"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.

Link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CGiDqhSdLHk

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.

BTW these books were up on amazon India for like $10-$15 each (books with slight printing defects were being dumped in the 3rd world) so I lapped up the entire collection :P

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.

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...

This misses the fact that the laws that guide the evolution of the universe are such that its evolution is "aimed towards" increasing entropy. This aim then entails what states are more likely over time, i.e. such states that increase the capacity for increasing entropy. It's not just an incidental fact that entropy increases, but that this trajectory is baked into the laws of nature. But the conceptual dual of an aim is a goal or a "want". So while not literally true, I think using intention terminology is more correct and insightful than leaving out any talk of goal-oriented behavior.

https://www.newscientist.com/article/2398369-why-free-will-d...

Dark matter?

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!

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

https://www.eia.gov/energyexplained/us-energy-facts/

We can make sustained nuclear reactions in much less space using engineered pressure instead of gravity, so that skews the energy density ratio.

IIRC fusion reactors on earth use magnetic confinement to raise the temperature much higher than the sun's interior for a much higher rate of fusion reactions. I'm sure someone will be along to correct me if I got that wrong. ;0)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sun#Structure_and_fusion

What more do you want to know.

Allow me to become a little philosophical but since human beings which are product of nature made plutonium, isn't the making of plutonium natural too?

I mean everything that is happening in this universe is natural!

I know the general usage of the words "artificial" for human-made and "natural" for everything else. But when we are talking at the grand scale of life and universe I think a human-made plutonium is as natural as bee-made honey.

My wife was recently asked to make a meal for someone who didn't eat "processed" foods. What level of manipulation needs to happen before a food is "processed"? Can beans or rice be dried and put in a bag? Can chicken broth be used if it's homemade, but the chicken came from a commercial farm? Or is extracting broth from a chicken processing it?

I've increasingly noticed many sub-cultures adopting odd definitions and interpretations of commonly used language with the expectation that everyone who interacts with their group understand their dialects. It's not really jargon or vernacular since the words are common to the language, just used to mean something different than the general population would understand. Similarly, artificial is now assumed to mean bad and natural good, when neither ascribe value by definition or in practice.

But your idea that people are failing to use Standard English and creating language subcultures around peculiar meanings of artificial/processed/chemical vs natural/homemade/organic is itself based on a very artificial distribution of language.

To me, the actions of stars fusing heavy atoms and then those atoms ending up in lumps of material somewhere sounds like a pretty complex system doing its thing.

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.

Kant would vehemently disagree. Not that I'm a Kantian, but he makes some pretty good points. So I think there's a lot of work here that needs to be done to make your argument stronger.

It is even debatable what points he really made. As always in philosophy.

Actually this famous slogan that "existence is not a predicate" is closer to proposals of Russell and Quine.

Disclaimer: quoted phrases from Kant may not match exactly what you can find in English translations. I know Kant from Polish translations, so I improvised a bit.

I mean, you probably don't even realize that this view is influenced by Kant. You are giving a very poor retread of 200+ year old German idealism.

For example, from the Wikipedia article on Critique of Pure Reason [1], Kant's major work: In the preface to the first edition, Kant explains that by a "critique of pure reason" he means a critique "of the faculty of reason in general, in respect of all knowledge after which it may strive independently of all experience"

I think it is fair to criticize his prose but it isn't like you don't have access to well over 200 years of commentary and follow-ups to one of the most famous and important philosophers within the Western tradition. For a gentle introduction I suggest this video [2] (42 minutes) where Geoffrey Warnock (at the time the Vice Chancellor at Oxford) provides an overview of Kant's ideas.

It is also fair to disagree with Kant, but it is pretty obvious when you are talking about the subject he dominates while having no experience with his work. The reason he is so famous is that he had very compelling things to say on this very subject.

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Critique_of_Pure_Reason

2. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wlEMkAkGS1I

To give an example, it would be like you were talking about gravity and saying that Newton was right. Then someone mentions Einstein, and you respond that you couldn't be bothered understanding the general theory of relativity because the math is too hard.

I mean, no one is saying you should read Einstein, just that Einstein had some things to add to the ideas of gravity that are worth considering. And if you want any theory of gravity that you have baked up on your own to be taken seriously, you will find that others will expect you to show some familiarity with his theories. And further, there is a wealth of material on his theories that does not require you to engage directly with the esoteric math.

The same is true about Kant (although, to be fair this is philosophy and not physics, so he didn't supplant Descartes in the same way Einstein did Newton). He added explicitly to the question about the bounds of knowledge with respect to experience. So if you are making claims about that subject then it is not unreasonable to expect that you have at least some familiarity with his contribution.

> You are giving a very poor retread of 200+ year old German idealism.

You kept putting me down because my ideas don't jibe with your readings. Now you're comparing philosophy with physics.

I am trying stay away from such pedantic bibliographic review. You keep appealing to authority to minimize my contributions. This is why I didn't want to go down this road. Thanks for dragging me.

> your viewpoint is well over 200 years old

Hate to break this to you but the ideas I'm talking about are well over 3000 years old. Kant et al are a cul de sac in this tradition.

Perhaps, yet how would you know if you refuse to engage with it?

I'm not sure how to respond when someone insists on remaining ignorant of alternative viewpoints and then suggests that any attempt to point out relevant arguments against their position is victimizing them.

As long as we don't discover something truly novel this is how reality of this universe looked like before we came since its creation. And it fared just fine.

Interesting turn of phrase about a supposed reality deprived of consciousness. Created.

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...

https://www.quantamagazine.org/a-new-thermodynamics-theory-o...

https://www.bbvaopenmind.com/en/science/leading-figures/ilya...

Anyway, I'm now going back to read Prigogine's book, Order Out of Chaos. It's also brought me around to think and study more about self-organization and emergent properties of complex systems.

About "A New Physics Theory of Life", and the idea that life exists because "the law of increasing entropy drives matter to acquire lifelike physical properties".. I see this is what you meant by "entropy is the process that drives life".

> Besides self-replication, greater structural organization is another means by which strongly driven systems ramp up their ability to dissipate energy. Thus, England argues that under certain conditions, matter will spontaneously self-organize.

Re-reading the article, I'm struck by how entropy and organization are, seemingly paradoxically, two sides of the same coin. It feels like there's something profound there, some principle that explains many phenomena at different scales all at once.

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.

sighs in bitcoin

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.

No, matter isn't 'captured' energy any more than it's 'captured' mass or momentum. Energy is a quantity, not a substance.

I am trying to recognize that even in that rock, energy is dissipating in multiple ways, and any number of different events can lead to it dissipating in different ways.

I suppose you can say that the individual atoms composing the rock are moving, but are those movements connected to the potential energy it has by virtue of being far from the relative minimum in a gravity well?

That rock could fall down the mountain mostly intact - a highly energetic event, compared to being eroded away chemically by rain over millennia.

ps: I subscribe to the heat death theory.

the rock, does, obviously "contain" energy thanks to e=mc2. but the notion that the rock is energetically in a different state as it sits on top of the mountain that when it sits at the bottom never sat well with me in high school, and it still doesn't, 45 years later.

I just happen to consider the explanation that a rock sitting on top of a mountain having "potential energy" to be relatively content free.

There's always a tension in physics (or has been for a couple of centuries or so) between force-based explanation and energy-based explanation.The force-based explanation (gravity) of why the rock might move downhill makes vastly more sense to me than the notion that it has "potential energy". However, the force-based explanation is not always clearly the right one either.

Also, I wasn't referring to "the idea of energy stored by being in motion". This is precisely the hangup that trips up so many. An object doesn't have energy because it is moving. And it doesn't move because it has energy. The motion and the energy are the same thing, just two different ways of talking about the same thing. The distinction matters because the way we've developed the semantics of "motion" and "energy" in physics means that, for example, "motion" is not something that is transferred between objects, but "energy" is.

OR the comet is just sitting there, 'stationary', the object hits it. Not the object has energy.

There's no total energy to a system, except calculated from some point of view?

if you consider the state to include position - relative to a frame of view - then energy describes (at least in part) the likelihood that the position at time T' is different than at time T

Theories which make life inevitable are inherently shaky because we have 1 sample.

In fact as far as we know - most of the space in the universe is doing the dissipation in a very inefficient way.

Which means the theory that it will do it simply because of the "selection pressure" is empirically wrong.

Let's say a huge asteroid sterilized Earth 100 years ago. What could the life do to outcompete that? Was it the result of this "selection pressure" that it didn't or was it simply result of starting conditions and gravity?

This theory seems to provide almost no predictive value it just takes a thing that happened once and makes a story about how it had to happen.

Again, this is not true. We have empirical evidence that life on Earth began as soon as it could. And the universe doesn't spontaneously do things as you're wishing it to do to support your argument.

> Let's say a huge asteroid sterilized Earth 100 years ago. What could the life do to outcompete that?

That doesn't negate anything. Entropy increases over time. Given the various conditions available in the universe, its processes follow that directive relevant to their conditions.

That's the whole point. The theory reduces to "if conditions are right life will happen" which moves the whole predictive power to the "conditions are right" and leaves the theory with 0 value added.

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

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/CA-duality

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.

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.

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.

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 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.

See also: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Assembly_theory

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...

https://xkcd.com/384/

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.

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.

You're prognosticating a future "when X...", when that "when" is a very big "if".

And augmentation branches then in AI as symbiont versus AI as desktop assistant.

First seems likely, but as a permanent alternative I don't know why a species would eschew lightspeed transportation and effortless immortality for the fragility and slowness of an organic body. It's possible there are good reasons, but I don't know of any.

Once uploaded comes the issue of getting computing time to run it (the economics and politics of prefering run time of X over run time of Y). And maintaining the computing platform. Certainly there are immense advantages to the digitized form - of course.

By contrast, augmentation (which is what we already do) seems straightforward. And seems to fit current society "easily" (haha - or let's say it will be tough enough as a first stage.)

So that from the point of view of a next epoch in life forms, AI fits more immediately in the struggle of AI as symbiont, AI as independent, or AI as desktop assistant.

Careful you might be going down a 14 hour rabbit hole.

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.

All I’m doing is calling out the intellectual dishonesty is making any claims about something we know nothing of.

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.

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.

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.

> 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.

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).