please?

Can't find a good general intro, but these articles take this viewpoint:

https://science.mit.edu/life-away-from-equilibrium/

https://www.pnas.org/content/114/3/423

Edit: Here's a good intro: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=10cVVHKCRWw

This is also, best strategy to search of extra terrestrial life, the concept of entropy for living systems deeply fascinates me, because how simple everything becomes (conceptually); life is entropy maximization systems in universe, looking at human kind it most efficient too.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com