The elimination of unfit members is natural selection in action. The species itself would die out if suicide was a general trait. My definition of life included persistence, so I have to disagree. Humanity as a whole is something that tends to persist. Humanity is an example of life. I also don't think there is intention involved, but you're free to apply that word to what a tulip does. — noAxioms
No. If it can perpetuate without procreation (just be sufficiently immortal), it can be life. Perhaps creation of competitors is not in its best interest. Procreation is just one way to achieve this, and it is a far more efficient way to speed evolution, so that method tends to get selected over the more evolution-resistant method of immortality. It is harder (but certainly not impossible) to make improvements to an individual than to a species.
Yes, life tends to die. Something that is immortal needs a mechanism to ensure survival from major accidents, which are inevitable. There can be no single points of failure. — noAxioms
They do record data readily. How else do we know the long term history of the planet? Ask the rocks. The information is stored nowhere else it seems. Their lack of USB port to download the information just means you need to learn their language if you want them to talk to you. — noAxioms
We have not defined life. Banno says fire meets the requirement, and since 'unnatural' was found to not belong in my definition, I think fire is life, just a very trivial form. So there's the example of one not complex, and that lack of complexity is why most don't consider it life. — noAxioms
If you don't agree, I think the claim of a requirement for a certain level of complexity needs to be defended. Fire doesn't seem to partake in natural selection, but nobody has listed that as a requirement. "Sufficient complexity to support natural selection"? That would add the need for data, which your definition had, and mine did not, and which fire seems not to have. — noAxioms
I don't like the word 'intent'. I think bacteria intends to persist no more than does fire. — noAxioms
The panda is sufficiently perfected for its niche that adaptability is all but gone. It cannot transition faster than its environment is changing, and will likely only stick around in captivity as do so many other sufficiently cute creatures. Possibly not, since they don't seem to thrive well in captivity. A bird of paradise has the same problem — noAxioms
OK. Is a computer virus an organism? Are there really 'parts' to it? I guess there are, just like there are parts to DNA that serve different function.
The only difference between a computer virus and a biological one is that the former is known to be an intelligently designed thing. That suggests that biological primitives might be as well. Biology seems to have a better than even chance of having fallen here from the cosmos rather than having originated here. If the former, perhaps it was engineered by (as opposed to evolved from) some non-biological predecessor, but then that just defers the origin question further back, asking how those predecessors came to be. Somewhere, something had to happen just by chance, given non-deistic assumptions. Even the ID community has backed off on the life thing. The teleological argument now puts the tunings of our universe at a far lower probability than the odds of life appearing naturally. — noAxioms
I'm not asking you to define life, I'm asking you to give me an example of anything which could plausibly be agreed to as life which also happens to be uncomplicated. I don't have a good answer as to why life needs to be complex, it just is. Maybe because simple things never do anything intelligent. I don't know, the answer is complex. — VagabondSpectre
There must always be a relation to an X, and there is no objective X. It seems always contextual. In everyday conversation, "He is tall" references a context-dependent X. The relation is there, else the statement is meaningless. The X is indeed probably fuzzy, making it more also a function of opinion, but my point is that there is always an X, and X is not objective.Also, 'tall' should always be relative to X if we want to say something that is objective and accurate.
Now I agree that in an everyday conversation, people may say "He is tall" (with no relation). — Samuel Lacrampe
I am also not self sustaining, hijacking the machinery of plants to harvest solar energy. Nothing is completely self-contained, so I don't see the issue with viruses. They have the semiotics and sufficient machinery to live off of their environment, which is other cellular life.And that is why a virus seems troubling. We can't really talk about it as an "it" because it is not self-sustaining in that minimal fashion. It is a bare message that hijacks other machinery. — apokrisis
Yes, and sterile as you point out. Defective examples of life are still life.A human can be both alive and suicidal at the same time; they're not mutually exclusive, which is the minor point I tried to make. — VagabondSpectre
I think 'intelligence' is about as fuzzy a term as 'life' or 'unnatural', 'intent' and 'consciousness' and we should avoid the terms. Apo has the right term. Semiotics is the difference between the data in DNA and the data in rocks.It has to do with the way the data is organized. The way data in the human brain is organized itself facilitates the mechanical extrapolation and development of consciousness. The way data contained in DNA is organized within the nucleus of a cell is what itself provides mechanical intelligent instruction to the rest of the cell.
You just described humans. The difference seems again to be the semiotics. Yes, I agree that fire is not life.Fire is not life, it's a chemical reaction we call combustion. It doesn't anticipate it's environment, it consumes it as fuel. It doesn't display intelligence or behave in a manner conducive to it's survival. It chaotically consumes what is available to it and then is extinguished in a predictable manner.
This one is pretty cool, bordering on the benefit we get from sex.Bacteria can swap genes (such as genes coding antibiotic resistance) between members of mixed species colonies.
Life (like mind) still has echoes of a vitalistic ontology - the presence of some generic spirit that infects the flesh to make it reactive. Talking about organisms ensures that structural criteria - like being closed for causality in terms of embodying a purpose with efficient means - are top of mind. We are paying attention to the process of how it is done rather than treating life as some vague reactive matter. — apokrisis
I think 'intelligence' is about as fuzzy a term as 'life' or 'unnatural', 'intent' and 'consciousness' and we should avoid the terms. Apo has the right term. Semiotics is the difference between the data in DNA and the data in rocks. — noAxioms
Why is that? If we are able to produce life from material (matter and energy) only, then life is made of material only. Nothing can be created out of nothing. Note I am not including here a human being, which may not only have a life, but also a soul.I think they may be able to do it, but I don't think they will be able to explain their results objectively, using only a material/objective level of description. — Cavacava
I think that the biophysical discoveries of the past 15 years - the new and very unexpected detail we have about the molecular machinery of cells - really explains how life and computation are deeply different.
To sum that up, the reductionist view you just expressed hinges on the belief that the physics or hardware of the system is a collection of stable parts. Even it we are talking about circuits that can be switched, they stay in whatever state they were last left in. You can build up a hierarchy of complexity - such as the layers of microcode and instruction sets - because the hardware operates deterministically. It is fixed, which allows the software to flex. The hardware can support any programme without being the slightest bit bothered by anything the software is doing.
But biology is different in that life depends on physical instability. Counter-intuitively, life seeks out physical processes that are critical, or what used to be called at the edge of chaos. So if you take any protein or cellular component (apart from DNA with its unusual inertness), as a molecule it will be always on the edge of falling apart ... and then reforming. It will disassociate and get back together. The chemical milieu is adjusted so that the structural components are poised on that unstable edge. — apokrisis
So computers have stable hardware that the software can forget about and just crunch away. If you are equating the program with intelligent action, it is all happening in an entirely different world. That is why it needs biological creatures - us - to write the programmes and understand what they might be saying about the world. To the programmes, the world is immaterial. They never have to give a moment's thought to stopping the system of switches falling apart because they are not being fed by a flux of entropy.
Life is then information in control of radical physical instability. That is what it thrives on - physics that needs to be pointed in a direction by a sign, the molecules that function as messsges. It has to be that way as cellular components that were stable would not respond to the tiny nudges that signals can deliver. — apokrisis
Again, with computation, more data, more detail, seems like a good thing. As you say, to model a physical process, the level of detail we need seems overwhelming. We feel handicapped because to get it right, we have to represent every atom, every event, every possibility. In principle, universal computation could do that, given infinite resources. So that is a comfort. But in practice, we worry that our representations are pretty sparse. So we can make machines that are somewhat alive, or somewhat intelligent. However to complete the job, we would have to keep adding who knows how many bits.
The point is that computation creates the expectation that more is better. However when it comes to cellular control over falling apart componentry, semiotics means that the need is to reduce and simplify. The organism wants to be organised by the simplest system of signals possible. So information needs to be erased. Learning is all about forgetting - reducing what needs to be known to get things done to the simplest habits or automatic routines. — apokrisis
This then connects to the third way biology is not like computation - and that is the way life and mind are forward modelling systems. Anticipatory in their processes. So a computer is input to output. Data arrives, gets crunched, and produces an output. But brains guess their input so as to be able to ignore what happens when it happens. That way anything surprising or novel is what will automatically pop out. In the same way, the genes are a memory that anticipates the world the organism will find itself in. Of course the genes only get it 99% right. Selection then acts to erase those individuals with faulty information. The variety is reduced so the gene pool gets better at anticipation. — apokrisis
So life is unlike the reductionist notion of machinery in seeking out unstable componentry (as that gives a system of signals something to control). And at the "software" or informational level, the goal is to create the simplest possible control routines. Information needs to be erased so that signal can be distinguished from noise. It is just the same as when we draw maps. The simpler the better. Just a few lines and critical landmarks to stand for the complexity of the world. — apokrisis
It might not amount to much, but it seems everything we are want to label "life" does employ recorded data in some form as a necessary part of it's ability to self-organize, anticipate, and successfully navigate it's environment. — VagabondSpectre
The kind of computation to which I refer isn't just basic computation; "deep learning" is an example of the type of computation that I would compare to life because the organizational structure of it's data points (a structure which emerges as the machine learns on it's own) is well beyond the complexity threshold of appearing to operate non-deterministically. — VagabondSpectre
I do understand the non-linearity of development in complex and chaotic systems. Events may still be pre-determined but they may not predicted in advance because each sequential material state in the system contains irreducible complexity, so it must be played out or simulated to actually see what happens. (like solving an overly-large equation piece by piece because it cannot be simplified). — VagabondSpectre
Machines which we build using mostly two-state parts with well defined effects are extraordinarily simple compared to those which seem to emerge on their own (using dynamic parts such as inter-connected memory cells with many states or strings of pairs of molecules which exhibit many different behaviors depending on their order). Even while I recognize the limits on comprehending such machines using a reductionist approach, I cannot help but assume these limitations are primarily owing to the strength of the human mind. — VagabondSpectre
And if we already accept that this common usage is the test of our definition, why bother witht eh definition at all? — Banno
Machines which we build using mostly two-state parts with well defined effects are extraordinarily simple compared to those which seem to emerge on their own — VagabondSpectre
And if we already accept that this common usage is the test of our definition, why bother witht eh definition at all? — Banno
Is a virus alive then? — apokrisis
We simply do not need to be able to present a definition of life in order to do biology. — Banno
I differentiated the terms. I would have said the virus is life, but it is not alive since it has no functioning parts most of the time.Is a virus alive then? — apokrisis
Humans also cannot replicate sans life. We have much more of the machinery of replication built into us, and are 'alive' in the sense that we function in some entropic way. But I am just as dependent on the external machinery (or at least the byproducts of it) as the virus. Apo did point out a clear distinction of dependence on the machinery itself vs us being dependent on the byproducts only.I think the appropriate question is, could viruses replicate sans life? As far as I know the answer to that is 'no'. — Wayfarer
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