Hacker News Reader

Comment by popalchemist | Hacker News Reader

cracking the "origin of life" (I put it in quotes because if you subscribe to the panpsychism premise that consciousness is fundamental then the question of hte origin of life is a bit nonsensical; everything is a permutation of the same primordial life-consciousness) is a bit like cracking AGI; if some new insight gets us closer to the larger question, it is relevant to the larger question even if the larger question is a superset of the sub-question.

It is related in that way.

View on HN

The origin of life means abiogenesis - how the first living "stuff" arose from simpler chemistry.

And it is just as relevant if you believe in panpsychism as it is if you don't - panspsychism holds that rocks and even electrons are conscious to some extent, but that has nothing to do with how we got from organic chemistry to proto-cells (as both protocells and organic molecules have some degree of consciousness in this theory).

Questions of the origin of life are only irrelevant/settled for those who subscribe to explicit divine origins of life, such as Creationists, who hold that God literally created the first life from nothing directly - that it was an unknowable miracle, not a physical process.

I didn't say anything about the question of the origin of life being irrelevant, but nonsensical, in that if consciousness (which can also be framed as life-force, rather than seeing those as two distinct subjects) IS fundamental, and thus is the first-mover, then conceiving of an "origin" of it is a category error, as space-time would be made FROM it, rather than being the substrate within which it appears.

It is not a discarding of the question but a recontextualizing.

I still don't think that makes sense. Even if you hold that rocks and humans are made out of mind-stuff and alive in that sense, there's still an interesting question of how precisely biology, the first cells, arose out of the simpler chemistries we see everywhere else. Perhaps it's a less fundamental question, but it's an interesting and very difficult question nonetheless.

It's a simple observation that there is some serious difference between the observable behavior of rocks vs that of bacteria, and it's an interesting question how that arises. Especially since we've tried quite a bit to create a bacteria in a lab and no one has ever succeeded.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com