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Comment by randomopining | Hacker News Reader

Life is just structured matter. It gains consciousness that has a goal of propogating and increasing the structure of the universe.

This is a movement from disorder towards perfect order, perfect stillness.

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Lots of things are just structured matter (i.e. everything else), so it's an inadequate characterization.

When did I say inanimate objects aren't structured matter?

Actually I'm saying that life is like inanimate matter, but is just another step on a continuum towards greater structure.

The first "life" couldn't even affect a thing next to it. Now humans are changing Earth and the near solar system. In the future our reach will be galaxy wide and beyond. Increasing order from disorder.

I agree. It’s an ordered state that self perpetuates and self adapts to new environments in a spread that seems inexorable.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Entropy_and_life

Is this when we discuss sentient life being just a byproduct? What's the point of it all then... Heavy shit.

That's right- many people (myself included) believe that the subjective experience of consciousness is merely an emergent property of big brains (an epiphenomenon). And even if that does imply the universe is "meaningless", those big brains contain enough space for us to make our own meaning. I'm a nihilist in the universal sense, but a humanist in person.

So things like AI can't be conscious, this is some sort of biological process?

What is so specific about "biological" (which is a fairly meaningless term) that can't be replicated if we do the same thing with silicon or other substrates?

I think you are hand waving the whole thing and thinking consciousness = brains.

Sure, our brains produce consciousness, but WHY? Structure? Density of information? Complexity? Brain waves?

Nobody knows.

I didn't brains were the only way to achieve consciousness, nor did I imply that.

I believe it is entirely possible that we could eventually create AI that is conscious, or at least, would be able to convince it is. Whether this is achievable is different from whether it is possible, but I do think that if we continue down the current line with LLMs and other models, we'll eventually end up with a system that can articulate its consciousness to the point where the Supreme Court will have to make a decision about AI rights.

Like you basically said, consciousness is just an awareness of self. Awareness of self comes as part of an evolutionary adaptation to survive and propagate.

Consciousness does not necessarily mean you are non-deterministic in your consciousness operating.

Everything may be deterministic, but too complex for us to figure out at this point.

Such a weird “belief” to hold, although admittedly I held it until my late twenties. The one objective fact of the universe is it exists and it existing at all is freaking weird. What is the uncaused cause and why are we here to experience it? Saying it’s an accident holds zero logical weight and human logic being “made up” isnt an argument but further proof of this. The truth is your nihilist belief has been taken down by so many philosophers and thinkers across so many different cultures it seems criminal none of these arguments in favor of meaning are taught in schools. Then we wonder why everyone’s so depressed.

So you are saying having no purpose/meaning is wrong.

What if having a meaning is wrong too?

What if meaning is simply always a subjective thing and thus NOT OBJECTIVE.

Thus what is, is. And that's it. Anything else is just subjectivity applied.

It's a temporary striving towards perfect order within a larger system that trends towards maximum disorder.

Perhaps its not temporary but an eternal balance?

Doubtful given the laws of thermodynamics and the rate at which the universe is expanding. Heat death seems to be an inevitable conclusion at some point.

We’ve not established the rate of expansion, if it’s accelerating, what rate it’s accelerating, or even if space is expanding. It seems likely but not proven or nailed down. Further, it’s not known if it’s possible to manipulate the expansion, such that you could create a local pocket of non expanding space. At the moment galactic space is likely not expanding, and space around black holes wouldn’t expand for an extraordinarily long time.

It does seem inevitable, but it also seems that way from our current point of knowledge. Nothing says the story ends with our current understanding.

For all we know every 15 billion years a universe worth of matter springs into existences blowing the existing matter outside of our visible universe. This is a contrived point but we don’t know what the universe looks like at really large timescales beyond our visible universes birth. It could (and likely does) get weird.

Ah, that's a fair point.

Both of these things are simply observations from a limited perspective. If the universe just dies doesn’t it seem weird for it to have ever existed in the first place? Surely this one thing that is all that ever could and does exist didnt just happen to start existing 13 billion years ago and we’re just lucky enough to be around to experience the short existence of all there ever is and could be.

Heat death of the sun would beg to differ

The article discusses seeding life at a galactic scale, which is beyond our sun. At some point you’re talking about intergalactic space. Further, the expansion of space and the necessity of a universal heat death is a theory, and is in no way proven.

Life does not reduce entropy even in isolation

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