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Comment by enkid | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

> 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.

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