Does Science Suggest Humans Have a Cosmic Role? | Hacker News Reader

Does Science Suggest Humans Have a Cosmic Role?

cosmos.nautil.us

19 pointspmcpinto8 comments

There's a fascinating book by Stuart Kauffman, At Home in the Universe, where he claims that under certain conditions (that are favorable in our universe), life is all but certain (he views it as a fourth law of thermodynamics). He uses a computational model called boolean networks[1], which he invented in the late sixties, whose random configurations -- under very simple constraints -- cause lifelike computation to arise naturally.

Given the number of stars in a given galaxy, the fact that almost none out of just a few thousands of observed planets is hospitable to life is still no indication that life isn't very common in the universe, especially if we accept Kauffman's conjecture that life is very likely to arise almost anywhere that can accommodate it.

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

"That is to say, humanity is ordinary, cosmically speaking, just one of countless examples of extraterrestrial intelligence spread across the universe."

Isn't humanity terrestrial by definition? At least ASFAWK we originated on this planet. We may be ordinary and just one of countless examples of intelligence spread across the universe but we're not extraterrestrial.

Some of that is sort of nonsensical (like the idea that observation creates reality)

Could you elaborate what's wrong with that idea?

As far as I could understand he just talks from psi-empistemic point of view about wave function collapse. Although now we don't have any way to determine whether psi-epistemic or psi-ontic point of view is 'correct' (as like as define what precisely does mean 'correct' for this question), I don't think that you can just call one of these views nonsensical, especially without support arguments.

'Collapsing the wave function' is now generally thought of as a result of entanglement between the measurement device and the system that's being observed rather than some magical quality of consciousness.

But any measurement device always has a conscious observer that reads in one or another way results of measurements (e.g. spin directed up or down) from this device. Without such observer a combined system of the device and the quantum system of interest would infinitely be in a state of superposition.

You're just another measurement device that's entangled with the system at that point, though.

Betteridge's Law of Headlines.

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