https://medium.com/for-for-thought-for-rainy-days/life-cause...
If anyone finds the time and mood to go over it I'd appreciate a discussion :)
Your essay in general is poorly informed and borderline incoherent. But asking for feedback on HN is perfectly OK and you should be downvoted for that. I think it is reasonable to expect people to either give you constructive feedback or STFU.
regarding the article itself I think you should try to understand I did my best stay away from the horror of the shitty "new age" quantum bullshit interpretation of the measurement problem. it is NOT my intention or idea.
my central idea is that maybe life is a property of the universe not a phenomenon, and try to construct something out of it.
I wish you'd give the perspective a chance :), beyond the annoying paragraphs, and put up with my lack of coherence as a gentle gesture towards an amateur wrestling with an extremely complicated subject.
Thanks again!
That is a bizarre, quasi-religious assumption. What evidence do have in support of it? I understand that you're making an assumption and proceeding from there, but it seems to revolve around a misunderstanding of what "property" means. If life is a 'property' of the universe, everything else also is, and the word ceases to have any meaning.
Why would life be all encompassing? It is just a thing on its own, and quite small in its manifestation. The way I framed the assumption is that life (I know it's hard to dismantle the meaning inside the word and see it separate from us) is just as time woven in, working in the opposite direction of time.
I have developed this here:
https://medium.com/for-for-thought-for-rainy-days/the-meanin...
As for the idea, it is exactly NOT religious I want it to be seen. A property is a characteristic and I don't know if life would be an essential or accidental property of our (this) universe.
Awareness, our subjective existence, subjects of religion and philosophy are completely separate subjects from life and the phenomenon of evolution it produces.
As for evidence, I would dare quote evolution and the spawning of it. But I can solely produce thought experiment type of evidence :) from my current settings.
for entertainment purposes i have an attempt to define life here:
https://medium.com/for-for-thought-for-rainy-days/the-meanin...
> The void has in theory the highest level of entropy. Matter randomly spawns into existence, then back into non existence. Can’t get any more chaotic than that.
On the contrary, a vacuum has very little information density; to describe a region of space to that is a vacuum to any degree of precision requires fewer words than to describe any space on earth to the same degree of precision, since the vacuum is very uniform. Your impression that the void is more chaotic than our everyday environments is a misreading of pop-sci physics books; the same chaos happens throughout, even in matter-dense regions of space.
I think that your article illustrates why many critical thinkers refrain from creating cosmologies; our present scientific understanding and tools are still so immature that we cannot accurately describe our own minds and bodies, let alone with any certainty the human societies; and that let alone the cosmos, let alone one person's attempt.
Though it seems to me that physics has a tradition of producing outspoken physicists with enough hubris to think otherwise.
>The only possible inference from these two facts is, I think, that I –I in the widest meaning of the word, that is to say, every conscious mind that has ever said or felt 'I' -am the person, if any, who controls the 'motion of the atoms' according to the Laws of Nature
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/What_Is_Life%3F http://www.whatislife.ie/downloads/What-is-Life.pdf
The idea that I am just a small part in a giant conscious living system makes me feel good. The alternative - that we are islands of life that somehow different and separate from a dead, mechanistic universe - seems kind of unpleasant.
You're welcome.
(Note that my reply had a serious typo: it should have read: asking for feedback on HN is perfectly OK and you should NOT be downvoted for that. I left out the word "not". Thanks to grzm for pointing that out.)
>life is a property of the universe not a phenomenon
But that's not true (to the extent that I can wring any coherent meaning out of that sentence at all).
Life is very well understood: it is the reproduction of information in the face of random mutation and natural selection. The central concept is not complicated at all. The results of this process (because that's what life is: a process) can be very complicated, but the process itself is not.
It uses existing vocabulary from physics, but just for superficial discourse. Entropy, locality, the Heisenberg principle, etc are not just concepts, but equations and definitions one uses to measure and reason about the physical world, which your article completely ignores.
Tldr it'a woowoo "science"/"philosophy".
You might be interested in a book I just added to my reading list: "What is life?" (Schrödinger, 1944) The wikipedia articles on it sound fascinating.
There's no clear structure or method to the reasoning. There are no valid scientific hypotheses in it, and no ideas for scientifically researching parts of your philosophy. There are a lot of assumptions about things you don't seem to know a lot about, and a lot of unfounded, unresearched statements.
I'd recommend you study logic, as in the mathematical field, at 1st year mathematics Bsc level, and also get a solid understanding of basic research statistics and hypothesis testing. It'll help you be more precise in your reasoning and get a better understanding of the border between philosophy and science.
I'll end with a list of more specific critiques:
>> Consider for a moment that life is an embedded property of the universe, just like time and space are.
What does this even mean? Spacetime is a construct that combines space and time to make it similar to 4-dimensional Euclidian space, which makes it much easier to reason about physics mathematically AFAIK. Are you suggesting a 5-dimensional model? Or that life is "literally time" travel? Or that entropy can decrease in a closed system, if only for "the life element"?
Because any of those interpretations sound a lot like "life is not part of physics" and pseudoscience-based mysticism when not supported by any mathematical rigor.
>> Just like time is a property of the time-space continuum, life is a property of a larger continuum space-time-life.
What the hell is this continuum you're talking about? This needs references and a thorough definition which does not contain made-up undefined terms. You can't just say a few magic words and call it science.
>> Time and life are two opposing fundamental forces of the universe. Time is the global entropy increase and life is the local entropy decrease. I don’t know if they’re symmetric, but they are closely so. It is a fractal who grows the same over and over again, no surprises here.
Uh, yes. Why are they opposing? Why are you saying life is "a force"? What do you define as "a force"? How is time global entropy increase? What's this crap about symmetry and fractals?
>> "the animus and the tenses"
>> "the power of resilience"
Define your terms.
I could spit through the whole article line by line but I don't have enough battery and I'd end up critiquing every nonempty line.
If you want I could help you find some good learning resources on the subject. You're on HN so you probably have access to a modern browser OR a somewhat decent PDF reader, and that ought to do fine.
Your detailed effort is much appreciated, almost a Christmas gift! And with limited battery :D
Awesome, yours, A
This alt isn't strongly linked to my IRL identity (yet) and I'd like to keep it that way. I'm a bit busy so I'd rather not make another email account for this occasion.