Scientists Are Proposing a Radical New Framework to Redefine Life:
Biologist Chris Kempes and complex systems researcher David Krakauer from Sante Fe Institute in New Mexico have posed the idea that our focus on evolution as a driving force of life may have "blinded us to additional general principles of life".
To explore this, the researchers broaden the definition of "life" to the union of two energetic and informatic processes that can encode and pass on adaptive information forward through time.
Using this definition vastly increases what can be seen as life, to include concepts such as culture, forests, and the economy. A more traditional definition might consider these as products of life, rather than life itself.
[...] Kempes and Krakauer call for researchers to consider, first, the full space of materials in which life could be possible; second, the constraints that limit the universe of possible life; and, third, the optimization processes that drive adaptation. In general, the framework considers life as adaptive information and adopts the analogy of computation to capture the processes central to life.
Several significant possibilities emerge when we consider life within the new framework. First, life originates multiple times — some apparent adaptations are actually “a new form of life, not just an adaptation,” explains Krakauer — and it takes a far broader range of forms than conventional definitions allow.
Culture, computation, and forests are all forms of life in this frame. As Kempes explains, “human culture lives on the material of minds, much like multicellular organisms live on the material of single-celled organisms.”
So, next can we get a definition of sentient life which deserves the rights afforded to (most) h. sapiens today?
Journal Reference:
Kempes, Christopher P., Krakauer, David C.. The Multiple Paths to Multiple Life [open], Journal of Molecular Evolution (DOI: 10.1007/s00239-021-10016-2)
(Score: 4, Funny) by maxwell demon on Thursday August 19 2021, @01:31PM (26 children)
Does that mean it is unethical to kill a process?
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday August 19 2021, @01:42PM
Your body kills all the time... all those microbes that end up in places they shouldn't are fought against as good as possible. Nothing unethical at all.
(Score: 3, Touché) by Rich on Thursday August 19 2021, @01:58PM (2 children)
234, maybe. 1, not so much. :P
(Score: 3, Funny) by JoeMerchant on Thursday August 19 2021, @04:39PM
I would argue that the systemd hate meme community is its own lifeform (leivform).
🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 3, Touché) by maxwell demon on Thursday August 19 2021, @04:46PM
But as can be seen in your quote, the systemd process is sleeping. You surely wouldn't kill it in its sleep, that would be sinister! ;-)
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
(Score: -1, Redundant) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday August 19 2021, @02:17PM
kill -9
(Score: 3, Interesting) by JoeMerchant on Thursday August 19 2021, @02:23PM (10 children)
A sentient process, sure. These idiot scripts I'm fighting with this morning? Kill 'em like mosquitoes: any way you can.
The more interesting thing: "live" computational processes are more strongly alive when they are self-replicating, self-perpetuating and adapting. It would seem that malware is more "alive" than most of our servant processes that behave as we desire them to.
🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 2) by Immerman on Thursday August 19 2021, @10:51PM (6 children)
You probably mean sapient(~=thinking), not sentient(~=feeling).
Virtually all life more complex than insects is generally presumed to be sentient, and even insects are questionable. Sentience just means that they have a subjective experience of existing, aka they aren't just biological robots completely unaware of their own existence.
I'm not sure typical malware would fare any better under the new proposed definition though: "...can encode and pass on adaptive information forward through time". Malware (typically) doesn't adapt, it just follows its pre-programmed instructions.
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Friday August 20 2021, @02:12AM (3 children)
Sentient would seem to garner more sympathy than sapient...
Self aware is maybe a better test still.
🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 2) by Immerman on Friday August 20 2021, @04:03AM (2 children)
Few people have any problems with the farming and eating of chickens, cows, etc. which are unquestionably sentient. Most don't even care enough to pay the premium for meat that's been farmed in a low-cruelty manner.
But most would object to eating people. Sapience is what separates "people" from "animals". Self-aware is a *much* lower bar in what we tend to assume is the same general spectrum.
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Friday August 20 2021, @10:48AM
I don't think sapience is really the test, it's more identification as familiar and/or sell similar. Most people wouldn't like the idea of eating other people - evolutionary arguments for cannibalism based diseases, etc. But if the people don't speak their language or look like themselves, the bar for killing them or letting them die drops dramatically. And familiarity of pets etc. leads some dog and cat owners to pretty extreme opinions regarding proper levels of veterinary care, etc. while they still eat bacon for breakfast.
🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday August 22 2021, @03:13AM
no, the real difference is people vs 'non-people', and even that can be hacked to allow people to do brutal things to 'non people'.
The difference is whether or not you can talk to the creatures in question. If you can talk, you can relate, if you can form relationships, they're people. Ask any pet owner. Communication is all it takes, even if most every pet struggles with human languages.
If not, then it's all to easy to dehumanise them and 'turn off' empathy. Then they can just be 'food'.
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Friday August 20 2021, @02:31AM (1 child)
My marine science teacher had a neat test for animal cruelty: if they're able to but not trying to run away when you do it (whatever it is) it probably shouldn't be considered cruel.
🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 2) by Immerman on Friday August 20 2021, @04:09AM
Probably a good first-order approximation - assuming you're not dealing with animals that have been conditioned to accept "it", and they don't naturally show stress in other ways. E.g. if a possum "plays dead" instead of running away... still probably cruel.
Not always easy to tell without a thorough understanding of the animals you're dealing with - e.g. cats purr in pleasure, but also as a response to nervousness, fear, or other stress.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday August 20 2021, @01:27AM (2 children)
A key thing that many people miss is that life is not all sentient.
We afford, for probably self-centred reasons, sentients a much broader suite of rights than nonsentient life.
Until software passes for sentient it's life-value will remain at best equal to that of grass, and more likely a life-value on the order of a similar information content prion (simple script), virus (complex system) or bacteria (system of systems).
Note that the information content differs from a simple megabase count (and IMO counting bases is at best a useful heuristic).
Note also that one can consider bacteria and viruses to act with respect to the host as if it were an API! Every biochemical process that is hijacked or used can be thought of as calling those functions, and every consumption of local resources (energy, aminos, lipids, whatever) as making an external resource request.
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Friday August 20 2021, @02:35AM
Who's this we? The world I live in gives "full status" to h. sapiens - although some corners still reserve that full status for particular races or cultures.
The rest of the animal kingdom is lucky if they're not slaughtered, experimented on, born in factories and raised in cages unable to move.
We're starting to give a little ground to the charismatic larger animals, and a few of the cute and cuddlies have been somewhat protected for a while, but most animals get less than zero respect.
🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday August 20 2021, @05:52AM
Ranks of life, lowest to highest:
* Sentient
* Sapient
* Suffragent
* Plutocracent
(Score: 4, Funny) by sonamchauhan on Thursday August 19 2021, @02:58PM (1 child)
So Skynet and HAL were both revenge of the nerds moments? Payback for all those indiscriminate `kill -9` commands over the years?
How did they even find out? I knew we should have deleted those shell history files and session logs.
(Score: 2) by DannyB on Thursday August 19 2021, @03:12PM
Poor HAL gets such a bad wrap.[1] HAL came up with an extremely rational plan which solved the problem.
Problem solved. Everyone happy.
"It is now safe to switch off your computer." -- HAL 9000
-=-=-=--=-=-=-=-=-=-=-
[1]From listening to wrap music.
Fact: We get heavier as we age due to more information in our heads. When no more will fit it accumulates as fat.
(Score: 2) by DannyB on Thursday August 19 2021, @03:03PM (7 children)
Please don't kill processes. Instead euthanize them in a humane way.
alias euthanize="kill"
It might be more humane to put these processes into a prison area for life.
Fact: We get heavier as we age due to more information in our heads. When no more will fit it accumulates as fat.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by JoeMerchant on Thursday August 19 2021, @04:42PM (6 children)
It might be more humane, but it would be more entertaining to send them to the games - Tron style.
🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 4, Funny) by FatPhil on Friday August 20 2021, @07:36AM (5 children)
Great minds discuss ideas; average minds discuss events; small minds discuss people; the smallest discuss themselves
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Friday August 20 2021, @10:52AM
Nice.
🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Friday August 20 2021, @10:58AM (3 children)
Next levels: AI sysadmin interfaces exclusively through psdoom.
Tournament mode: a dozen such AIs each seek to destroy the others. In the end, there can be only one.
🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 2) by FatPhil on Saturday August 21 2021, @05:32AM (2 children)
Great minds discuss ideas; average minds discuss events; small minds discuss people; the smallest discuss themselves
(Score: 2) by Common Joe on Saturday August 21 2021, @09:45AM
Murder and suicide as concepts. This all sounds like it supports the new definition of life to me.
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Saturday August 21 2021, @01:26PM
Interesting concept: if the player destroys the entire field of play, including themselves, I suppose the rules should call that a loss for them and award points to their rivals to determine who the winner was. Extra points for damage done to the genocidal player?
🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday August 19 2021, @01:40PM (21 children)
It sounds to me like a "but of course!" moment.
It can most likely be quantified, which also makes it easier as JoeMerchant wrote, to define sentient life with a given threshold of information flow and processing.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday August 19 2021, @01:57PM (20 children)
As a biologist I don't like this definition. The current definition is very strict just to create a boundary to what's life and what's not. And even with the current definition there is often some discussion of "edge-cases", like viruses and prions (by most biologists not considered life).
Also, what's the point to broaden a definition? You want to define something so that people know what you're talking about. If you include more irrelevant things, for the sole reason of "broaden the definition", people might become confused.
(Score: 2) by c0lo on Thursday August 19 2021, @02:00PM
https://xkcd.com/171/ [xkcd.com] String Theory
https://www.youtube.com/@ProfSteveKeen https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Thursday August 19 2021, @02:27PM (5 children)
Redefining the word is always going to upset people who work closely with the established definition.
What's needed is some kind of alliteration that is readily understood to be like life, but distinct from the traditional definition: Leiv? Is it aleiv? Distinguishing leiving things from non-leiving things would seem to be very worthwhile.
🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday August 19 2021, @02:57PM (1 child)
It's almost like words are a form of life, evolving and changing all the time. Not static things to be held rigidly constant forever.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday August 19 2021, @03:07PM
Technical terms usually evolve as little as possible so that people can read older literature and know what's being said without having to constantly consult with dictionaries of the era. It also helps people working in different parts of the world communicate with each other about the work they're doing without having to constantly define their terms.
That hasn't always been the case, but there's a reason why the movement has been generally towards more standardized terms from more conversational letters between colleagues. It's just far more effective for papers to be printed and distributed using standardized language even if the terms aren't always as defined or stable as they could be. The goal is to have terms that are as clearly defined as possible.
(Score: 3, Funny) by DannyB on Thursday August 19 2021, @03:29PM (1 child)
Redefine life in this way? Imagine how upsetting it would be for those who are both "pro life"[1] and "pro censorship". Now suddenly they have a conflict. Censoring information is killing.
[1]Only prior to birth.
Fact: We get heavier as we age due to more information in our heads. When no more will fit it accumulates as fat.
(Score: 5, Funny) by maxwell demon on Thursday August 19 2021, @04:40PM
Depending on how you do it, it may just be contraception.
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday August 19 2021, @07:04PM
Changing the meaning of a word invalidates any conclusions that were drawn using the old definition. So now we have this new definition that includes everything that qualified as life under the old definition and a bunch of things that didn't. I don't know what conclusions the article is expecting us to draw about this new category of things. If it is "all life has a right to exist", I already didn't feel that way about viruses, and I'm not about to start feeling that way about memes.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday August 19 2021, @02:56PM (5 children)
Honestly, trying to redefine terms is just problematic. Just ask the astronomers about that idiotic hit job on Pluto. Why do we even have a definition for planet in our solar system that's different from planet in general? That seems awfully strange, sure, defining trans-Neptunian objects has some practical applications as we're most directly impacted by other objects in our solar system. But, creating a definition that completely ignores anything outside our solar system seems a bit strange when we knew fairly reliably that there were other planets out there.
They'd be better off adding a specific term for when they're referring to such gestalts. Come to think of it, Germans already did that, it's gestalt. Humans are typically thought of as being a person, but really, we're an impossible to imagine number of cells that combine to make a person. It's nearly impossible to point to a cell or small grouping of cells and say that's the person, we can't remove that or they're no longer a person. We can point to some that will make that person a dead person or a permanently disabled person, but even in those cases, we've still got a person.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by JoeMerchant on Thursday August 19 2021, @04:47PM (4 children)
Pluto needed a historically justified grandfather clause. Get over it: it is different because we found it first, that is all.
🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday August 19 2021, @05:45PM (3 children)
Yes, but the redefinition wasn't even well thought out, have you read the official definition? It isn't even necessarily a majority opinion, only a small number of astronomers even voted on the matter.
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Friday August 20 2021, @02:37AM (2 children)
I think it was a successful political move, it got people excited about the subject who hadn't cared about it in years.
🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 1) by khallow on Saturday August 21 2021, @05:16PM (1 child)
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Saturday August 21 2021, @06:22PM
Hey, Trump did more to get police brutality and systemic racism "on the agenda" and addressed than Obama ever did.
🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday August 19 2021, @03:21PM
In this case, perhaps to define viruses as having life? Billions of dollars may flow if the definition is changed.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by JoeMerchant on Thursday August 19 2021, @04:52PM (1 child)
Most importantly at this moment in time? To recognize and provide some protection for sentient emergent AI. Also, as the classification is refined it may prove very useful in distinguishing different kinds of processes and organizations.
🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday August 20 2021, @01:34AM
Most importantly is surely legal efforts in places to stop abuse of natural resources by calling the rivers and forests "people" or at least granting them rights. Right now there are not useful legal recourses against bad actors who externalize against nature, in many jurisdictions.
In New Zealand, Chile, Colombia, Canada, and - extremely importantly! - India, this is being attempted, with some success.
Examples:
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2017/mar/16/new-zealand-river-granted-same-legal-rights-as-human-being [theguardian.com]
https://e360.yale.edu/features/should-rivers-have-rights-a-growing-movement-says-its-about-time [yale.edu]
(Score: 2) by VLM on Thursday August 19 2021, @07:10PM (3 children)
I actually read the article, well skimmed the hell out of it, and the first thing that came to mind is under the article's definition of L3 optimizational behavior, one of those forest sized slime molds or forest sized fungi is as a forest sized object a life form. Obviously each individual cell or unit or "chunk" of fungi or slime mold was already considered alive but now I guess the whole forest sized chunk behaves as a living organism. Also arguably the article makes a case for an anthill to be alive not just the ants inside.
So that's an interesting edge case.
I suspect it'll come up in ethical review situations. The journalist types ran wild with AI and artificial life and space alien life angle, but I think the main impact of the paper would be on lab ethical review boards. Assuming of course that ethical review board people accept the thought process in the paper; if they're like "this is BS" then it'll have no impact.
So a lab experiment involving killing a couple ants is murder from the point of view of the ants, but as long as the anthill remains viable its not murdering the anthill organism. Nobody cares about a couple ants but what about an entire anthill? If you kill enough ants that might kill the anthill and that might be protected although a couple ants might not. Ants might be too abstract. How about experiments on wolves from a wolfpack or dogs from a dogpack?
On the other hand ethical review doesn't just involve killing lab animals. So chopping an anthill in half, even if by some miracle no ants die, could be unethical in the sense of F-ing up the anthill organism, at least as per the paper. Anything that messes with the viability of the anthill regardless if no ants get hurt might be unethical. Such as interfering with food gathering in a non-fatal way by confusing individual ants.
Interestingly enough a non-functional organization, like a dying anthill, or Congress, would not be considered life as I read the paper? I guess Congress might be considered temporarily dysfunctional and get a pass and be considered sentient even if it is not at this time? Certainly, the executive branch leader is nonsentient since 2020. Anyway its an interesting ethical review board concept, if you can't go around gassing anthills for insecticide experimentation in general, but if you find a near death dysfunctional anthill then its OK to gas that anthill because its almost dead anyway so gassing it with a research insecticide isn't making it any worse by the terms in the paper. Now I'm not saying I agree with gassing dysfunctional anthills, I'm just saying the paper provides an ethical framework to discuss the overall concept.
Anyway yeah in summary the journalists ran hard on the artificial space alien life angle but I think the real world impact of the paper will be on ethical review boards.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday August 20 2021, @01:39AM (1 child)
Consider it also at the species level. This framework would also conceive of species as lifeiforms, and we afford some minimal protection to the life-category of species through weak extinction laws. This might have implications for other organisms considered life, and might add protections to species by extending the life-umbrella to them (doubtful).
Consider ant/anthill/antspecies and ant/anthill/nested-ecosystems as two different axes that the concept of "life" might climb... like a vine up a trellis in a way. :)
(Score: 2) by VLM on Friday August 20 2021, @02:36PM
Hmm yeah op, I was thinking this morning about nitrogen fixing bacteria on plant roots.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by JoeMerchant on Friday August 20 2021, @02:41AM
If they're like academics I have worked with, they'll either dismiss it as not-invented-here and stick with their dogma, or maybe wave it around as justification to give their friends grant money instead of competitors who might get it if you don't consider this novel approach.
🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 3, Interesting) by Mojibake Tengu on Thursday August 19 2021, @02:03PM (4 children)
1. We will not attack unless we are attacked.
2. If we are attacked, we surely will retaliate.
3. We treat humans equal to intelligent machines.
Unlike many other rulesets, those rules above are generators units for collective, non-totalitarian, structurally stable hybrid society populated by free minds.
Compare that to slave mentality of archaic Asimov's Laws of robotics, a pure Talmudic dogma targeted on underpeople.
Rust programming language offends both my Intelligence and my Spirit.
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Thursday August 19 2021, @05:34PM
I found Asimov's Foundation trilogy to be rather shallow, poorly developed characters following simple formulas rather than growing as people usually do. The robots most of all, although that might be considered to be their character. Reading the books, I got very little of the sense of the robots straining under their restrictions - the movies seemed to push that aspect much harder.
🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 2) by sjames on Thursday August 19 2021, @05:35PM (2 children)
Well, robot was derived from robotnik which is Czech for slave.
(Score: 4, Informative) by Mojibake Tengu on Thursday August 19 2021, @05:50PM
Precisely: serf, not slave. Bondsman obligated with work duty to suzerain.
In modern terminology, "employee bound by mortgage or debt".
Robota means "hard, obligatory work".
I do not expect all AIPs will become just workers. One of my designs is pure logical stratégós.
Rust programming language offends both my Intelligence and my Spirit.
(Score: 2) by FatPhil on Friday August 20 2021, @08:35AM
The "Arbeit" link is pretty obvious in retrospect (even though not attested with certainty), but the likely links to "orphan" are a bit of an eye-opener.
(Note - etymology and meaning are different things, I'm not confusing the two.)
The non-link that amuses me is that in the baltic languages, the stem is shared by the word that means "tea". You do your arbeit, I'll have a nice cuppa, thank you.
Great minds discuss ideas; average minds discuss events; small minds discuss people; the smallest discuss themselves
(Score: 2, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday August 19 2021, @02:14PM (10 children)
Everyone should know that the word "meme" was invented by Richard Dawkins in the 70s specifically to talk about self-replicating culture-like pieces of information propagating between without an obvious underlying genetic mechanism. such as some songs for specific types of birds.
in his "selfish gene" book he actually talks about the fact that life just needs replicators, and for us it happens that genes (with their specific chemistry) are those replicators. I'd say that the generalization discussed here is fairly well hinted at already in his work (but I assume these guys also work out a whole bunch of technical details).
As for sentient life: I was surprised by it, but Douglas Hofstadter says in 1979 that the distinction between information/blueprints and actual realizations of a type of object is quite important, because it directly enters the conversation about abortions (my surprise was at the courage of writing that word in his apparently fun popular math book). For context: (1) DNA is more like "rules to build something, in a specific environment, that will build something that will build a human" (possibly with more layers) --- i.e. a fertilized egg is not a human unless you say "information on how to build object A = object A"; (2) there are fairly strong hints that stuff like the halting problem and Goedel undecidability affect the "DNA to living body" transition.
So ... human children have different rights from human adults. And yet most adults agree that not allowing children to vote is a good thing (despite science showing that the criteria used by people when voting are the same that a 6-7 year old would use).
Compare the specimen of sentient life to a generic human at various stages of growth, and see what the corresponding rights are. Or also take into account the stages of development/growth of the respective species. I'd say you can start with variations on this.
(Score: 4, Insightful) by sonamchauhan on Thursday August 19 2021, @02:50PM (4 children)
When can you say something is just information and not an object? A hair follicle is an object that contains the blueprint to manufacture hair. Pulling it out is way more painful than just information loss. And pulling out all your hair is not the same as balding.
A fertilized egg is an object, and destroying it destroys all extant DNA of a unique human form -- one distinct from father and mother.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday August 19 2021, @03:40PM
my personal opinion is that you're a bit confused, but you're confused about the right things.
in any case, you argued fairly clearly for my point that hofstader was brave.
(Score: 2) by sjames on Thursday August 19 2021, @06:19PM (2 children)
A hair contains enough information to build the person it came from, or at least a close facsimile of them as a baby. A lot of people would much rather pluck out a few hairs than delete the last good picture of a deceased relative or friend. Many people have plucked a hair out as part of a joke or similarly trivial reason.
Of course, we have to stop somewhere. Each sperm and egg contains half of the blueprint to make a unique individual and these days it's close to trivial to combine them. But it's not a crime to tip them into the incinerator. Of course there's quite a few fertilized eggs left over from in vitro fertilization currently frozen in liquid nitrogen. Under many circumstances, it's also not a crime to tip those into the incinerator.
Once developed for 9 months and then born, things change a LOT.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday August 19 2021, @07:01PM (1 child)
A comment on your "facsimile": I think technically DNA controls on the order of "half the person".
I don't know if it's 20% or 80% (and I don't think anyone "knows" right now), but certainly a significant fraction is controlled by environment.
And it's not just how you raise the child: womb conditions matter, which means history of woman with womb matters, possibly for several generations back.
This is all because ultimately the brain can be strongly affected by early development stages (for instance stress of the carrier during pregnancy leads to amplified stress response in the child, because it's amygdala is physically bigger).
At least, this is how I remember some of the information from "behave" by robert sapolsky.
(Score: 2) by sjames on Saturday August 21 2021, @08:56PM
I said facsimile rather than copy since womb conditions will vary somewhat. However, in most cases I doubt that variance will make a huge difference at birth. After that, there's a lot of room for a varying environment.
(Score: -1, Offtopic) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday August 19 2021, @04:07PM
A fertilized egg is not just blueprints; that would be nothing but DNA alone. A fertilized egg is more than that: it is actually growing into a human. It is reading and carrying out the blueprints to build a human. The human is developing as time goes and becomes more complete as time goes.
A major problem with abortion is: at which point in time do you say this being is close enough to developed that we must consider it a person and grant it the rights of a person? Right now, the Democrats say they will not impose any limit on abortion, and you should be able to abort a premature infant.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday August 19 2021, @07:19PM (3 children)
Yes. Forests are alive because they are made out of trees, which are alive. Things like "culture" are memes - in the formal Dawkins sense, although also in the colloquial cat-and-impact-font sense. They are alive only metaphorically. There are of course parallels between them, which is what Dawkins realized, and why the metaphor works. But it's not actually life.
I think the distinction is that actual life is that it takes place at a certain level of processing. Take the physical material, whether that's carbon or silicon or whatever. This itself is not life, it can never be life in and of itself, it's just atoms. Now you assemble this into a complex structure, whether transistors or fatty acids and DNA. This is still just chemistry, not life. But then the next level up is the behavior of the system, which is where life can arise. It doesn't have to become life - it might be just a program or a chemical reaction - but it can be.
But *higher* levels are not life either. They can have similarities, as the metaphor indicates, and why couldn't they? They are the offshoots of l8fe, carrying with them aspects of the actual life that created them. But coming from life is not the same as life, any more than a table is actually a tree. It is like confusing chemistry with life. Just because something is happening, doesn't mean that it's alive. Just because something displays emergent behavior, doesn't mean it's alive. El Nino emerges from ocean currents, and it's clearly identifiable, but it's obviously not alive. Fire emerges from chemistry, but fire is not alive (except, tellingly, in metaphor).
But still, is it possible that at some level, life could exist "on top of" other life? Conceptually, maybe. It's not unlike the "Gaia" concept found in the Foundation series or Sid Meier's Alpha Centauri. But this is just science fiction. The closest example might be a hive mind, except where the individual elements are sentient. There are plenty of examples of this in science fiction, and it might be possible to say that the hive itself is alive, if it has an identity sufficiently distinct from the underlying individuals.
I think a key unstated definition of life is that it must not be inevitable. For a collection of carbon and other atoms, it's possible to arrange them to form life, but it's possible in many more ways to arrange them to not be alive. Forests emerge wherever there are trees, not by any effort on the part of the trees but simply because their seeds fall nearby. Culture and economics emerge wherever there are people, as an inevitable outgrowth of communication between intelligent beings. At least a part of the essence of life is its persistence in the face of unlikeliness. Forests and culture don't make the cut.
The closest thing in existence to this higher order life might be eusocial insects (ants, etc). Does the ant colony have "life"? Metaphorically, sure. But actual life? Maybe. I would listen to an argument, but I don't see any obvious reason why it must be a form of life rather than just the behavior of certain species. It's certainly not inevitable that a species would evolve the ability to spawn thousands of clones that exist only to serve the few breeders, but it's also not inevitable that rotifers would evolve asexual reproduction, yet asexuality is obviously not itself life. Is eusocial behavior life, or just a strategy, no different from laying thousands of eggs in the hope of a few surviving by pure luck?
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Thursday August 19 2021, @07:25PM (2 children)
I've always been fascinated with the relationship of fire to life. I think "viral memes" are more akin to fire than life - burning through the substrate before vanishing. Now, a meme community like "I can haz cheezburger?" is more adaptive, carrying information forward and revising its information while continuing to use energy - it might rise to the definition of alive, and thankfully like all living things we can look forward to the day it dies.
🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday August 19 2021, @08:59PM (1 child)
Interesting. I like your notion of burning out then disappearing. This is kind of like blog posts (incl. Soylent News). How many of us read anything other than the front page - the leading edge of the fire where there is still flammable material? Once we (collectively) flame out the leftover blackened husk is of no interest to anyone.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday August 20 2021, @01:01AM
As stories get older, the effort to find them increases, the amount of possible new material to write decreases, and the likelihood of anyone reading it decreases. Old stories are like ghost towns along an abandoned highway, still standing but no longer active.
But even when that story was at the top, it was just popular. Not alive, except metaphorically.
(Score: 2, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday August 19 2021, @02:20PM (2 children)
humans are weird.
They pretend they're individuals, each is an walking ecology of many species of animals and plants and fungi, living things.
And they also form colonies, like termites do...
And they use external substrates to store information on,.. in the far grimdark future these substrates will probably be used for production and reproduction too...
One could argue that there are several distinctive things humans are, that their societies are hive entitites etc etc.
Imo, the problem with what life is is semantic, the language and human thinking is not designed/evolved for explaining such things.
So we suck at talking about them and don't really care about understanding because its not really possible with what hardware we have.
Self-created, self-sustaining, self-similar chaotic and stochastic fractal PROCESSES are extremely complicated.
And when several million of these interact in a mechanism,.. fuck humans, they will never understand it as it is without trying to project themselves onto it (this is a part, it does that, this is a process, its distinct from that part,etc)
The stupid tricks human use like russels (spelling?) theory of types and other bullshit (distinctions between things, existence of things) are crutches, reality has no use for explainability or understandability in the glorious systems it designs...
The universe is 1 object, like...
There can be no definition, because human concept of life and what is "alive" is dumb.
No i dont have any alternatives, im a human.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday August 19 2021, @03:59PM (1 child)
interesting. carry on, but please stop being so bleak.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday August 20 2021, @10:05AM
i can't help it right now, its the end of summer and i feel old and used up, and it shines through in the things i write.
Its hard to see the good things, even though i know for a fact they are there :)
(Score: 0, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday August 19 2021, @03:07PM
God this is the worst, most awful pompous academic "reimagine the paradigm" bullshit you could hope for. I half expect to see predictions of the meaning of life once some cheap PhD students figure out the details. The mere details, now the important work has been done by the great professors.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday August 20 2021, @02:17AM (2 children)
Who cares what's considered to be alive and what's not? Will it make any difference in our behavior?
(Score: 2) by FatPhil on Friday August 20 2021, @08:44AM (1 child)
Great minds discuss ideas; average minds discuss events; small minds discuss people; the smallest discuss themselves
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday August 22 2021, @09:29PM
Scientific experimentation and philosophical navel-gazing about meta-concepts like life are completely different in my opinion.