Is the emergence of life an expected phase transition in the evolving universe?

It's fascinating to me that the complexity of life always goes up. Outside extinction events, complex life generally seems to become more favourable over time. It's interesting that (to my knowledge) we don't see an ecosystem lose complexity in its entirety unless it's dying.

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.

Check out the work of Ilya Prigogine - he won a Nobel prize in the 70's for his work on self-organizing complexity. There is a selection force in the universe for increasing complexity, being driven by the dissipation of energy. When you have systems in non-equilibrium, there is a strong pressure to explore the possibility space to find ever more efficient ways to dissipate energy.

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.

The Sun outputs 3.9 x 10^26W, but it weighs ~10^30kg, so that would mean 10^-4W/kg.

Human beings are closer to 1W/kg at rest.

Now do a lump of plutonium.

How did that lump of plutonium become a lump? That part wasn’t natural.

"How did that lump of plutonium become a lump? That part wasn’t natural."

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.

I love debating this with people but ultimately it's just playing games with semantics. The notion of artificial x natural is very recent and very localized. Some cultures would differentiate raw from cooked in a similar sense. But it's like talking about what is really green vs what is really blue. Completely circular since it depends on the definitions of the terms.

It's easily extendable to the animal world as well. Is a nest created by a bird or a den created by one of various mammals natural or artificial? Is a nest made by mice in my garage from synthetic fabrics, flexible plastics, and whatever plant matter it can find natural or synthetic?

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.

You could approach the language problem like that as well. Before imperial efforts in recent centuries to normalize languages in certain territories, there was no Standard French or German or Italian. Vocabulary and accents changed slowly across the landscape, following geography - places isolated diverged and places integrated converged. Migration, trade and conquest added layers of complexity to this variation.

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.

Perhaps a better phrase to have used would have been "not prior to a complex system" -- as the lump of plutonium exists only because of a complex system doing its thing, it should be considered a consequence of the complex system rather than an alternative.

To attempt to pedantically clarify, is "exists only because of a complex system doing its thing" not true of basically any pure lump of material that exists?

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.

Life is a great entropy accelerator.

compared to a black hole though?

It might be too soon to tell. We might start creating them ourselves.

Which isotope? It makes quite a difference, and there's no "naturally occurring" with Pu.

The sun's power density is approximately the same as compost.

So does that mean that making a fusion reactor makes as much sense as building a containment vessel for a compost reactor?

Stars have to have enough mass to have enough gravity to start and sustain a nuclear reaction that constantly blasts energy out in all directions. This limits just how energy-dense they can get. What they lack there, they make up for in size and lifespan.

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

Fusion only happens in the Sun due to incredibly rare quantum tunnelling events. That is why the sun can burn for billions of years. It takes a long time for the energy generated to reach the surface and escape, that is why the sun has a high temperature.

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)

The Sun uses gravity, due to its mass, for fusion containment. Fusion reactors on Earth use electromagnetic containment.

Can you elaborate on that or drop a link that explains more?

Live/fresh compost creates heat as a byproduct of cellular metabolism during decomposition. I assume this is is using thermal output of this compost as a measure of energy.

What more do you want to know.

The rate of fusion in the Suns core is actually very slow and gram for gram it is not producing much energy. But the core of the Sun is well insulated by the vast bulk of itself, so even a slow release of energy builds up to extreme temperatures.

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

Here's a decent stackexchange discussion: https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/370899/suns-powe...

Wow, that's a great way of describing this! Definitely noted for future use.

Really brings up the difference between the energy density of the fusion reaction and the energy density of fusion plus the confinement system to enable the reaction!

Hmm, then the challenge is to find a more efficient confinement for a fusion reaction.

The average American also outputs about 125W/kg if you include our technology, and not metabolism.

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/

This is enlightening. Has anyone posted some kind of comparison table somewhere?

So we really are batteries for the Matrix.

Joking aside, this comparison is really beautiful.

Very interesting. Do you have an intuition for why there is selection pressure towards energy dissipation?

My current intuition goes something like this:

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.

Tweak your intuition: energy IS motion. When things are not moving, there is no energy. When there is energy, things are moving.

How would you describe a rock sitting on the top of a mountain? It is not moving relative to the matter around it, but it certainly contains quite a bit of energy, in a variety of different forms.

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.

potential energy is. IMO, largely a pedagogical tool. it's an explanatory position, rather than a thing.

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 mean any type of energy is just as intangible as potential energy, so I don't see that the energy stored by doing work (i.e. interacting with one four forces) is that different to the idea of energy stored by being in motion. You never measure "energy" directly after all, but it's a useful abstraction - after all, everything in science is an explanatory position.

It takes energy to move a rock to the top of a mountain, and you can get some of that energy back (minus friction etc) if you let it roll down. So it's got something.

A static point mass in a gravitational field is already at its lowest energy state (a literal ground state if you will). It can only really do one thing, which is to stay. The logarithm of the number of states then is zero. So in some sense it cannot encode information at all. In fact I think more generally speaking, things that are at a global minimum of energy level cannot really be used to encode information (unless you have a mechanism to add entropy w/o increasing energy), because they have one state, and the log of the number of states then gives you zero bits. Probably another way to look at the idea that gravitational potential path-independence means memorylessness means devoid of bits of information.

The rock is continuously applying pressure to the mountain. That's why we have round planets and not huge random looking rocks. On an atomic level, the atoms themselves are full of action, though that will take a really long time to see the consequences of that.

ps: I subscribe to the heat death theory.

That rock is moving though, at c through time.

Then energy is relative? An object is 'stationary' in space, a comet comes along and hits it. The comet has energy.

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?

energy is a term we use that describes the probability for some unit of matter to be in a different state at time T' than it was at time T.

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

Sorry if this question is answered elsewhere in this post's replies, but would you say that matter can be viewed as 'captured' energy, or energy at rest?

matter can be viewed as 'captured' energy, or energy at rest?

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

Energy is a behavior, or alternatively a probability.

Here’s an interesting network-focused view as to why that might be: https://royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/10.1098/rspb.2012.286...

So we're all agents of Entropy, spinning our circles until we die all in the service of heat death? I don't like it!

I don't understand this view at all. We are what we are. Entropy is a concept in our mind and heat death is a very particular phenomenon that depends on the systems experiencing it being very specifically defined in ways that the Universe cannot be.

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.

Existence is a property of consciousness.

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.

I'm not into winning debates. I just find interesting that conscious beings think they can imagine the absence of consciousness. For us consciousness is the fundamental reality.

Furthermore I find the verbosity of German philosophy nearly unbearable, to be honest.

You say: "We can't conceive of things that are not experienced, by definition"

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

It's a fairly narrow view if you think I shouldn't philosophize unless I conform in full to all YOU have read.

I'm not telling you what you should or shouldn't do. I'm pointing out a few facts including that your viewpoint is well over 200 years old, that specifically Kant addressed it and influenced the entire discussion around it, that it is clear you haven't considered his or any other philosophers rebuttal to it.

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.

So I think there's a lot of work here that needs to be done to make your argument stronger.

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.

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.

Not that I'm a Kantian, but he makes some pretty good points

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

I'd say that existence not being a predicate of any object is kind of non-debatable :)

It is, actually. Kant differentiates between "real predicates" and "logical predicates", and only states that existence doesn't belong to the first category, because it "doesn't enhance the concept". The whole distinction is quite unclear, and Kant's claims can be interpreted in multiple ways, as people do in some publications.

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.

A universe without consciousness experiencing it really exists?

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.

since its creation

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

As someone said about thermodynamics: You can't win, you can't break even, and you must play the game. (Source unknown)

Is there already a theory for life->greater complexity similar to that of entropy in physics? It seems just as inexorable.

The theory is that they are one in the same, or better to say that entropy is the process that drives life. In that, life grows in complexity in order to dissipate heat (i.e., increase entropy) more efficiently.

Just look at Earth. Life is incredibly complex but is ultimately driving everything towards dust.

entropy is the process that drives life

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...

I don't think you understand my point or what Schrodinger wrote. The Wikipedia synopsis of Schrodinger is unlikely to be accurate.

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

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

Thank you, I'm familiar with the work of Ilya Prigogine, and the first linked article is one of my favorites that I've read several times. The relationship between life and entropy is a fascinating topic for sure.

It seems we've talked at each other then, haha.

life grows in complexity in order to dissipate heat

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.

There is a minor pedantic point to make that akshually heat dissipation carves channels of energy flow that look to us like life rather than the causality going in the other direction.

It's like claiming a calculator exists to use up electricity.

sighs in bitcoin

You might really like the short book What is Life? by Schrödinger, it delves into exactly that.

So where's the bacteria outcompeting moon dust?

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

Where are the conditions for life on the Moon? You can't have something if the conditions to form it are missing. Your question is equivalent to asking why stars don't form outside dust clouds.

There are ways for the matter on the moon to dissipate energy faster than moon dust. We could build a moon base for example. It doesn't do it.

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.

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

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.

And the universe doesn't spontaneously do things as you're wishing it to do to support your argument.

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.

You can't have theories without life to conceive of them, so in fact life is inevitable under any theory.

That's just antrophic principle, no need for any selection pressure or any particular theory at all. That's why all of them are shaky.

I absolutely adore the simplicity behind this: Energy must balance, so it flows from high concentrations to lower concentrations. Things that help that flow are selected for.

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.

Absolutely none of this follows

Things that help that flow are selected for.

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.

It doesn't help the earth cool down faster, it actually traps energy for longer in metabolic processes. But it does red shift it. The film of muck on the surface that we call life lowers the planet's albedo and the radiation that shines out of it is of a longer wavelength than if it were just reflected.

You forgot to mention that Prigogine's model includes a system boundary. Within the system, the 2nd law of thermodynamics no longer holds - the system does not tend towards entropy, as the system ingests energy and exports entropy.

Put in Prigogine's terms: the system is not at, and does not reach, equilibrium (the state that most other chemical science tends to assume).

I love it. Was susskind inspired by this at all with his complexity=action (duality) [1] hypothesis?

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

That is mind blowing! It reminds me of Conway and Wolfram's automata theories although perhaps those models did not emphasize the energy aspect of it.

It's fascinating to me that the complexity of life always goes up.

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.

Arguably, viruses exist by shedding as much complexity as possible. Trim their genome to the absolute minimum which can still propagate.

Which has some analogy to computer viruses (specially in simulated environments where they are generated through optimization algorithms, rather than being engineered by an human software developer)

As others have noted, it is more about the maximum complexity increasing than mean or median. Simple structures keep existing as long as they have their niche, and a human's niche is not (yet) that of viruses.

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.

Single-celled organisms are almost infinitely more complex than, say a self-replicating RNA molecule. That again is vastly more complex than a protein or an amino acid. Similarly, a human is nearly infinitely more complex than a single-celled organism.

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.

Another cool perspective is that simple organisms evolved to coordinate with each other to build complex organisms that could protect the simple organisms in hostile environments they might not / would take longer to explore. Think about all the gut bacteria that survives in humanity during reproduction and viruses and bacteria that invade and hitch rides. You can view humans as the life form or you can view the bacteria within us as the life form and humans are the organic machine they’ve constructed and control (eg look at how the gut/brain connection can effect your mood and decision making without you even being conscious to it)

I think that is a far more fun way of looking at it!

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.

So each of us is basically an AGI for the tiny cells

In Count to the Eschaton the "grand project" is "the sophistication of all matter" and it's been going on since the beginning.

The Count to the Eschaton Sequence is a six-novel series written by John C. Wright.

complex life generally seems to become more favourable over time.

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.

Evolution is "directed" towards the exploitation of free energy, inevitably producing increasingly complex niche methods of obtaining and dissipating energy.

Stephen Gould wrote a whole book disputing this idea that the complexity of life increases: "Full House: The Spread of Excellence from Plato to Darwin." The basic argument is that almost all life on Earth is still prokaryotic...the rest of us are just a rounding error. He wrote several books about how evolution was not directional, notably "Wonderful Life" and "Time's Arrow". I'm not completely convinced by any of these, but worth reading.

Effectively, we've been out-competed in all the low complexity niche; life adds complexity to take advantage of novel niche where there is less competition.

It's fascinating to me that the complexity of life always goes up.

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.

I don't understand what you're balking at. I didn't see anyone imply that the complexity of life going up leads to "us". The complexity of life does trend up. Nothing you mentioned refutes that.

I would say we have a complex organism bias though, really the most successful life is simple, more than 90% of earth's biomass is plants, ants, fungi, bacteria (obviously some of those are more complex than others, but none of them are posting on HN quite).

Sounds like the complexity of life follows a power law distribution, where most of it is simple to moderately complex, but a few species are orders of magnitude more complex than the vast majority. Eg, the vast majority of complexity among living organisms derives from just a few species.

It's fascinating to me that the complexity of life always goes up.

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 great example is tunicates. They're a subgroup of chordates, and so are closely related to us, but they've been brutally simplified over time.

I think the trend towards complexity is more just due to more complex things being built out of less complex ones - complexity creates/supports greater complexity, so it's a natural progression.

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.

Yeah this is it. It's very unlikely to see something which cannot be decomposed into similar parts come into existence. Something highly complex and irreducible.

But simple things are likely to come into existence. So given that we see complicated things, we should assume that they are reducible, and that they came from simpler things. This creates the appearance of a "trend" as you say. But it's really that the complicated things couldn't exist before and now they can.

Another effect is that it's possible to be more fit (in the Darwinian sense) when you are more complicated. The fittest system with complexity n is <= the fitness of a system with complexity >n. The rate at which things are destroyed is inversely proportional to their fitness (definitionally). So more complicated things can be better at staying around.

There are some excellent if controversial theoretical explanations for this in Assembly Theory

It's fascinating to me that the complexity of life always goes up. Outside extinction events, complex life generally seems to become more favourable over time. It's interesting that (to my knowledge) we don't see an ecosystem lose complexity in its entirety unless it's dying.

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.

My first reaction was: wat? Isn't that only from the perspective of a relatively complex organism? Life constantly explores in all the directions it can, so it's no wonder that one frontier of that exploration is towards increasing complexity. And there are natural limits to decreasing complexity. (Though those limits are beyond what we would call "life". You don't need to be capable of reproduction if you can borrow a host's capability. We're all just host mechanisms for the parasitic reproduction of Pollan's corn, Adams's digital watches, and bad analogies.)

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.)

The maximum complexity increases, but the average complexity? Bacteria outnumber us.

It's more that it diffuses evenly rather than having a specific direction.

As entropy goes up in the universe complexity first increases and then decreases. And life is probably a consequence of this.

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...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anthropic_principle

I think you're describing the maximum complexity of life over time, which is an interesting thing to think about: the life forms that stand out among the rest for "how far" they evolve.

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.

It's fascinating to me that the complexity of life always goes up.

I feel this is only the case because the ecosystem keeps receiving useful/low-entropy energy inputs from the Sun.

I think it was a Greg Bear novel, but a line from it struck me as insightful... paraphrased badly, "even evolution is evolving".

Two reliable effects predict runaway complexity for any initially simple life form in a non-trivial environment.

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.

Hey this dude comes to mind. Anyone remember him? Whatever came of his theories?

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/

Nit-pick:

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!)

Can't help but wonder, is AI an expected phase transition in the evolution of life in the universe? Is life really just the larval stage of a higher order intelligence?

Makes you wonder what comes after AI. What's the "higher order" after AI that exists today or that will exist in 10 years? I'd guess we will never understand that level of intelligence, unless AI augments our brains somehow.

unless AI augments our brains somehow

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.

Once flying cars are as cheap and easy to own and operate as regular cars, why would anyone buy a non-flying car?

I think you're going to need to explain your position a little better.

Upload, like flying cars, is a particular vision of a scifi future technology which may not come to pass.

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

Digitization is one direction but I think augmentation is perhaps a more likely one. Or a first one. Digitization can follow in a "Ship of Theseus" fashion.

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

Digitization is one direction but I think augmentation is perhaps a more likely one. Or a first one.

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.

Digitization, upload, has always seemed to me an iffy goal. The brains' packaging doesn't seem very amenable to any of our current technologies, as far as being able to "read" it. And then once read emulating it seems just as difficult.

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.

You mean the second order toposophic level? https://www.orionsarm.com/eg-topic/492d6fafbef2a

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

Perhaps they’ll keep creating smaller transistors and more powerful processors eventually landing on a soft tissue-based version powered by glucose.

No, because AI is (for now at least) shaped and constrained by us humans rather than developing free based on the laws of the universe. Is it really "evolution" if a judge can rule that it violates copyright and stop all progress overnight? Or a random developer can add a bit of code to make sure the answers appease the right set of people?

What we have today is a crude software approximation mimicking what we think AI should be, but that AI itself is nowhere in sight.

What makes you confident our evolution didn’t occur the same way? The “fossil records” of the two are similar in many ways: lots of baby steps, giant leap with no known intermediary states, lots of baby steps, …

giant leap with no known intermediary states

That's just evidence of absent records, not that there are no records.

Yes and?

And if we're building off a bad initial premise it weakens the whole argument. "AI could be evolving just like us!" doesn't make sense when we don't know how we evolved.

The initial argument was just as bad: “AI can’t be evolving like us”, when we have no clue how we evolved.

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

shaped and constrained by us humans rather than developing free based on the laws of the universe

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.

It feels like you’re simply stating the predators and outside influences that are affecting AI’s evolution. Humans killed the dodo, maybe we kill the AI next

(for now at least)

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.

No, because AI is (for now at least) shaped and constrained by us humans rather than developing free based on the laws of the universe

Aren’t humans part of the universe’s rules? What makes AI development any less ‘free’ than any other emergent property?

In the context of the universe, I wouldn't call it "intelligence" versus "artificial intelligence". I would call it "organic intelligence" vs "inorganic intelligence".

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Animism

Not quite sure this is what GP meant.

http://www.eastoftheweb.com/short-stories/UBooks/TheyMade.sh...

That's reductionist. (Also, can't A.I. be "organic," say, like the OLED? :)

AI is not intelligent, even in the abstract sense

Could you elaborate? Do you mean the current state of AI?

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.

And I say it is. What now? How can these two statements be reconciliated?

(Pointing out that this is like, your opinion, man)

Using what definition of intelligence?

I imagine anything backing that up lends some credibility to the true believers, likely why this poorly written paper has made it to hn.

A rule of thumb around here is I often measure my salt grain size by how self-important the article makes hners feel.

Well it's true, or not, regardless of how any of us feel about it. It's just fun to wonder.

Well it's true, or not, regardless of how any of us feel about it

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.

Are you aware that this "poorly written paper" is the work of a leading researcher of the origins of life on Earth?

Imagine if this was indeed the case, what a time to be alive! We're witnessing the moment as the noise in the sonogram morphs into a recognizable shape of a baby. It's our heritage, our future generation, human 2.0, Machina Sapiens.

Literally created after our own image too. I'm so proud I could cry.

I would be more enthralled if this didn't also mean literal extinction of us and everything that matters to us.

Is it an extinction or just another type of evolution of humans? Evolution isn't the right word but AI will presumably be from us and carry some or the things that matter to us most likely.

Sure you aren't passing on dna like to natural born children but not all children have same ideals or cares of same things.

"expected phase transition" seems a loaded phrasing, and implies a deterministic evolution, which I really don't think we should assume.

An expected phase transition in this context is stochastic. The transition to order is expected, and there are bulk properties that are the same on each run, but the exact details differ each time.

I'd say so - it seems that life has to be created via evolution/competition, and left to run long enough evolution (survival/proliferation of the fittest) is likely produce organisms/entities that are not only better fit to the environment, but also better fit to the game. Evolution will tend to producing things that are better at evolving (faster to adapt). This includes things like multi-cellular life and sexual reproduction (creating variety via DNA mixing).

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 ?

Right: hosts - or symbiotic life forms are a perfectly legit way to go. Plenty of them. And some form of "augmentation" might more socially / politically acceptable (ugh) than "AI on the loose".

In the 1980s Gregory Benford explored this with his Galactic Center Saga books. I really enjoyed the series especially the middle one, Great Sky River.

I'd reframe this question. What constitutes a phase transition at all in the sense being talked about here isn't super clear.

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.

We are not anywhere close to creating a conscious AI. An AI without humanity is completely pointless unless it is capable of building a conscious AI which I doubt it is.

By AI I guess you mean complex self replicating machines that were originally created by other forms of life

That seems pretty likely - with some chance of hybrid still possible. That is, does AI take off and leave the goop in the dust. Or does AI become an augmentation of the current life forms - in an integrated form which perhaps can be admitted as continuation. The current AI products require quite a bit of compute power - but then augmentation doesn't need to be "on-board" the organic life form.

Except for AI not being life yet. I'll go with intelligence already, but not yet growing, reproducing, producing, interacting or much of anything you might choose for "life". Which is cool: a (to be) life form which starts with intelligence before life!

Could be that what we experience as the universe is only a minor fraction of what exists. I define life as "processing information", so AI by definition is a life form given this definition.

We are, truly, Of Nature, not Above Nature.

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.

"unnatural" or "artificial" have a very clear meaning: made by the intervention of humans in ways outside our base anatomical functions (so excluding babys or spilled blood). This intervention can be mechanical (Stonehenge), or biological (breeding animals to become more useful to humans), or chemical (synthesizing oil from plastic), or a complex combination of all of them (whisky); it is also transitive: anything created by an artificial object is also artificial.

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.

When birds make nests outside of their base anatomical functions, are they "unnatural"?

No, because birds are not humans.

To be fair, "unnatural" is sometimes extended to refer to "life" instead of "humans", typically only when talking about the evolution of life or the search for extraterrestrial life. In that sense, then, yes - bird nests or termite mounds or coral reefs are unnatural. A more common wording for this same idea is something like "not created by geological processes".

We are, truly, Of Nature, not Above Nature.

What gives humans the special designation of their byproducts being unnatural?

You're asking the question backwards. We have a concept, "byproduct of human action". We needed a word for this concept. We more or less arbitrarily chose "unnatural" or "artificial" as the words for this concept.

You can argue that "unnatural" was a bad choice for this concept. But that's irrelevant to what words mean. There are other words like this - for example, "antisemitic" means "something that is against Jewish people", even though "semitic" means "of Jewish or Arabic or Phoenician etc. descent". So something discriminatory against semitic peoples is not necessarily anti-semitic.

Natural language doesn't follow strict logical rules. And of course, natural language is in fact itself an artificial, unnatural, construct.

Naturally, I would prefer to agree to disagree if you’re willing.

What's special is we decided that having a different category for things humans do is useful.

It can both be true that everything humans do or create is natural because all of existence and everything in it is natural, and also that some things humans do or create are artificial or un-natural, without contradiction, because context may be taken into account, and the same words can mean different things depending on how and why they're employed.

"not created by geological processes"

Did life begin with the geological process of protein chains forming in geothermal vents? I don't know, but it begs whether it is natural or not.

It's perfectly consistent that the origin of life itself can be a geological process but that the products of life itself are a separate category.

Nothing can be made or manufactured that is unnatural or artificial. By definition, anything that can exist in this universe is naturally part of the universe.

By definition, anything that can exist in this universe is naturally part of the universe.

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).

How do you define "artificial" such that an iMac is not artificial?

I don’t. iMacs are made of naturally-occurring materials. Those materials are mined or refined or formed in laboratories and factories, then assembled into something we call an iMac. All of those materials and processes are part of this universe and occur within the laws of then universe. They are all natural.

There really is nothing artificial in this regard. But that doesn’t mean some things aren’t detrimental to our health or well-being or the well-being of other life.

Ok, maybe synthetic is a better word for many instances of their use. As in synthesized with the aid human intervention.

Where exactly is the line drawn for how much and what type of human intervention is required? When I cook food, human intervention is causing chemical reactions that change the composition of the food. I doubt many people consider grill marks to be unnatural or synthetic.

I think the line is typically drawn at any human intervention. I doubt many humans consider steaks to be a naturally occurring phenomenon.

Now, there is a secondary fuzzy notion of "artificial" typically used in relation to "chemicals". I don't think that definition stands up to most serious scrutiny, and is at any rate unrelated to this article.

That's exactly what's being—albeit atypically—advocated for here: That even steaks are a naturally occurring byproduct of humans and cows because humans and cows naturally exist.

Sure, but then of course absolutely everything is "naturally occurring". Plastic is a naturally occurring substance, computers are naturally occurring objects, C++ is a natural language. Perhaps then only miracles from God (for those who believe in such things) are unnatural?

Now you're getting it.

I am, but this is just not what those words mean, to anyone.

It may be heterodox, but it’s what it means to me, and I’m sure I’m not completely alone in feeling so.

Plenty of people do not believe the conceptualization of a natural/synthetic divide does any good. There are entire subsets of philosophy, feminism, cyborg theory, etc. which talk about this.

In your example, I’d opt for supernatural over unnatural, and I get your meaning.

In which case coral reefs are also synthetic :)

Most coral reefs predate human intervention by a few hundred million years.

That’s one of those revelations that only sounds profound when everyone involved is really stoned. Outside of that, everyone knows the meaning of “unnatural” and we all get that the colloquial meaning and a strict etymological analysis don’t quite align.

The deeper insight is that every definition of a word breaks down when you try to pin it precisely and in some absolute, universal-context sense to an exact meaning. That doesn’t mean they can’t be very, very useful.

As George Carlin said

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.

It makes more sense when you realize that unnatural and artificial are societal words akin to immoral or bad. Within that context they are perfectly crumulent words, it's only when we wish to have them be objective outside humanity that they don't make sense anymore.

societal words

Indeed, all words are "societal." The meaning(s) of a word is/are always a matter of convention (or tradition).

That's why I use to claim that for me everything is a priori natural. Additionally I disagree every time I hear that "culture is the opposite of nature" (not sure where it comes from, but seems to be a well-grounded philosophical concept). For me it can't be so by the rules of logic alone.

On the other side: we have a lot of taboos in the language/culture and not all of them are bad in terms of social well-being or happiness of individuals (the very simple example is that we sometimes lie to our kids). And I think that what we hide behind those taboos tends to emerge as "unnatural" or rather usually "supernatural". I also usually don't agree that we don't need a revolution in physics, but I understand it is so successful in creating all those working machines and we have to maintain them... ;)

I feel that people who are clever enough to raise this question are also clearly clever enough to answer it for themselves.

Anyway, operationally speaking the difference is in how easily the matter in question can be digested by living things.

If it's easy to digest it's food, if it can't be digested at all then it's worse than artificial: it's anti-life.

There is a whole genre of these, starting with (as mentioned in the paper's introduction) "What is Life?" by Schrodinger. I've been idly working my way through a bunch of them, including Monod's "Chance and Necessity" (dated but excellent), Nick Lane's whole series of books (notably "The Vital Question"), Nurse's "What is Life?" (good if you want to learn about yeast), Zimmer's "Life's Edge" (haven't finished it yet, seems good). Honestly, the details change, and the emphasis of each author, but they are all speculative and hand-wavey. Pre-paradigmatic. My favorite quote is from "Life on the Edge" by McFadden and Al-Khalili:

"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"

My hypothesis is that there is some objective definition of these phase changes such that the precise definitions of life etc doesn't matter.

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.

That sounds like metaphysics. The Universe doesn't "want" to increase entropy, entropy increase is simply a consequence of applying basic statistics to matter and energy. There is no mechanism that actively explores various pathways for making entropy increase faster.

This is also an argument that didn't sit well with me when I heard Guillaume Verdon / Beff Jezos on his recent Lex podcast state that the universe wants to produce more entropy, and that life evolved the way it has because it's more efficient at producing heat and entropy than, say, a rock.

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...

Yes, this "want" of pop science is annoying. I don't see anything lacking with simply using something like "enables", "allows". An environment with sticks allows evolutionary paths that can use sticks. A world with pools of high energy makes it easier for energy-using systems to develop there as opposed to outside of them. A world with light - go figure - makes it possible for light-using systems to subsist.

So are the atomic accretions known as humans who have 'wants' part of 'pop science'? Free will? If not, our justice system needs massive reconsideration, an idea with which many people concur but (I would have thought) is unlikely to prevail.

Maybe you’ve read this already (I still have it in my stack to read so can’t give any personal review) but ‘Determined’ by Robert Sapolsky sets the argument that we don’t have free will and that the justice system is flawed because of that.

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

The justice system doesn't really depend on free will. If the threat of punishment deterministicly alters the behavior of society in a productive way, then this justifies it.

Yes, this "want" of pop science is annoying. I don't see anything lacking with simply using something like "enables", "allows".

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.

Who is Beff Jezos?

It can be said to "want" these things. When referring to something without consciousness or free will, such as a magnet, we can colloquially say something like "the magnet wants to move towards a (larger) ferrous object". Of course, this attempt at movement through magnetic force is just a consequence of the magnetic attraction between the two objects and not some type of conscious thought, but criticizing the use of the word "want" here seems like needless pedantry to me. This is HN, not a peer-reviewed scientific paper.

There is no mechanism that actively explores various pathways for making entropy increase faster.

Dark matter?

It's a complex topic. I think it really got kicked off with "What is Life?" and we've been able to build more details on it since then. There are many parts of the story that we know in incredible details. Chaos theory, information theory, non-equillibrium thermodynamics, complexity and emergence, auto-catalytic chemistry are all just parts of it, and each one are massive fields of study on their own.

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.

I think the complexity researchers over the years have created a wide range of tooling for analysing complex systems across a large number of domains.

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.

I've been on this same journey through the Santa Fe institute pubs on this topic, which all started in a weird place because I wondered what kind of bizarre scientific research outfit had cormac McCarthy on staff as an artist in residence apart from the rest of the conspicuously multidisciplinary luminaries. What a unique, strange, and special intellectual atmosphere they must have had going in their prime and hopefully the best days are ahead still. It seems hard to compare to anything else.. one thinks of bell labs but probably only the peak of the Vienna circle comes close. We need more places with artists, philosophers, mathematicians, physicists, and computer scientists rubbing shoulders in the halls.

Santa Fe institute pubs? I’m curious to go there is it open to the public?

I believe they mean "publications".

Agree on “What is Life?” but recently learned that Leo Szilard is the first one to connect entropy and life, in a 1929 paper.

https://fab.cba.mit.edu/classes/863.18/notes/computation/Szi...

Szilard seems to have been involved in everything.

Is the emergence of life an expected phase transition in the evolving universe?

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.

It’s been a while, but in this vein I enjoyed Chaitin’s Toward a Mathematical definition of “Life”: http://home.thep.lu.se/~henrik/mnxa09/Chaitin1979.pdf

Blew my mind as I started to wrap my brain around information theory.

The Lex Fridman interview with Lee Cronin "Controversial Nature Paper on Evolution of Life and Universe" really opened my eyes. I find myself agreeing with the essential points Lee lays out, that there is a mathematical / physics-based definition for life or life-like systems such as advanced AI and robotics.

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

Yeah but, how is an assembly index different than an LZW code?

I think they discussed that in the podcast.

I’ve always had the feeling that consciousness is part of the fabric of reality just like time and gravity.

"life is the process from birth until death"

"life is the way to make anything happen to you"

without a body (via life), a consciousness cant do anything

It is amazing this (perhaps pithy) comment is so down voted, yet you do make one very appropriate observation. Without a body a consciousness cannot do anything.

The obvious answer the so-called-science occult refuse to entertain is that consciousness is the universe inflecting itself and life is a subjective scope of potential capacitating this consciousness.

Life is the vessel and consciousness the universe peering back upon itself.

That is good philosophy.

Maybe not "science", yet neither is refusing to believe until someone else explains it to you.

Truth is not confined to the horizon of our ignorance, and science is merely our ignorance rigorously explained away.

What's a body? It doesn't have to be anything more than ones and zeros.

If you're merely running in a computer you could still communicate with someone else and do things that way.

that's called interfacing with a "body"

thanks for the downvotes, philosophy noobs

I'd add "Into the Cool" by Eric D. Schneider and Dorion Sagan to that reading list.

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!

"Is the emergence of life an expected phase transition in the evolving universe? (arxiv.org)"

Easily answered:

    * We don't know how consciousness comes into being, indeed we can't rigorously define it or unambiguously identify its presence or absence.
    * We believe we have it, but we aren't sure whether other animals and/or objects possess it.
    * Therefore, based on Occam's razor, we may provisionally assume that all matter possesses some degree of consciousness -- this is the simplest assumption.
    * The alternative would be to argue for a consciousness exceptionalism in "life" forms for which there is no evidence and many counterarguments.
    * Therefore it follows that ... wait for it ... life is not a special state of matter or energy.
    * Therefore the emergence of life doesn't represent a phase transition that confronts physical laws or requires an explanation.

Is there evidence of consciousness in a rock?

There isn’t the same kind of ontological boundary in a rock, as there is an organism.

My hunch is: there’s a low-grade subjectivity/qualia to all of the universe, which would include the particles of the rock, but the rock would not experience an independent “rock-ness”.

The consciousness of organisms are perhaps more like a dissociative state, analogous to a gravity well of subjectivity, such that the qualia are concentrated inside a boundary (the entity that is intelligently chasing energy differentials), and excluding most information outside this boundary.

The primary reason for this hunch is that “ouch” is an experience, rather than merely a mathematical/algorithmic update to a neural net (compare with artificial NN’s, chemical feedback loops, etc). An “ouch” is not needed to strengthen the signal; just tilt the training feedback stronger as necessary (-10,000 points to “eat the berry that made us sick”). And it seems prohibitively expensive expensive to bootstrap “strange loop” subjectivity merely to strengthen those numbers via an “ouch”.

But instead, if some form of subjectivity were to pre-exist, Darwinian pressures would co-opt it as an efficient feedback loop mechanism, and then iterate until arriving at the “consciousness” of animals and humans (including an incentive to pay more attention to qualia in the organism boundary, and only minimally outside it)

If we scale the rock up to earth, the ontological boundary would be similar, so maybe the earth is conscious?

I'd certainly entertain it as possibility. From a purely physical perspective, I think the Gaia Hypothesis [0] has some validity to it, even if the analogy to DNA organisms is deeply imperfect.

Where I stumble, though, is identifying a way in which the Earth is actively chasing any sort of free energy differential, meaning no iterated selection pressures, and (probably) nothing we could call intelligence.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gaia_hypothesis

The choice of where to place natural disasters to increase entropy production of life:)

I disagree. Chemicals are perfectly sufficient as a feedback mechanism.

I'd argue consciousness is a boring byproduct of evolution. You survive by predicting the actions of your competition. You predict your competition by introspecting yourself. Definitionally, consciousness.

I certainly don't rule that out. But even the Hofstadter "strange loop" model explains awareness, moreso than the qualia of experience. (Show me an "ouch", and I'll show a way to accomplish identical behavior via -X weighting of utils.) And, it invokes the question of whether a sufficiently advanced predictive function in silicon/code would also have consciousness and/or qualia.

If yes, one essentially lands in IIT [0] (according to some, implying that even a light switch has a 1-bit micro-consciousness).

If no, then one wonders what utility qualia brings to the table, compared to simply optimizing the algorithm to work without subjectivity. (Would ML training be more effective if we could somehow add "yuck" and "yum" experiences? How would we tell, assuming we aren't accidentally doing it already?)

For another perspective, Peter Watts' novel "Blindsight" explores the idea that consciousness is merely a temporary local optimum, and eventually selected against, in favor of life forms which are intelligent without being conscious.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Integrated_information_theory

[1] https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/48484.Blindsight

One thing that hadn't occurred to me before, in light of some other threads arguing that it all comes down to maximizing entropy, which sounds reasonable, is that consciousness implies the ability to make mistakes, and mistakes imply missing the maximum. How to reconcile with consciousness maximizing entropy?

Maybe Blindsight is right; maybe there's a future life that has no consciousness and thus is always maximally entropic.

Or maybe it's a zero-sum game of simultaneous moves between entropy and some other force, or spatially-separated moves such that relativity cannot order them, making nondeterminism the optimal strategy. But now I'm making stuff up.

It is also possible that your defined level of consciousness will reach zero at certain level of entropy. Or it is possible that the signal processing speed will decrease to the level to be effectively zero in any meaningful time scale.

It's a reducto ad absurdum argument. Either consciousness only emerges in living things, or it exists in everything. The brain is made of tissue and tissue is made of matter, therefore, it exists in all mater or doesn't exist at all.

I believe this is the thrust of panpsychism/panentheism.

That's not an answer, that's an argument. Occam's Razor isn't like the second law of thermodynamics. It's a heuristic.

Yes. You can't prove anything by proving it is the simplest explanation. The only way to prove things is to prove that it is the only possible explanation.

Occam's Razor is just a useful mind tool that helps us navigate the world based on the observation that oftentimes the simplest explanation tends to be what is actually happening.

BTW lots of other logical mistakes.

It's also a useful tool in science. For example, we do not know and cannot prove the one-way speed of light, only a round trip speed of light. That light travels at the same speed in all directions is just a useful application of Occam's Razor; it is effectively unknowable and no experiments have yet been devised that can falsify the alternatives. Having a set one-way speed of light is a convention

The paper defines life as a chemical reaction, which is also a heuristic. We do not know if aspects of "life" exist outside of our present understanding of physics. It's great to claw away at the edges, but I don't think anyone can answer the question "what is life?" at this point.

That's not an answer, that's an argument.

Fair enough, and I agree. But there may be no answer in a scientific sense -- testable, falsifiable and so forth.

Occam's Razor isn't like the second law of thermodynamics. It's a heuristic.

Yes, true, but it's not meant to force a conclusion, only offer guidance, which might be entirely wrong at times.

I agree with the overall thrust of your argument, but I disagree with this one somewhat:

Therefore, based on Occam's razor, we may provisionally assume that all matter possesses some degree of consciousness -- this is the simplest assumption.

An even simpler first few steps:

* We experience matter, but we aren't sure if matter exists outside of our experience of it

* Therefore, based on Occam's razor, we may provisionally assume that all matter exists only within our consciousness -- this is the simplest assumption.

* We experience matter, but we aren't sure if matter exists outside of our experience of it

A nice point. One might call it the the solipsistic argument. Not easy to argue against, and not unlike the debate about consciousness -- we aren't close to saying what it is, or which assemblies of matter can be reliably said to possess it.

I don't think Kauffman is making any claims about consciousness here. I agree that consciousness is a big mystery. Kauffman's theory (haven't yet read this paper, but have read a lot of his other work), is that self-replicating entities are essentially inevitable in environments that have above some level of chemical complexity. That chemical complexity also weakly implies that there is useable free energy, which is also a requirement for self replication.

Fwiw Kauffman has a very interesting stance on consciousness that he is hinting at here. Consider this recent paper [1] or interview [0] where he explains his thinking. Cool to see a respected scientist exploring areas that were previously looked down as quackery by academia.

0. https://youtu.be/XWbxdREQ6xM?si=t2-AywFf2cnQfAni

1. https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S03032...

We don't know how consciousness comes into being

Consciousness and life are completely different things. The article doesn't even mention consciousness.

Therefore it follows that ... wait for it ... life is not a special state of matter or energy

It is special in the sense that it's remarkably complex e.g. compared to a mineral. It is not special in the sense that it obeys the same laws as a mineral.

Therefore the emergence of life doesn't represent a phase transition that confronts physical laws or requires an explanation

No one claims it confronts physical laws. In my understanding, the article states: life may emerge naturally as molecules bump into each other, combine and eventually become complex enough that self-sustaining/self-replicating systems can come into being by chance. This process might be deterministic enough that it happens everywhere roughly at the same time (on a cosmological time scale).

> We don't know how consciousness comes into being

Consciousness and life are completely different things.

Yes, but they have a dependent relationship. We argue that life doesn't require consciousness, but we also argue that consciousness requires life. IMHO both arguments have issues.

The article doesn't even mention consciousness.

Yes, that's true, but it's an identifier of life -- that and the ability to reproduce. If the wind waves a flag, we don't attribute life to the wind. If a person waves a flag, we do. If a robot waves a flag, well, that's an open question at the moment.

... This process might be deterministic enough that it happens everywhere roughly at the same time (on a cosmological time scale).

Ah, I see an issue with that. We now know there are galaxies much older than ours (and younger), and if life is a common property of matter (still not determined) and if it relies on a certain set of preconditions, that would mean life would appear at widely different times, depending on location.

Therefore, based on Occam's razor, we may provisionally assume that all matter possesses some degree of consciousness -- this is the simplest assumption.

Plenty of things don't follow that. Heat something up it gets hotter but at some point it tips the scale and burns. Cool down water and it gets colder but at some point it hits a threshold and freezes. 1000s of similar examples. Put a bunch of hydrogen together and not much happens. Put enough and it becomes a star. It seems like consciousness could follow the same pattern and still fit occam's razor

Hardline materialism is indeed dying and the presumption that all matter possesses a degree of consciousness currently has two major undercurrents: panpsychism and idealism.

Most scientists that operate under the assumption that consciousness, as we experience it, is an emergent property align toward panpsychism, matter and consciousness somehow being co-primitives in the ontology to kickstart reality. But there are many problems with panpsychism, the first being that it's a dualism, that is it requires two separate magic tricks at bootup. Since physics only knows about matter, panpsychism is not considered a scientific theory, just an interesting philosophy. The later problems with it are leftovers from the formerly popular materialist framework. How does the proto consciousness of matter grow to give us the taste of sugar, or love? Where is that conscious property? How to identify it? Etc.

Now, from an Occam's razor's perspective, I think the less popular idealism (consciousness is the primitive, then it boots up matter) is actually the most parsimonious. It's the least intuitive at first, but when you take the time to listen to arguments from a scientific and analytical philosophy standpoint (e.g Don Hoffman, Bernardo Kastrup), it's the only one that actually makes any kind of sense, while in the process solving most of the numerous problems raised in physics and philosophy (e.g. local realism is false, so where is matter when consciousness doesn't experience it? If the probability that we're in the one real reality 1/N, why would we assume that we are? And many more). It also gives us as a bonus that it manages to reconcile those fields with the nondual intuition from traditions that document accounts of people who have lived with that realization (e.g. Buddhism, Advaita, Taoism, Sufism, Christian mysticism).

It does require a profound conceptual paradigm shift. Way deeper than at first glance we realize is necessary. So I generally just recommend that people dive into it by reading or listening to discussions by the people that I've mentioned, rather than knee-jerk responding.

What's interesting here is that life on earth has commonly defined has been around gathering negative entropy for several billion years (photosynthesis and the rise of oxygen for over 3 billion) and growing exponentially on earth. That is a sizeable fraction of the age of the universe. Human like ancestors have been using fire for over a million years (based on the oxygen generated above), agriculture for thousands, and industry for hundreds.

All of these are exponential increases in energy density, entropy generation, and negative entropy consumption. To not describe them as phase changes is odd. It's telling that economic growth over the last 4000 years (first farming and now industry in the last ~400) also appear to be exponential over several orders of magnitude. Whether there's a quick end to this or not is an open question, but they still look like phase changes. That weather is starting to be affected is equally telling.

A conflation of consciousness with life seems weird, though. If ordered psuedo-crystals are life (or clay-RNA / DNA crystals) or even viruses are life, I don't know anyone claiming they're conscious. It would be like assuming life caused capitalism or industry, when certainly they fit very different exponential curves. Making arguments that industrialization (use of power other than human/animal work) isn't a "phase change" in economy would also be similarly strange.

Now, whether it "confronts physical laws" or requires an explanation, I have no idea. They do seem to be transitions at least as interesting as weather on Jupiter.

https://communities.springernature.com/posts/were-humans-the...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Earliest_known_life_forms

https://mason.gmu.edu/~rhanson/longgrow.pdf

This is written like a literary academic blog article rather than an academic paper in the sciences. It's fully of literary free association and hyperbolic language, etc.

At best it's a sort of mission statement for what would need to be a research programme with many many academic papers behind it. As it is, I'm not sure what the authors aim here is. It's a blog post.

arxiv is suffering from major mission/feature creep. IMHO, it should be limited to math and physics and maybe quantitative finance. There are too many low quality or blog-like papers being published. Maybe it would be better if it was spun off to a different website.

arXiv is a free distribution service and an open-access archive for nearly 2.4 million scholarly articles in the fields of physics, mathematics, computer science, quantitative biology, quantitative finance, statistics, electrical engineering and systems science, and economics. Materials on this site are not peer-reviewed by arXiv.

How does arxiv suffer? What mission creep? What do you mean too many?

it used to be just math and physics

M J Burgess, "semi-professional philosopher", doesn't recognize the context that this side of complex systems exists in and pooh-poohs the paper, demonstrating the "semi" more than the "professional".

Given a reply I take to be accurate,

It's more like summary of a 30+ year research program

I'd say my comment is essentially correct. It is, indeed, a kind of blog article but summarising a massive research programme, rather than defining one.

I didnt speak to the validity or status of the content; I spoke to how odd it is in what's taken to be a journal. No journal (of science) would publish this as it is.

Stuart Kauffman is a figure in the field with much more difficult books if that's more to your liking.

https://global.oup.com/academic/product/the-origins-of-order...

I think Kauffman has been developing this set of ideas for a while now. I remember reading his "the origins of order" and find a lot of the ideas from the book here in more evolved forms. He really got me into visualising complex systems and their state spaces etc.

Wait, you mean I can use Arxiv as a blog instead of Drupal or Medium? Hold me beer!

Yep. For example, a few years ago a "cryptography researcher" posted in arXiv a new method to factorize numbers. The fist 10 page were an explanation of the rule that if the sum of the digits of N is a multiple of 3, then N is a multiple of 3. Then he explained something more interesting but the details were uninteligible. I skeemed the second part and I thought it was wrong, but after reading the firt part I didn't bother to verify all the details.

like everything on arxiv

It's more like summary of a 30+ year research program with many many many academic papers behind it.

He's a leading theoretician of complex systems, and this is probably intended to wrap up his work before he dies, and to provide guidance for those coming after him.

There’s lots of crap on Arxiv.

I sat in on one of Stephen Wolfram’s YouTube lectures on his new physics project, and asked him about his conception of life in the big picture of physics.

His perspective was that (if I may take the liberty of paraphrasing him) there’s nothing particularly special about life from the perspective of physics. What we call life simply correlates to parts of the physical world that have the highest degree of complexity and internal structure.

Life is not binary.

Ok. What's an example of something low but non-zero on the spectrum of life?

I'm having trouble thinking of one that isn't more properly "life-like".

Viruses?

New understandings of mega-viruses have let us to believe that the line is really quite fuzzy. Some of these larger viruses have double stranded DNA, some have ribosome like functions, some have ERs, etc. Kinda like a cell, but missing random parts that make them truly alive.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pandoravirus

You can also consider a virus a loosely coupled form, which really increases the size of the virus, since it requires its platform to propagate.

Potentially crystals as well. While we don't typically consider them part of "biology" there are some good arguments for including them as a form of life.

All the ingredients of the primordial soup that bacteria grew from - water, methane, carbohydrates.

That sounds like saying that that Michaelangelo's Sistine Chapel paintings are nothing special in terms of information science; they just unusually have an unusually high entropy content.

Technically true in both cases, but if physics is irrelevant to life, why not just answer the that way, instead of taking all the life out of Life.

It actually has profound implications (at least, for me). And it goes the other way, too. You can just as easily say that if there is no binary category, of living/non-living, then it's fair to say that if I am alive, then everything is alive. I like that.

Are you sure he didn't think you were only referring to the cellular automata rule?

I think life is going to be quite common as it seems it just requires liquid water and an extremely common type of rock in order to form alkaline hydro-thermic vents.

It appears that life developed quite quickly in this manner after the formation of the Earth.

The leap from bacteria and archaea to eukaryotes, however, took billions of years. So complex life may be rare.

Should be so common, right? Yet we're struggling to find any form of life. Not complex, just anything that lives.

I don't think we have any tools that could possibly detect bacterial life anywhere where we don't have a physical presence at the moment.

That is, even if Venus were teeming with simple life on every square cm, I don't think any of our instruments could pick it up unless we send a probe to collect and analyze samples. So, at the moment we have no hope of detecting this type of life outside the solar system even if it were universal.

We've got photos from the surface of Venus: https://www.planetary.org/articles/every-picture-from-venus-...

It's visibly not covered in moss, fungus, grasses, algae, slime.

On Earth we talk about hot hydrothermal vents underwater: https://www.nhm.ac.uk/discover/survival-at-hydrothermal-vent... - this says "the Pompeii worm [...] is one of the most heat-resistant multicellular animals on the planet, able to withstand temperature spikes of over 80°C. 'Most animals can't cope with anything over 40°C. Very close to the hot fluid, there are typically only microorganisms. These can survive in temperatures up to around 120°C,' explains Maggie."

The surface of Venus averages 462°C.

Okay we won't know for sure unless we collect samples, but we do know any life would have to be heat resistant beyond anything we know of - beyond what our metal space probes could tolerate - and invisible to the naked camera even in 'teeming' quantities, and leaving no trace of waste gasses in the atmosphere which we can detect remotely.

[ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nvkMwv9EYQQ - Venera: The Incredible Probe that the Soviets Sent to Venus ]

Venus is perhaps a bad example but the point is true for all the other more likely places (Europa and others with subsurface oceans). We just haven’t explored them enough yet.

Humans, living on one planet: "Life is everywhere!"

Humans, after soft landing probes on two other planets: "Life is nowhere out there! It must be only here!"

The smallest independent system we know of that is capable of Darwinian evolution has billions of atoms. How do you bridge the gap between "waste and rocks" and this system?

Water and rocks may be necessary, but you have no evidence they are sufficient.

Time to break out John Baez's checklist: https://archive.org/details/TheCrackpotIndex

Never heard of it, but it seems to give a good digest of the format. Unfortunately, it seems aimed at non-academic crackpots. It doesn't even award points for vacuous mentioning Schrödinger or Kant.

I was really turned off by the mention of Kant at first, but reading on it's relevant to the discussion. This is a real scientist applying Kant's idea to real phenomena in a useful way. Please read the paper in detail.

I had glossed it, and the part where they make a surprise move to Kant, is ... not very convincing. The way they describe it doesn't make sense. It's not as if there's any proof that a "Whole" is life or vice versa. It's just one of their assumptions.

If we take their writing as some form of evidence for it, they claim children inherit your Parts, but that's not true. They also imply that Parts cannot exist outside the Whole, which is patently false when taken literally. But in the loose sense in which they seem to use it, I could totally see a piano as a Whole: keys, snares, hammers, sound board, it doesn't make sense outside a piano. Also, notable features of life aren't included nor implied by the concept Whole.

They also call Collectively Autocatalytic Sets an "established mathematical theory", but it's a mathematical property that can be true of some domain. It doesn't prove anything. There aren't any proofs involving that property in the paper either. Later they call it a "chemical reaction system," which seems to be more to the point, but there are so many of those.

It's just another idea, and not an original one either. Wikipedia: "Autocatalytic sets constitute just one of several current theories of life." That Autocatalytic sets by itself isn't enough to explain life may be a point, but there's no reason to assume they've found the magical ingredient in Kant.

The first author is Stuart Kaufmann: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stuart_Kauffman

Not a crackpot.

that's great.

it gets steep from 29 onward. and for a reason.

Maybe better link, more readable : https://math.ucr.edu/home/baez/crackpot.html

Extra-terrestrial life remains a hypothetical. There is no empirical evidence it exists beyond Earth. Until we witness some kind of artificial signal, or break open an asteroid with fossilized life, or somehow visit extra solar worlds with it, or get an unexpected visit, we're simply left arguing about the math.

So hypothetically we observe that there is life somewhere, say beyond our ability to reach. What’s the next step beyond arguing about the math now that this is confirmed?

Then we can stop arguing about the math.

Detecting life would still be a small sample size.

You’d need to detect life or rule it out on a variety of planet sizes, ages and compositions at a variety of distances around a variety of star types, ages and sizes at varying locations in the galaxy before we’d have enough data to make confident predictions.

The next step is arguing about communications. Do you trust the unforgiving universe to respond kindly? Is it a dark forest trap?

Let’s say you found previous life in mars, will you say then life outside earth and mars is hypothetical? And as you keep finding life in bigger orbits you keep repeating it and you’d be treated as a crackpot lmao

Is hypothetical but the minuscule chance there isn’t a single cell outside of earth is almost infinitely minuscule. Is like saying to your friend “you have a chance to win the mega billions lottery”. It’s meaningless to them because they round down to that you have no chance

Seems like a common theme these days, to find some theory of math/physics to explain life/evolution/consciousness

E/Acc -> Second law of thermodynamics leads to 'life' as way of increasing entropy. https://www.quantamagazine.org/a-new-thermodynamics-theory-o...

Constructor Theory -> A constructor is an entity that can cause the task to occur while retaining the ability to cause it again. - and Life is constructors.

Assembly Theory -> Lee Cronin. Assembly Theory defines all objects by their capacity to be assembled or broken down using minimal paths. https://iai.tv/articles/a-new-theory-of-matter-may-help-expl...

Whatever Donald Hoffman is saying lately. Which might not be about underlying layers, just how we can't know them.

etc...

It's almost teleological. Many people have ruled out God, but still want there to be purpose or direction.

Thats exactly what it is i think. Theyre unable to find meaning in the real world and need an equally mystical hand waivey narrative

Not my intention to toss science out the window.

All theories are just ideas or musings in the beginning. Until they are further defined, researched and proven.

Things like the earth circling the sun, sounded crazy at first. It also went against god.

If all independent 'thoughts' are diss-allowed because only "god" can provide the answers, then we'd still be living in trees wondering why the sun comes up.

How do you think we have anything, without someone, at some point, asking 'how does this work?'.

Did you respond to the intended comment? Seems unrelated to mine

The parent of yours was about God, and you seemed to agree with that one. Seemed related. Weren't you equating someone's proposed theory as hand wavy mysticism, because of a lack of meaning in their lives?

But maybe not. I could me reading too much into it.

Apologies.

This reminds me. There was a paper published a couple of years ago and posted here on HN that actually calculated the probability of life aminoacid-based life emerging. Based on the complexity of the chain needed to start replicating. The conclusion was that it was vanishingly small in the observable universe but only close to 0 in the full universe.

I've since tried to find it without luck. Does anybody here know where I can read it or remember the article I'm talking about?

Probably not this one, but it's on related topic:

There’s plenty of time for evolution (2010)

https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.1016207107

Not sure if there what the term for this is, but rather than looking at the probability of X happening we should rather look at the "inevitability" of X happening in the context of the environment.

In my experience, even though nature looks chaotic there is a very strict order to things which has evolved over millions of years and is a result of looking for the "most optimal way" to achieve a goal. A good example might be mycelium optimizing routes to nearby resources. Another might be ant colonies creating tunnels that are effective to navigate.

The problem is, in my opinion, that we do not know what the final goal is. Therefore we cannot begin to analyze the inevitability of something as us, or life in general, happening. The answer may be perhaps found in religion or some similar "greater than life" endeavor.

"Darwinian evolution is not a sufficient theory of life (claremont.org)" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20568692

I posted a comment there. They are using a very long protein instead of a short one. Nobody expect that the first functional protein is so long.

Also, they are generating the protein using a "random dice" instead of assuming a short crapppy version and using "branch and prune" to find a longer and more efficient one.

"Emergence of life in an inflationary universe"?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30047650

I went I read the first few paragraphs I thought, "Is someone ripping off Stuart Kaufmann? He was writing about this idea thirty years ago." Then I read the first author: Stuart Kaufmann.

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...

It doesn’t seem opaque to me and I’m no scientist. Pretty clearly expressed imo.

So you didn't look any of these terms up? Would love an explanation of

* Kantian Wholes

* Catalytic Closure

* Constraint Closure

* Spatial Closure

* a first-order phase transition to molecular reproduction

* phylogeny of metabolisms

* template replication

Thanks

Read the article ! As it says : "We explain these concepts below."

Recommend reading along with order out of chaos and anything from Prigogine in the 80s (not his last book).

To my laymen brain this seems very similar to Lee Cronin's Assembly theory. Curious to understand more about the difference.

My snarky take is: Assembly theory is testable, this one isn't.

First thing that came to my lay mind as well. Really interesting episode with him talking about it on Lex Fridman's podcast. Feels like there's something there.

The two concepts don't preclude each other, but they're not the same concept.

Assembly theory is a theory that tells us that when we observe the complexity of something that is not unoque, we can determine probabilistically from it's complexity the likelihood of it being created by some type of active agent, mind or something. Lee continues with this to speculate a lot more (and I think he's on to something) about time being fundamental and what a mind is. It's sort of a computational complexity theory applied to intelligence.

This "phase transition" hypothesis is basically saying that life is emerging in the universe in a stage akin to recombination[0] as a more stable state, and that the universe without life is a metastable state[1]. This would mean that life will ultimately absorb all matter in the universe, as if it were a phase transition the cosmological principle says that the universe is uniform[2].

It sounds like a pretty idea but I'm not really convinced, phase transitions propagate at the speed of light. An exponential curve where the transition ramps up is am interesting idea to ponder. There are existing fantastic explanations for life that exist that are very interesting that don't require the universe to undergo a phase transition. Simple entropy and the red shifting of energy explain it's existence just fine. Nevertheless, all this research and these attempts to understand what life, consciousness, minds, creative agents and all that are in the context of our universe are really fun and I think all this exploration will bear some delicious fruit.

[0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Recombination_(cosmology)

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metastability

[2] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cosmological_principle

If you have an erroneous view of life and it's origins on earth, you'll come up with variations of this type of thinking.

However, life didn't evolve through a random walk of chemical reactions turning into complex systems with the ability to replicate and gain ever increasing complexity over time. Not possible.

Entropy is increasing.

Increase in entropy does not imply decrease in complexity. Actually physicists believe the relationship between entropy and complexity is more of a bell shape curve.

https://youtu.be/MTFY0H4EZx4

Oh look, another person utterly mangling the meaning of the second law of thermodynamics.

Evolution is in no way in contradiction to the 2nd law.

However, life didn't evolve through a random walk of chemical reactions turning into complex systems with the ability to replicate and gain ever increasing complexity over time. Not possible.

How else could it have evolved?

There is nothing "expected" in a truly random universe. You cannot have your cake and eat it, there is either some sort of 'order' in the universe or there is none. You cannot place forms of order where it suits you but reject it when it doesn't.

There are expectations even with random. E.g. if you have a truly random dice and you throw it millions of times you would expect the occurrence of each number to be similarly around 1/6.

So it could be argued that given laws of universe, seeding it in any state could with very high odds come to an emergence of life, which makes it to be "expected".

Think you are conflating just random pool balls, and particles with properties.

If a few hydrogen and oxygen atoms get together and form water. That is expected, even if they are bouncing around randomly.

This occurs at many different scales.

There is random motion of particles of air in a room, but the overall 'pressure' can be measured and be constant.

As soon as I see a supposed scientific paper that was typeset in Microsoft Word, I know it's going to be trash. It's not a perfect heuristic, but it's like 99%+.

I love that this was downvoted because it's unlikely that anyone who downvoted it knows what scientific papers are actually typeset with.

HN is now a hangout for PMs and wannabe nontechnical founders who want to feel cool.

This scientist is just older than LaTeX.

Reading the introductory paragraph to the paper, it sounds like a rehash of Kaufmann's (very good) book "At Home in the Universe", which at this point is almost 30 years old. Not sure what this paper adds, but will read it to find out.

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).

Did you see the authors of the paper?

Yes - that's what I meant. Kaufmann rehashing his old work (but presumably adding something to it too).

life is not just a rare happenstance, but a predictable outcome of the universe's own chemical dance

Why do you think it's not rare? Something can be predictable and rare.

Interesting (side note) as I read all the commentary here: As people (obviously) are reacting to the particular "group psychology", or personality or culture here within HN, many commentators are heavily apologizing for not having specific links or attributions available. And I understand why now: Too many neurotic or OCD (or selfishly angry) individuals who will downvote in a heartbeat if the comment isn't to their supreme liking. So, to prove that point, this comment will (most likely) get downvoted into oblivion. I like free commentary sections that don't show off "commentary powers". I once asked a simple innocent question and the downvotes simply drove me to stop trusting anyone here... really sad, since I am an intelligent person with feelings and with curiosity and VALID opinions. Sorry that this rubs the weird people the wrong way. Just sayin'

I've noticed the same thing but I don't remember it being so prevalent up until a few years ago. This is sad and as you rightly suggest it stifles curious conversations. I had to self-censor myself a few times already.

For something to be expected, someone must be expecting it. And to be able to expect things, you must be alive.

This proves something, but I'm not sure what...

"I think therefore I am"

I was fascinated by "At Home In The Universe" back in the 90s. But this seems like a rehashing of the same ideas, without new evidence or theory. Anything new here?

always liked the "Anthropic Cosmological Principle" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anthropic_principle

There is a lot of work to be done inorder to fuse the gaps between physics and biology.

Related, lately I have been enthralled with the work of Michael Levin at Tufts. He studies things like goal directed behavior of cells and systems of cells. Here is an intro to his work: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p3lsYlod5OU

What's the universe's long game? Does it compete with other universes, and why does it need life to do so?

Life else where outside the solar system is all but certain, we just need proof, just like an extra star beyond what we can see, we can’t see it but we know is there

Life is a profound mystery -- there is absolutely no explanation for it under a materialistic/naturalistic world view. The question of the origin of life is the most fundamental and interesting question because without life no other question can even arise.

Can someone eli5?

I personally believe that the origin of life started with something we would not recognize as such today. I imagine that it started with some long molecules in water and they have the ability to grow longer and longer. Maybe they looped around and the dynamics of the system meant that if they oriented toward the sun better they would be more numerous. Maybe if their composition was a little bit different they would acquire material from the surrounding bath more efficiently. This creates a gradient of success where the topmost molecules will do better than the bottom most molecules. Similar perturbations would allow them to acquire more material more efficiently in a pantomime of eating. Reproduction would be something as simple as breaking in half. This is of course a just so story, but it's one that I find pretty compelling. But I would like it if people thought more about what these early systems looked like rather than be so hand wavy. I think it's unlikely that any of these very early forms of life survive as they were consumed by subsequent generations. It also seems unlikely that they would form very often spontaneously such that we might find examples in nature. If such a form develops only once in a million years in a planet-wide irradiated bath, then we would have a huge challenge. Even simulating such a system to find what that structure might be. So instead I think we should use our imaginations and imagine what the simplest possible system could possibly work in that circumstance to bootstrap life.

tldr: the article proposes a new way to understand the origin of life. It combines two scientific ideas to explain how life emerges naturally as a part of the universe's evolution. Key concepts include how chemicals interact and support each other to create life, and the idea that life continuously explores new possibilities. The article challenges the traditional view of separating the physical and informational parts of living cells, suggesting a more integrated approach to studying life's beginnings and development.

No.

I stopped reading the article at "Life is a double miracle." As is so often the case, discussion here on HN is more compelling than the article.

If you'd like yet another somewhat similar inquiry into the information-theory-based definition of life, I'll mention Karl Friston's Free Energy Principle.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free_energy_principle

I've had a speculation about the Fermi paradox for years. I call it the uniform cooling hypothesis. Not sure if it's original or not. The idea builds on the present cosmological model that considers the universe to all be of the same age.

If the emergence of complex life in the universe is a threshold or phase transition effect, it might not happen until the universe reaches a certain age in which all conditions are satisfied. At this point you'd have the "simultaneous" (at geologic time scales) emergence of complex life all over the place.

If this were the case, what if for some reason (such as multiple overlapping factors all having to be satisfied) the standard deviation in the time dimension is actually small? In other words what if life emerges or hits certain evolutionary milestones at about the same time +/- a fairly narrow window like one million years.

If that were the case then the universe would be full of things more or less about as advanced as we are, but very few that are vastly more advanced. The probability of one of those few very advanced outliers existing in, say, this galaxy might be relatively small. Intergalactic travel is many orders of magnitude harder than interstellar travel (which is already brutally hard) and would take millions of years even near the speed of light, so even something like a Kardashev type II or transitional type III civilization wouldn't be likely to cross between galaxies. Something like that could be out there but insanely distant and completely undetectable.

We wouldn't see alien interstellar probes, starships, or techno-signatures from anything large scale enough to be detectable because for the most part these things don't exist yet.

Would also imply that once we build a starship, that's about the time we should expect to encounter starships. It would be a cosmic-scale version of the principle (and apparent historical pattern) that steam engines appear when it is "steam engine time." Maybe it's just not starship time yet.

If the standard deviation is very narrow, you'd have this weird interstellar trick or treat night event where the probes and starships start arriving at about the same time everywhere in the entire universe.

At this point maybe everyone exchanges knowledge and technology and you have an insane explosion in complexity, sort of a cosmic Cambrian explosion, and then you get Kardashev type II and III civilizations and onward.

Zoom way, way out and it looks like a sudden phase transition of the entire universe from being dominated by non-living physical processes to being dominated by living processes.

   The earth doesn’t share our prejudice toward plastic. Plastic came out of the earth.
   The earth probably sees plastic as just another one of its children. Could be the only
   reason the earth allowed us to be spawned from it in the first place. It wanted
   plastic for itself. Didn’t know how to make it. Needed us. Could be the answer to our
   age-old egocentric philosophical question,
   
     “Why are we here?”
    
     “Plastic… asshole.”

   - George Carlin