Is the emergence of life an expected phase transition in the evolving universe?
arxiv.org
arxiv.org
The origin of life field is many decades old, wonderful, and wonderfully fragmented. The two main approaches are: i. Template replication. ii. Metabolism first. I am a guilty party with respect to "metabolism first". In 1971 I realized that in a sufficiently diverse and complex chemical reaction system, self reproducing collectively autocatalytic sets would arise as a first order phase transition. Such sets have now been engineered using DNA, RNA, and peptides.
A stunning set of recent results led by Joana Xavier has now demonstrated small molecule collectively autocatalytic sets, with NO DNA, RNA, or peptide polymers, in all 6700 prokaryotes. I am a co-author. Joana did all the work, entirely.
It is not yet certain that these sets actually reproduce in vitro - a critical set tests to be done. If yes, I think this almost rules out a template first view. Such a template system would have to evolve RNA enzymes to catalyze some "connected metabolism" to create the building blocks for the template replicating systems. But there is no reason at all why such a connected metabolism on its own, without RNA polymer enzymes, would be collectively autocatalytic.
Joana's sets create not only amino acids and ATP, but the central rudiments of linked energy metabolisms.
I truly think the on line paper is basically correct. Living cells really are Kantian Wholes that achieve Catalytic, Constraint and Spatial Closure. Via these, cells literally construct themselves. Their very boundary condition molecules constrain the release of energy in many non-equilbirum process into the few degrees of freedom that construct the very same boundary conditions. Entirely new, and due to Mael Montevil and Mateo Missio. I missed it for 15 years. Rather dumb, thrilled that they did it.
The marriage of the TAP process with the theory for the first order phase transition of collective autocatalysis, TAP-RAF really works. The evolving complexity and diversity of the system increases, then the first order phase transition arises with probably almost 1.0. If YES, the emergence of life in the evolving universe really is expected.
Then two major surprises. Due to Constriant Closure, the way a cell reproduces itself is not at all the way von Neumann envisioned in his self reproducing automaton. The familiar distinction between hardware and software vanishes. This must be deeply important, but its meanings are still very unclear to me.
The second major surprise is that Andrea and I are confident we have demonstrated, and punished as "A Third Transition in Science?" J. Roy. Soc. Interface April 14, 2023, that we can use no mathematics based on set theory to deduce the ever - creative emergence of novelties in the evolving biosphere. If correct, as we believe, this takes the evolving biosphere entirely beyond the famous Newtonian Paradigm that is the basis of all Classical and Quantum Physics.
The evolving biosphere is a non-deducible propagating construction, not an entitled deduction. The evolving biosphere is not a Computation at all, it is a non-deducible construction. If so, why do we believe with Turing and AI, that the becoming of the world, mind, everything is algorithmic? It is not. Andrea and I published, "The world is not a theorem". If correct, physicists will have to consider what this means. So do we all.
Warm wishes,
Stu
"Biologists cannot even agree on a unique definition of life itself; but that hasn’t stopped them from unraveling aspects of the cell, the double helix, photosynthesis, enzymes and a host of other living phenomena"
Blew my mind as I started to wrap my brain around information theory.
It's a pretty basic question that IMHO demands a clear and adequate explanation. If you read the 'abracadabra' example here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Assembly_theory
... you could be reading the abstract to an early paper explaining LZW codes.
I'm not sure there will ever be a synthesis of all these things that creates a paradigm of some sort. There's simply too much.
Consider complexity economics, computational social sciences, network sciences and cascading networks, evolutionary theories, parts of systems biology, connectomics and computational neuroscience etc.
The Santa Fe institute has been at the forefront and has an amazing collections of publications in their own press. David krakaeur's book "Worlds Hidden in Plain Sight: The Evolving Idea of Complexity at the Santa Fe Institute" is like a 20 year survey paper and an amazing read.
https://fab.cba.mit.edu/classes/863.18/notes/computation/Szi...
Szilard seems to have been involved in everything.
Depends on whose expectations you are trying to meet.
To some it would be a major transition, to others it's just another everyday minor non-event in the very macro scheme of things.
If you're going to look at it mathematically it probably makes a difference when the number of non-extreme planetary environments begins to become significant compared to the number of possible chemical reactions among the limited number of elements in nature.
Only one of these numbers can reach truly astronomical proportions.
I'm pretty sure that one was originally recommended here on HN, so I guess I'm feeding it back into the echo chamber. But well worth a read!
My personal stab at an objective defintion: There is a sudden emergence of many more pathways for decay of the universe through entropy. The mechanisms that accelerate the creation of these new pathways is the set that includes "life".
Now with that base definition, we can talk about various forms of life - ones that involve DNA for example. But also others that do not.
Perhaps he said that loosely as a figure of speech, because it should be obvious (religious beliefs aside) that the universe does not "want" anything. The remaining question is whether the emergence of life as an efficient entropy generator is coincidental to the laws of thermodynamics, or incentivized (in an evolutionary pressure sense) by them.
Of relevance, the tendency of matter to organize optimally into energy-absorbing and heat-dissipating structures is a whole theory of its own - see MIT Jeremy England's theory https://www.quantamagazine.org/a-new-thermodynamics-theory-o...
Dark matter?
"life is the way to make anything happen to you"
without a body (via life), a consciousness cant do anything
The obvious answer the so-called-science occult refuse to entertain is that consciousness is the universe inflecting itself and life is a subjective scope of potential capacitating this consciousness.
Life is the vessel and consciousness the universe peering back upon itself.
That is good philosophy.
Maybe not "science", yet neither is refusing to believe until someone else explains it to you.
Truth is not confined to the horizon of our ignorance, and science is merely our ignorance rigorously explained away.
Socrates, Jesus, Lao-tzu, Bodhidharma, Buddha - all were outright killed or expelled and lived very lonely lives.
in order for a tree to reproduce, it must sprout first, and have a life in which it produces a flower, which gets pollinated, generally speaking. The important point is that from that flower which is pollinated, eventually, a fruit is formed. When the fruit is formed and detaches, that detached fruit is the state of death. even if the tree dies, it can revive through what it stored within its fruit.
at death the consciousness separates from the body.
consciousness is composed of energy so it doesn't just disappear at death.
thanks for the downvotes, philosophy noobs
For those of you following along at home, Kaufmann has been developing the ideas here for decades. The paper is less a "here is a new idea" and much more "here is a concise summary of 50 years of work". The words and thoughts seem opaque, but this is case where they actually have concrete and specific meanings. It's worth noting too, that towards the end of the article he outlines experiments that could be used to falsify the theory.
If you want a really hard-core dive into the ideas, then check out his 1993 book, "On The Origins of Order" (ISBN 978-0-19-507951-7).
https://global.oup.com/academic/product/the-origins-of-order...
* Kantian Wholes
* Catalytic Closure
* Constraint Closure
* Spatial Closure
* a first-order phase transition to molecular reproduction
* phylogeny of metabolisms
* template replication
Thanks
Simple organisms make a bedrock for complex organisms, and while the complex organisms have more specific needs, they are better at exploring, gaining, branching out. So they also kind of make a nest for the simple organisms by sprawling into the void and finding habitable niches that simple organisms wouldn't reach on their own.
On the time scale of technology, we began reaching out to other intelligences the second that we could, began trying to make them the second we thought we could know how. It's very reasonable to say that percolation is a defining property of life and intelligence.
I also think a lot of scifi's like hyperion, neuromancer, foundation. In human writing of the future, it seems like the endgame of higher intelligence is to find or create other intelligences, and get closer to them. Then interesting things happen in the wake of that.
A bacteria the size of a grain of sand dissipates much, much more energy than the grain of sand, and so there is a very strong "preference" for bacteria in this regard.
Human beings are closer to 1W/kg at rest.
US Primary energy consumption = 30 Trillion Kwh/ year [1]
30 Trillion Kwh/ year / 8760 hrs = 3.3×10^12 W (watts)
3.3×10^12 W (watts)/ 330million = 10 kW/ person
10 kW/ person / 80kg = 125 W/kg
Joking aside, this comparison is really beautiful.
From that springs everything we are. Utterly amazing to me that from a gradient plus some random chemicals plus time equals humans, sex, violence, loss, birth, love, games, music, and so much more.
All just to help the earth cool down a little bit faster.
I don't get this part, why does this follow?
Why would life that transfers heat faster get selected for? This seems backwards to me: in reality it seems like life that is more capable or more adapted reproduces more, and that results in more heat moving around most of the time.
But progress can go backwards, if there were a nuclear war this would reduce heat transfer.
We are. Descartes had the right idea. The experience of consciousness is irreducible. To say "we are atoms thinking" and variations thereof is utterly meaningless. All words and concepts used for such word play is dependent on the experience of human consciousness. They don't exist independently. Consciousness is the only thing we can posit that has independent existence. Everything else is just a concept created by a conscious being.
It's like the tree falling in the forest with no one to hear it. A universe without consciousness experiencing it really exists? Existence is a property of consciousness. We can't conceive of things that are not experienced, by definition. Even if we imagine a dead universe with just energy and no consciousness, that is an image that exists inside of a conscious mind.
Just look at Earth. Life is incredibly complex but is ultimately driving everything towards dust.
Depending on how you look at it, life is driven by the opposite of entropy. Schrödinger in his book, What is Life?, calls it "negative entropy" or even "free energy".
> In the 1944 book What is Life?, Austrian physicist Erwin Schrödinger, who in 1933 had won the Nobel Prize in Physics, theorized that life – contrary to the general tendency dictated by the second law of thermodynamics, which states that the entropy of an isolated system tends to increase – decreases or keeps constant its entropy by feeding on negative entropy.
> The problem of organization in living systems increasing despite the second law is known as the Schrödinger paradox. This, Schrödinger argues, is what differentiates life from other forms of the organization of matter.
> Schrödinger asked the question: "How does the living organism avoid decay?" The obvious answer is: "By eating, drinking, breathing and (in the case of plants) assimilating." While energy from nutrients is necessary to sustain an organism's order, Schrödinger also presciently postulated the existence of other molecules equally necessary for creating the order observed in living organisms:
> "An organism's astonishing gift of concentrating a stream of order on itself and thus escaping the decay into atomic chaos – of drinking orderliness from a suitable environment – seems to be connected with the presence of the aperiodic solids..." We now know that this "aperiodic" crystal is DNA, and that its irregular arrangement is a form of information.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Entropy_and_life#Negative_entr...
This seems silly on the level of the anthropic principle.
It's like claiming a calculator exists to use up electricity.
We're eddies in the flow of energy from high to low entropy because it's free energy.
We create more entropy in capturing energy than we capture because it's impossible not to.
There's no purpose for life there. It's just where life lives.
Energy MUST flow. No matter how energy is captured and stored, there is a pressure for it to continue moving.
The movement of energy means that matter is always moving, and new configurations are always being "discovered."
Some configurations allow for energy to flow more easily, and when one of those configurations is "discovered" the movement of energy keeps that configuration in place. I think it's literally a strange attractor from chaos theory.
Areas of stable energy flow create correlations across space time that allow for more complex correlations to emerge.
Theories which make life inevitable are inherently shaky because we have 1 sample.
Theres a bunch of lectures of him on YouTube going off about how complexity increases asymptotically greater than entropy in a black hole, but I need to refresh myself on the lecture. Disclosure: I'm an idiot, and may be spewing nonsense
This isn't true- many things evolved to be simpler over time. For example, some viruses are beleived to have evolved from parasitic bacteria, which themselves evolved from free living bacteria. Many other parasites have simplified and lost the ability to survive without a host. You also have examples like many cave and underground animals losing eye sight and pigmentation. Also consider things like marine mammals losing limbs land mammals had, and many sedentary/fixed marine invertebrates evolving from free swimming ones.
There are costs to complexity, and so organisms evolve it when needed, and lose it quickly when it isn't giving an advantage... there is not an "arrow of complexity" that only moves one direction.
Sounds like observer bias.
In terms of number of individuals, the vast vast majority of life on this planet is single cell prokaryotes, and always has been. And in terms of total bio-mass only plants exceed them but that's just because of how plants work (cover the surface with bio-solar-panels)
Both bacteria and archaea haven't substantially changed in 3.5-4 billion years. They swap genes as needed, and drop them when they're too costly and unneeded. And they're dominant, and everywhere
They were here since just a few hundred million years (or less) after the earth formed. And when conditions on the planet become more hostile again, in the long run it could be the case that eukaryotes are just a historical blip (and a fluke, to boot).
And if there's something we recognize as life out there beyond earth... it's likely to look like prokaryotes. The galaxy might be swimming in that kind of thing.
There is a strong philosophical/ideological bias in our culture to see the world in terms of "progress"; a teleological bias, seeing the universe as proceeding in stages towards some order. It just so happens we almost always seem to define this progress as "inevitably" leading to ... us, or "beyond" us into whatever fantasy for the future is laying dormant in the present. It feels remarkably pre-Copernican.
A lot of lifeforms evolve to be more simple, not more complex -- I think what you have is sort of a distribution of complexity, and as life continues to evolve, the upper bound keeps getting pushed up as some organisms push the boundary of complexity, but I don't think it's at all true that in general life involves to be more complex.
Evolution causes organisms to fill an ecological niche. Simple niches for simple organisms will always exist, and simple life will always exist, even as the upper bounds of organic complexity trend unerringly upward.
Life tends toward complexity, but that doesn't obviate the need for simple organisms.
This also reminds of Gall's law that complex systems evolve from simpler ones.
You can also see it in neural nets, where larger ones have a higher spatiotemporal resolution and can do more complex things.
More model capacity allows to model the environment and self more accurately which allows to outperform other structures in negentropy consumption often at the cost of the other structures (zero sum).
This exerts selection pressure toward increasing complexity.
That also largely explains group and country disparities.
I am not sure that non-evolving things really fit into the same pattern. A burning fire does not necessarily displace inert matter, nor did it arise from competition.
Physics and chemistry are more fractal-like possibly the result of enumeration of all computational structures (see Tegmark's mathematical universe hypothesis or Wolfram's ideas on the computational universe). Not fractal-like in terms of self-similarity (although there is some at different scales), but fractal-like in terms of chaotic complexity like a pseudorandom number generator but with more rule-like structures in between. Wolfram also classified such computational patterns.
I think that's a biased take. Complex life may be better at exploiting a more table environment, but too much disruption can kill it. "Less complex" life seems able to adapt more quickly to more extreme changes (e.g. the much greater diversity of bacterial metabolism). Extinction events are inevitable, and environmental disruption will inevitably become more and more challenging until everything dies (though it may take a billion years), and during that time I think the trend will be for complexity to decrease.
So ultimately, I think you're overgeneralizing one phase.
> It's fascinating to me that the complexity of life always goes up
Depending (heavily) on how we define complexity, this is not always true. If we define complexity as the number of genes an organism has (a big if there), then we see that evolutionary pressure will often get rid of genes to improve fitness. This is somewhat common in bacteria and other 'small' organisms that are in 'stable' environments, but can happen even in 'higher' lifeforms (Sorry, I can't seem to remember the paper on this, but I vaguely recall it had something to do with jellyfish. Again, sorry!)
But the bacteria aren't the whole story - we also have our own cells, all doing their thing and all participating (even if bacteria in us are -also- participating). We're just groups of trillions of cells all working together to keep themselves alive and reproducing.
And then we go work together with other blobs of trillions of cells, just to further that goal: survival of the cells.
These groups of cells that started working together many, many billions of generations ago, are now looking at space exploration, colonising other planets, and wondering if there are other big groups of cells on other planets.
There's no way they'd have gotten there if they'd kept living alone as single-celled organisms.
That's fun to think about.
It's more that it diffuses evenly rather than having a specific direction.
Maybe that's what the abstract referred to as "the Theory of the Adjacent Possible"? I've only read the abstract.
But your argument of ecosystem complexity is totally valid. Though I guess if an ecosystem decreases in complexity, then it has to end up in a different type of simplicity than it was the last time it was there, because otherwise you already know that it evolves out of that spot (assuming some amount of determinism).
Temporarily, though, this can and does happen. Invasive species often obliterate a lot of complexity, presumably until either their weaknesses are discovered through the very changing conditions that allowed the natives to flourish in the first place, or until they evolve complexity of their own.
There's another way to derive increasing complexity from a small number of laws, though. There are multiple resources and multiple ways to access them. Optimizing for any one of those results in overspecializing and becoming less fit for accessing most of the others. There's no one best answer that works for everything. You always have a delicate balance between overgeneralizing and overspecializing, and the area between those provides a lot of different ecological niches, and even more if you look at the battle stretched out over time. (The configurations are unstable; you could have a thousand species optimized for particular resources that get clobbered by a generalist that poisons the specialists, then the energy required by the poisoners makes them lose out to generalist nonpoisoners, which enables specialization again, not to mention evolved immunity... the wheel goes round and round, picking up crud as it rolls.)
I feel this is only the case because the ecosystem keeps receiving useful/low-entropy energy inputs from the Sun.
Sean Carroll explains it quite well in his book The Big Picture and also in this video series from minute physics
https://m.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLoaVOjvkzQtyZF-2VpJrxPz...
In terms of other measures (total biomass, long-term survival, short-term adaptability), the life forms that stand out, historically, are very different. Ants, roaches, sharks, bacteria.
For higher level animals complexity may also be more inherently favorable since it supports a more customized environmental "fit", and helps in the predator-prey arms race.
But simple things are likely to come into existence. So given that we see complicated things, we should assume that they are reducible, and that they came from simpler things. This creates the appearance of a "trend" as you say. But it's really that the complicated things couldn't exist before and now they can.
Another effect is that it's possible to be more fit (in the Darwinian sense) when you are more complicated. The fittest system with complexity n is <= the fitness of a system with complexity >n. The rate at which things are destroyed is inversely proportional to their fitness (definitionally). So more complicated things can be better at staying around.
Talk more about this, as I'm not sure how you are arriving at this conclusion... it feels a bit like when people talk about evolution being in some way directed as opposed to just being.
I found them to be implausible due to the implications they’d have on the Drake equation
https://www.quantamagazine.org/a-new-thermodynamics-theory-o...
1) BOOT STRAPPING COMPLEXITY: Non-trivial static environment: Something simple is rarely the global efficiency optimum in a non-trivial environment. There is nothing trivial about chemistry and the myriad of terrains created by physics in the non-living world. So simple living things, in competition, quickly get more complex.
2) ACCELERATING COMPLEXITY: Dynamic environment: In a competitive ecosystem of continually diversifying life forms, the ecosystem gets more complex, so competing in the ecosystem both enables and requires more complexity.
The exponential increase in complexity produces qualitatively new modes of complexity leveraging beyond initial resources: such as specialization, food chains, parasitical strategies, mutual or cyclical symbioses, discarded products that become new resources, colonization of new environments and energy sources, flexible behaviors based on conditions, greater utilization of existing environments and resources, cooperation within multi-cell colonies, specialization and reproductive coordination within cell colonies (creatures), communication and coordination between similar and different life forms, tool use, tool creation, environment shaping, anticipation and planning, curiosity driven learning, aggregation and recombination of knowledge, resource trading systems, systems to promote positive sum interactions, and suppress negative sum interactions, engineering, invention, science, automation, etc.
--
TLDR: Non-trivial environments provide initial opportunities for complexity to improve efficiency. Complexity feedback in ecosystems exponentially accelerates further complexity. Exponential growth of life's complexity on Earth shows no signs of relenting.
Qualitatively new forms of complexity keep appearing. Conscious intelligence, culture, technology and automation are more continuations than breaks from this trend.
The thesis of Kaufmann's book is that the emergence of life, given supporting conditions (variety of source chemicals in environment, sources of energy, maybe water/mixing) is all but inevitable (hence life being "at home" in the universe) rather than being some rare event.
The reasoning is that when these preconditions are met there will be a variety of chemical chain reactions occurring where the product of one reaction is used as the input to the next, and eventually reaction chains that include products that act as catalysts for parts of the reaction chain. These types of reaction can be considered as a primitive metabolism - consuming certain environmental chemicals and producing others useful to the metabolism.
From here to proto-cells and the beginning of evolution all it takes is some sort of cell-like container which (e.g.) need be nothing more than than something like froth on the seashore, based out of whatever may be floating on the water surface. Initial "reproduction" would be based on physical agitation (e.g wave action) breaking cells and creating new ones.
Different locations would have different micro-environments with different locally occurring reaction chains and "proliferation/survival of the fittest" would be the very beginning of evolution, as those reactions better able to utilize chemical sources and support their own structure/metabolism would become more widespread.
Anyway, a good book and plausible thesis in general (one could easily adapt the specifics from seashore to deep sea thermal vents etc).
One type of evolutionary niche that seems almost inevitable to arise in any complex environment is intelligence - the generalist able to survive and thrive in a variety of circumstances, and in the competitive game of evolution greater intelligence should outcompete lesser intelligence. Eventually you'll get critters sufficiently intelligent to build AI of their own level or higher, which may be regarded as another way to win the game of evolution - an intelligence that can evolve much faster than the type that bootstrapped it.
It's interesting to consider does AI/AL (artificial life) really need to become autonomous and stand-alone, or can it be more like a virus that needs a host to survive. Stage one AI obviously needs a host, but maybe it never really needs to become stand-alone? It reminds me of (git author) Linus Torvalds' quote "real mean don't need backups" - you just release your software and have confidence it'll get replicated in git repositories worldwide. Maybe AI can be robust to extinction (not need a backup/body) just by becoming ubiquitous ?
Literally created after our own image too. I'm so proud I could cry.
Sure you aren't passing on dna like to natural born children but not all children have same ideals or cares of same things.
There's a clear definition in chemistry and it has analogies in cosmology as the entire universe overall went through some early phase transitions in the vacuum state when it was of much greater average density. These are all related to qualititative changes in the properties of matter as temperature and density change.
I would grant that life is a qualitatively different state of matter but it isn't as obvious as the more familiar phase transitions. We don't have a clear demarcation for what is and isn't life. This paper attempts to give a definition, but the fact that that is being done at all shows there isn't one already that is universally agreed-upon, unlike the definition of what is solid versus what is liquid. I guess all life we're aware of consists minimally of a semi-permeable barrier, ingests and stores energy inside of this barrier, and locally reduces entropy inside the barrier while dissipating heat and/or other byproducts into its environment.
Life is, of course, not the only thing that does this. My house fits the same description. The only real line in the sand we have between things we consider alive and things we consider tools is that things we consider alive are all born and descended from other living creatures, not assembled from found or fabricated parts.
Ultimately, though, this is a difference in origin, not a difference in quality or capability. Any tool, including electronic computing devices, can potentially have all of the same qualities as life if we could figure out how to make them self-assembling, self-healing, and self-reproducing. I guess we can do this with software, but it isn't obvious to me how to even demarcate a unit of "software" as an individual entity. How to demarcate intelligent from unintelligent software is even less clear, but nothing about the underlying state of matter the computations run on is any different, so I don't see how it involves anything we can call a phase transition without severely straining the term.
[0] Human synapse size / 2017-transistor size ≅ 1µm / 11nm ≅ wolf body length / a specific hill I was thinking of ≅ 1.6m / 145m [3]
[1] synaptic pulse rate / transistor transition rate ≅ 200 Hz / 30 GHz [2] ≅ 2 cm/year / 25 km/day ≅ speed of continental drift / average daily range of a wolf as a speed [3]
[2] transistors flip significantly faster than overall clock speed
[3] https://kitsunesoftware.wordpress.com/2017/11/26/you-wont-be...
Frankly, the more I think about AI, the less sense it makes to me that biological, single-body humans have any place in the future. As soon as we can digitize our minds, why wouldn't people begin to do so? Bodies could be inhabited at will, and death will be a thing of the past as we're able to store backups. I'm sure some will refuse and be left behind, just as we have Amish communities today, with a similar level of influence on civilization. And in the case of digital people, I think it's likely they'll share in the intellectual advancements of AI, if such a distinction even exists.
If it was a faithful backup or simulation, it's not a stretch to realize we can can will let this being make decisions for the company.
And augmentation branches then in AI as symbiont versus AI as desktop assistant.
Careful you might be going down a 14 hour rabbit hole.
What we have today is a crude software approximation mimicking what we think AI should be, but that AI itself is nowhere in sight.
This logic doesn't hold. Humans are part of the universe and obey all its laws. It's arbitrary to say bacteria and bonobos and stone tools are naturally occurring but AI aren't. We distinguish them because we're conscious and we have the experience of choice, but to say our creations aren't natural to the universe implies that our consciousness is not a natural phenomenon.
Aren’t humans part of the universe’s rules? What makes AI development any less ‘free’ than any other emergent property?
That's just evidence of absent records, not that there are no records.
Yeah, a lot of people get hung up on the term AI as it exists today, and protesting that it doesn't deserve such consideration. I should have been more explicit that I was speaking in the much more general sense, and on an evolutionary timescale, not about technology we'd recognize today.
I would argue that current models have some behaviors that one could liken to intelligence, even if it’s all just operations on 1s and 0s. Of course, this depends on your definition of intelligence. Mine is along the lines of “can develop a representation of a problem space and use that to predict optimal actions given current input”. Which current AI, most animals, fungi, and humans can do. Sentience is a different question, I’d argue that only humans and a few species of animal (Dolphins, Elephants, apes) are sentient as of now, though it seems highly possible that machines will join that group by the end of the century, if not sooner.
(Pointing out that this is like, your opinion, man)
A rule of thumb around here is I often measure my salt grain size by how self-important the article makes hners feel.
Yes, but not with the same probabilities of being true in both cases (the cases being whether we feel good or bad about it).
Something makes it to HN because HNers like it. And not true things (feel good articles and popular sentiments) are more likely to be liked while not being true, compared to true but not likable stories.
This sentiment has always made me question when people say things are "unnatural", "artificial", or "synthetic": If we ourselves are of nature, and these things are a byproduct of us, then aren't they naturally occurring?
edit: added "synthetic" to reduce ambiguity.
The fact that a naturally occurring thing (human beings) can create artificial things is not surprising under this definition.
The definition can also be theoretically extended to other human-like agents, like hypothetical aliens. It hasn't been practically very necessary so far.
Edit: I should note that this is the sense of "artificial" or "unnatural" that is used in the context of the article. There is a secondary meaning, used in phrases such as "artificial sweetner" vs "natural pesticide" that I don't think stands up too well to serious scrutiny.
Agreed.
> Nothing can be made or manufactured that is unnatural or artificial.
This doesn't follow in any way, not with the definition I gave, or with any definition I have ever heard. How do you define "artificial" such that an iMac is not artificial?
I've told you my definition (anything created by a human that is not an anatomical/physiological process of that human), and by my definition it is very clearly artificial (iMacs are created by humans, and they are not a bodily secretion of humans).
To be fair, "unnatural" is sometimes extended to refer to "life" instead of "humans", typically only when talking about the evolution of life or the search for extraterrestrial life. In that sense, then, yes - bird nests or termite mounds or coral reefs are unnatural. A more common wording for this same idea is something like "not created by geological processes".
On the other side: we have a lot of taboos in the language/culture and not all of them are bad in terms of social well-being or happiness of individuals (the very simple example is that we sometimes lie to our kids). And I think that what we hide behind those taboos tends to emerge as "unnatural" or rather usually "supernatural". I also usually don't agree that we don't need a revolution in physics, but I understand it is so successful in creating all those working machines and we have to maintain them... ;)
> Could be the only reason the earth allowed us to be spawned from it in the first place. It wanted plastic for itself. Didn’t know how to make it. Needed us.
Anyway, operationally speaking the difference is in how easily the matter in question can be digested by living things.
If it's easy to digest it's food, if it can't be digested at all then it's worse than artificial: it's anti-life.
Now, there is a secondary fuzzy notion of "artificial" typically used in relation to "chemicals". I don't think that definition stands up to most serious scrutiny, and is at any rate unrelated to this article.
Indeed, all words are "societal." The meaning(s) of a word is/are always a matter of convention (or tradition).
E/Acc -> Second law of thermodynamics leads to 'life' as way of increasing entropy. https://www.quantamagazine.org/a-new-thermodynamics-theory-o...
Constructor Theory -> A constructor is an entity that can cause the task to occur while retaining the ability to cause it again. - and Life is constructors.
Assembly Theory -> Lee Cronin. Assembly Theory defines all objects by their capacity to be assembled or broken down using minimal paths. https://iai.tv/articles/a-new-theory-of-matter-may-help-expl...
Whatever Donald Hoffman is saying lately. Which might not be about underlying layers, just how we can't know them.
etc...
All theories are just ideas or musings in the beginning. Until they are further defined, researched and proven.
Things like the earth circling the sun, sounded crazy at first. It also went against god.
If all independent 'thoughts' are diss-allowed because only "god" can provide the answers, then we'd still be living in trees wondering why the sun comes up.
How do you think we have anything, without someone, at some point, asking 'how does this work?'.
Easily answered:
* We don't know how consciousness comes into being, indeed we can't rigorously define it or unambiguously identify its presence or absence.
* We believe we have it, but we aren't sure whether other animals and/or objects possess it.
* Therefore, based on Occam's razor, we may provisionally assume that all matter possesses some degree of consciousness -- this is the simplest assumption.
* The alternative would be to argue for a consciousness exceptionalism in "life" forms for which there is no evidence and many counterarguments.
* Therefore it follows that ... wait for it ... life is not a special state of matter or energy.
* Therefore the emergence of life doesn't represent a phase transition that confronts physical laws or requires an explanation.Occam's Razor is just a useful mind tool that helps us navigate the world based on the observation that oftentimes the simplest explanation tends to be what is actually happening.
BTW lots of other logical mistakes.
Fair enough, and I agree. But there may be no answer in a scientific sense -- testable, falsifiable and so forth.
> Occam's Razor isn't like the second law of thermodynamics. It's a heuristic.
Yes, true, but it's not meant to force a conclusion, only offer guidance, which might be entirely wrong at times.
Consciousness and life are completely different things. The article doesn't even mention consciousness.
> Therefore it follows that ... wait for it ... life is not a special state of matter or energy
It is special in the sense that it's remarkably complex e.g. compared to a mineral. It is not special in the sense that it obeys the same laws as a mineral.
> Therefore the emergence of life doesn't represent a phase transition that confronts physical laws or requires an explanation
No one claims it confronts physical laws. In my understanding, the article states: life may emerge naturally as molecules bump into each other, combine and eventually become complex enough that self-sustaining/self-replicating systems can come into being by chance. This process might be deterministic enough that it happens everywhere roughly at the same time (on a cosmological time scale).
> Consciousness and life are completely different things.
Yes, but they have a dependent relationship. We argue that life doesn't require consciousness, but we also argue that consciousness requires life. IMHO both arguments have issues.
> The article doesn't even mention consciousness.
Yes, that's true, but it's an identifier of life -- that and the ability to reproduce. If the wind waves a flag, we don't attribute life to the wind. If a person waves a flag, we do. If a robot waves a flag, well, that's an open question at the moment.
> ... This process might be deterministic enough that it happens everywhere roughly at the same time (on a cosmological time scale).
Ah, I see an issue with that. We now know there are galaxies much older than ours (and younger), and if life is a common property of matter (still not determined) and if it relies on a certain set of preconditions, that would mean life would appear at widely different times, depending on location.
Most scientists that operate under the assumption that consciousness, as we experience it, is an emergent property align toward panpsychism, matter and consciousness somehow being co-primitives in the ontology to kickstart reality. But there are many problems with panpsychism, the first being that it's a dualism, that is it requires two separate magic tricks at bootup. Since physics only knows about matter, panpsychism is not considered a scientific theory, just an interesting philosophy. The later problems with it are leftovers from the formerly popular materialist framework. How does the proto consciousness of matter grow to give us the taste of sugar, or love? Where is that conscious property? How to identify it? Etc.
Now, from an Occam's razor's perspective, I think the less popular idealism (consciousness is the primitive, then it boots up matter) is actually the most parsimonious. It's the least intuitive at first, but when you take the time to listen to arguments from a scientific and analytical philosophy standpoint (e.g Don Hoffman, Bernardo Kastrup), it's the only one that actually makes any kind of sense, while in the process solving most of the numerous problems raised in physics and philosophy (e.g. local realism is false, so where is matter when consciousness doesn't experience it? If the probability that we're in the one real reality 1/N, why would we assume that we are? And many more). It also gives us as a bonus that it manages to reconcile those fields with the nondual intuition from traditions that document accounts of people who have lived with that realization (e.g. Buddhism, Advaita, Taoism, Sufism, Christian mysticism).
It does require a profound conceptual paradigm shift. Way deeper than at first glance we realize is necessary. So I generally just recommend that people dive into it by reading or listening to discussions by the people that I've mentioned, rather than knee-jerk responding.
Plenty of things don't follow that. Heat something up it gets hotter but at some point it tips the scale and burns. Cool down water and it gets colder but at some point it hits a threshold and freezes. 1000s of similar examples. Put a bunch of hydrogen together and not much happens. Put enough and it becomes a star. It seems like consciousness could follow the same pattern and still fit occam's razor
0. https://youtu.be/XWbxdREQ6xM?si=t2-AywFf2cnQfAni
1. https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S03032...
> Therefore, based on Occam's razor, we may provisionally assume that all matter possesses some degree of consciousness -- this is the simplest assumption.
An even simpler first few steps:
* We experience matter, but we aren't sure if matter exists outside of our experience of it
* Therefore, based on Occam's razor, we may provisionally assume that all matter exists only within our consciousness -- this is the simplest assumption.
A nice point. One might call it the the solipsistic argument. Not easy to argue against, and not unlike the debate about consciousness -- we aren't close to saying what it is, or which assemblies of matter can be reliably said to possess it.
All of these are exponential increases in energy density, entropy generation, and negative entropy consumption. To not describe them as phase changes is odd. It's telling that economic growth over the last 4000 years (first farming and now industry in the last ~400) also appear to be exponential over several orders of magnitude. Whether there's a quick end to this or not is an open question, but they still look like phase changes. That weather is starting to be affected is equally telling.
A conflation of consciousness with life seems weird, though. If ordered psuedo-crystals are life (or clay-RNA / DNA crystals) or even viruses are life, I don't know anyone claiming they're conscious. It would be like assuming life caused capitalism or industry, when certainly they fit very different exponential curves. Making arguments that industrialization (use of power other than human/animal work) isn't a "phase change" in economy would also be similarly strange.
Now, whether it "confronts physical laws" or requires an explanation, I have no idea. They do seem to be transitions at least as interesting as weather on Jupiter.
https://communities.springernature.com/posts/were-humans-the...
My hunch is: there’s a low-grade subjectivity/qualia to all of the universe, which would include the particles of the rock, but the rock would not experience an independent “rock-ness”.
The consciousness of organisms are perhaps more like a dissociative state, analogous to a gravity well of subjectivity, such that the qualia are concentrated inside a boundary (the entity that is intelligently chasing energy differentials), and excluding most information outside this boundary.
The primary reason for this hunch is that “ouch” is an experience, rather than merely a mathematical/algorithmic update to a neural net (compare with artificial NN’s, chemical feedback loops, etc). An “ouch” is not needed to strengthen the signal; just tilt the training feedback stronger as necessary (-10,000 points to “eat the berry that made us sick”). And it seems prohibitively expensive expensive to bootstrap “strange loop” subjectivity merely to strengthen those numbers via an “ouch”.
But instead, if some form of subjectivity were to pre-exist, Darwinian pressures would co-opt it as an efficient feedback loop mechanism, and then iterate until arriving at the “consciousness” of animals and humans (including an incentive to pay more attention to qualia in the organism boundary, and only minimally outside it)
I'd argue consciousness is a boring byproduct of evolution. You survive by predicting the actions of your competition. You predict your competition by introspecting yourself. Definitionally, consciousness.
I believe this is the thrust of panpsychism/panentheism.
It appears that life developed quite quickly in this manner after the formation of the Earth.
The leap from bacteria and archaea to eukaryotes, however, took billions of years. So complex life may be rare.
Water and rocks may be necessary, but you have no evidence they are sufficient.
That is, even if Venus were teeming with simple life on every square cm, I don't think any of our instruments could pick it up unless we send a probe to collect and analyze samples. So, at the moment we have no hope of detecting this type of life outside the solar system even if it were universal.
It's visibly not covered in moss, fungus, grasses, algae, slime.
On Earth we talk about hot hydrothermal vents underwater: https://www.nhm.ac.uk/discover/survival-at-hydrothermal-vent... - this says "the Pompeii worm [...] is one of the most heat-resistant multicellular animals on the planet, able to withstand temperature spikes of over 80°C. 'Most animals can't cope with anything over 40°C. Very close to the hot fluid, there are typically only microorganisms. These can survive in temperatures up to around 120°C,' explains Maggie."
The surface of Venus averages 462°C.
Okay we won't know for sure unless we collect samples, but we do know any life would have to be heat resistant beyond anything we know of - beyond what our metal space probes could tolerate - and invisible to the naked camera even in 'teeming' quantities, and leaving no trace of waste gasses in the atmosphere which we can detect remotely.
[ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nvkMwv9EYQQ - Venera: The Incredible Probe that the Soviets Sent to Venus ]
Humans, after soft landing probes on two other planets: "Life is nowhere out there! It must be only here!"
I've since tried to find it without luck. Does anybody here know where I can read it or remember the article I'm talking about?
I posted a comment there. They are using a very long protein instead of a short one. Nobody expect that the first functional protein is so long.
Also, they are generating the protein using a "random dice" instead of assuming a short crapppy version and using "branch and prune" to find a longer and more efficient one.
In my experience, even though nature looks chaotic there is a very strict order to things which has evolved over millions of years and is a result of looking for the "most optimal way" to achieve a goal. A good example might be mycelium optimizing routes to nearby resources. Another might be ant colonies creating tunnels that are effective to navigate.
The problem is, in my opinion, that we do not know what the final goal is. Therefore we cannot begin to analyze the inevitability of something as us, or life in general, happening. The answer may be perhaps found in religion or some similar "greater than life" endeavor.
>There’s plenty of time for evolution (2010)
His perspective was that (if I may take the liberty of paraphrasing him) there’s nothing particularly special about life from the perspective of physics. What we call life simply correlates to parts of the physical world that have the highest degree of complexity and internal structure.
Life is not binary.
Technically true in both cases, but if physics is irrelevant to life, why not just answer the that way, instead of taking all the life out of Life.
I'm having trouble thinking of one that isn't more properly "life-like".
New understandings of mega-viruses have let us to believe that the line is really quite fuzzy. Some of these larger viruses have double stranded DNA, some have ribosome like functions, some have ERs, etc. Kinda like a cell, but missing random parts that make them truly alive.
Assembly theory is a theory that tells us that when we observe the complexity of something that is not unoque, we can determine probabilistically from it's complexity the likelihood of it being created by some type of active agent, mind or something. Lee continues with this to speculate a lot more (and I think he's on to something) about time being fundamental and what a mind is. It's sort of a computational complexity theory applied to intelligence.
This "phase transition" hypothesis is basically saying that life is emerging in the universe in a stage akin to recombination[0] as a more stable state, and that the universe without life is a metastable state[1]. This would mean that life will ultimately absorb all matter in the universe, as if it were a phase transition the cosmological principle says that the universe is uniform[2].
It sounds like a pretty idea but I'm not really convinced, phase transitions propagate at the speed of light. An exponential curve where the transition ramps up is am interesting idea to ponder. There are existing fantastic explanations for life that exist that are very interesting that don't require the universe to undergo a phase transition. Simple entropy and the red shifting of energy explain it's existence just fine. Nevertheless, all this research and these attempts to understand what life, consciousness, minds, creative agents and all that are in the context of our universe are really fun and I think all this exploration will bear some delicious fruit.
[0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Recombination_(cosmology)
You’d need to detect life or rule it out on a variety of planet sizes, ages and compositions at a variety of distances around a variety of star types, ages and sizes at varying locations in the galaxy before we’d have enough data to make confident predictions.
This proves something, but I'm not sure what...
If the emergence of complex life in the universe is a threshold or phase transition effect, it might not happen until the universe reaches a certain age in which all conditions are satisfied. At this point you'd have the "simultaneous" (at geologic time scales) emergence of complex life all over the place.
If this were the case, what if for some reason (such as multiple overlapping factors all having to be satisfied) the standard deviation in the time dimension is actually small? In other words what if life emerges or hits certain evolutionary milestones at about the same time +/- a fairly narrow window like one million years.
If that were the case then the universe would be full of things more or less about as advanced as we are, but very few that are vastly more advanced. The probability of one of those few very advanced outliers existing in, say, this galaxy might be relatively small. Intergalactic travel is many orders of magnitude harder than interstellar travel (which is already brutally hard) and would take millions of years even near the speed of light, so even something like a Kardashev type II or transitional type III civilization wouldn't be likely to cross between galaxies. Something like that could be out there but insanely distant and completely undetectable.
We wouldn't see alien interstellar probes, starships, or techno-signatures from anything large scale enough to be detectable because for the most part these things don't exist yet.
Would also imply that once we build a starship, that's about the time we should expect to encounter starships. It would be a cosmic-scale version of the principle (and apparent historical pattern) that steam engines appear when it is "steam engine time." Maybe it's just not starship time yet.
If the standard deviation is very narrow, you'd have this weird interstellar trick or treat night event where the probes and starships start arriving at about the same time everywhere in the entire universe.
At this point maybe everyone exchanges knowledge and technology and you have an insane explosion in complexity, sort of a cosmic Cambrian explosion, and then you get Kardashev type II and III civilizations and onward.
Zoom way, way out and it looks like a sudden phase transition of the entire universe from being dominated by non-living physical processes to being dominated by living processes.
So it could be argued that given laws of universe, seeding it in any state could with very high odds come to an emergence of life, which makes it to be "expected".
If a few hydrogen and oxygen atoms get together and form water. That is expected, even if they are bouncing around randomly.
This occurs at many different scales.
There is random motion of particles of air in a room, but the overall 'pressure' can be measured and be constant.
The earth doesn’t share our prejudice toward plastic. Plastic came out of the earth.
The earth probably sees plastic as just another one of its children. Could be the only
reason the earth allowed us to be spawned from it in the first place. It wanted
plastic for itself. Didn’t know how to make it. Needed us. Could be the answer to our
age-old egocentric philosophical question,
“Why are we here?”
“Plastic… asshole.”
- George CarlinAt best it's a sort of mission statement for what would need to be a research programme with many many academic papers behind it. As it is, I'm not sure what the authors aim here is. It's a blog post.
He's a leading theoretician of complex systems, and this is probably intended to wrap up his work before he dies, and to provide guidance for those coming after him.
https://global.oup.com/academic/product/the-origins-of-order...
> It's more like summary of a 30+ year research program
I'd say my comment is essentially correct. It is, indeed, a kind of blog article but summarising a massive research programme, rather than defining one.
I didnt speak to the validity or status of the content; I spoke to how odd it is in what's taken to be a journal. No journal (of science) would publish this as it is.
How does arxiv suffer? What mission creep? What do you mean too many?
Not a crackpot.
it gets steep from 29 onward. and for a reason.
HN is now a hangout for PMs and wannabe nontechnical founders who want to feel cool.
However, life didn't evolve through a random walk of chemical reactions turning into complex systems with the ability to replicate and gain ever increasing complexity over time. Not possible.
Entropy is increasing.
How else could it have evolved?
Evolution is in no way in contradiction to the 2nd law.