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Comment by mentos | Hacker News Reader

[deleted] ha ill keep my stoner thoughts to myself

I'm sorry but how, other than colorful language, is it useful to consider every cell as a universe? And how does that put us at the center of the universe? Equating cell to universes here does nothing of value.

Reminds me of something I heard: AIs will be convincing long before they are smart.

Humans are wired to think that because a phrase is clever, that it must be true. For example, the Rhyme-as-reason Effect: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rhyme-as-reason_effect

AIs will be convincing long before they are smart

ELIZA and PARRY proved this all the way back in 1966 and 1972. ELIZA was a silly AI hack which mostly just repeated back what users said to it, turning users' statements into questions in the style of Rogerian psychotherapy. People could tell it was fake. But PARRY used the same technique but pretended to be a crazy asshole, repeating users' statements in the style of angry accusations, and people thought it was real.

Take a simple AI technique, add some element to make emotion overwhelm analysis, and you pass the Turing Test (because the Turing Test was only ever meant to be a thought experiment). PARRY convinced a lot of people, and Peter Norvig's AI book in Lisp shows you how to write ELIZA in the first couple chapters. It's trivially easy to make an AI which is more persuasive than smart.

I actually like the thought, and ChatGPT totally misses the point. Cells don't have to be a universe to be the center of the universe. I think more to the point, each of us is the center of the universe, because the universe is relative.

ChatGPT is like that smooth sales guy that can use so many words to say so little. Everything sounds great, and then you walk out of the meeting, and you can't figure out what you just learned, if anything.

I don't think that having "universe" be a relative term is very useful. I prefer it as a topological one: If you're considering two universes, it's not just that they're very far apart, it's that there are no paths between them.

Information follows paths, so you end up with the "-verse" suffix regarding speech. The universe you're in is the one you can say things about and back those things up with evidence. Other universes, well there are no paths along which evidence about them can reach you, so you're limited in what you can say about them.

Also regarding the "center" of the Universe: the reason that "everywhere is the center" is because the Universe exists in higher than three dimensions. Asking "where is the center of the Universe" is like asking where the center of the surface of a balloon is. The center of the balloon is not on the surface in the 2D Universe.

The center of the Universe is the Big Bang, which is physically located at the beginning of time. Gravity is a depression on the surface of the Universe, which is why gravity and time are related: it literally brings us closer to the past :)

(Also note: physics is not my expertise, so take what I say with a giant grain of salt. I have just thought about this a lot over the years)

That’s silly. The center of the surface of the balloon is obviously the little part where you tie it off. I’m glad I could solve this universe paradox for you and all physicists in just a few seconds. Maybe I’ll get a Nobel Prize.

Consider a balloon with no tie. Like a basketball or something. The point is that the surface is elastic and the sphere is expanding. Balloons make the best metaphor for that imo. If you can think of a better one I'd be glad to hear it.

Only other thing I can think of is a "rubber bubble" which... is a balloon.

I often think of it as a soap bubble, but I have to stop and check myself: are we choosing spherical because that's simple, or because we have evidence? It could be toroidal or something even more bizarre.

I see it as a sphere because of the uniform expansion of the Universe. The Universe might just be so large that any measurable difference in the rate of expansion is outside the observable Universe, which could suggest a shape other than a hypersphere, but I don't subscribe to that school of thought.

These are the properties of our universe, and of course we'll only ever have one to study. But words change, right? Atoms are no longer indivisible. Black holes are no longer fully black. So I'm really going for the properties that a thing must have in order to be considered a universe, so we don't end up with a change that's obnoxious. I'd hate it if "universe" eventually just meant "any old really big astronomical structure".

Perhaps the laws of physics would allow for different kinds, they just aren't ours (Lee Smolin's "Life of the Cosmos" is a fun exploration of this, recommended).

Overall I like your descriptions, but I'm going to have to do some thinking about the direction of a gravitational depression being one that points towards the past. I'm under the impression that many cosmologists reject the idea that something warped must be warped into some other dimension. The warping, I've read, can be intrinsic: Imagine a colored lens which is unevenly saturated with dye.

(I am also not a real physicist)

Amusingly, the cell is about halfway between the radius of the observable universe (4.4 * 10^26 meters) and Planck length (1.6 * 10^-35 meters), at between 10^-4 and 10^-5 meters, or 0.1mm and 0.01mm.

About the size of a eukaryotic cell, in particular.

https://bio.libretexts.org/Bookshelves/Introductory_and_Gene...

You seem to be abusing exponential notation there. Halfway between 0 and 4.4 * 10^26 is 2.2 * 10^26, quite a bit larger than a cell. Halfway from Planck length should be just about the same given it's indistinguishable from 0 on that large of a scale. Even if you wanted to use logarithmic scaling, half of 4.4 * 10^26 would 4.4 * 10^13. Negative exponents are fractional. The Planck length isn't actually a negative number.

>Even if you wanted to use logarithmic scaling, half of 4.4 * 10^26 would 4.4 * 10^13

That's the geometric mean of 4.4 * 10^26 and 1. He took the geometric mean of the radius of the observable universe and the Planck length. That's a reasonable way to define "halfway" across orders of magnitude

And how does it put us at the center of the universe? What does it even mean that we should consider each "cell to be the unit"?

Just eat some more edibles and it will all make sense to you.

Put aside cells for a minute and just consider complexity.

Can it be said that the universe has a centre of complexity, in the same way as it might be said to have a centre of mass?

Doesn't make sense to me. How can you consider each cell to be its own universe? Cells contain molecular machinery and their own metabolism, but I don't see how to draw this connection.

NOTE: I am just a layman when it comes to biology and physics.

When you use the second meaning of word universe: "a particular sphere of activity or experience." Your body is an universe, your room is a universe, everything that has some border and activity inside can be an universe with this definition. Original poster is expressing awe in complexity of biological cells.

But there's probably way more cells or cell-like things in the rest of the universe with quadrillions of planets than the one planet on which we happen to be (unproven, but simply very likely if you think about it given that ours managed to appear)

System of systems of systems... might be more accurate, i.e. the ecosphere is a system of living beings that are systems of organs that are a systems of cells... as a first, simple approximation.

Now count all hairs on planet Earth. There’re more hairs in the universe than stars. Each hair is a universe of its own. Also not bad? Now repeat for everything else that’s meaningless.

This in lieu of finding other cellular life out there

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