What is Life? by Erwin Schrödinger (1944) [pdf]
whatislife.ie
whatislife.ie
The idea that we should try and understand life as a battle against the second law of thermodynamics has had a significant influence on many of today's great thinkers - such as Friston [1] and Dennett [2], as well as countless others.
[1] https://royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/full/10.1098/rsif.201...
Carl Friedrich von Weizsäcker, in his Aufbau der Physik argues/shows that the 2nd law is often misunderstood as leading to "goo". His take is that this is not so, rather it leads to skeletons.
So rocks crystallising and stars forming would actually be going with the flow of the 2nd law, rather than battling against it.
Still, rocks and crystals are not quite an end state either, in a non expanding universe -- eventually they collide and crumble to dust.
"In the book, Schrödinger introduced the idea of an "aperiodic crystal" that contained genetic information in its configuration of covalent chemical bonds."
Good to see it available (a classic; not so easy to lay hands on)
https://www.amazon.com/What-Life-Matter-Autobiographical-Ske...
[1] http://inspirehep.net/record/1268726/files/978-4-431-77056-5...
We love separating things by arbitrarily naming and defining them, but the universe is completely connected, we can't exist outside of it or disconnected from it. If anything, the only life that exists is the entire universe and we are just tiny tiny pieces of it with a very limited view and awareness of the whole. Pretty much the same way we are made up of billions of cells that likely have no way of perceiving the human body they are a part of (or "having a conversation" with it).
Given the current empirical evidences we have, it's not particularity persuasive, but an extremely interesting imagination and proposal indeed.
[42]https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/profiles/1MmQjXrkwp98jNdc17...
I mean, when I speak I physically interact and transmit signals through air vibrations which we developed to both detect and interpret. Other perceptive "life" forms would have a hard time telling what we communicate about as well. Hell, we can barely if at all understand what other mammals communicate about despite their biophysical systems being incredibly similar to our own. Plants communicate with chemical signals and root/fungi networks.
Predicted pictures of the universe at large look eerily like the brain's structure as well.
No it isn't, a rock is not alive.
> Just because we can't consciously communicate with something it doesn't mean it's not alive.
Strawman, no one thinks life requires communication.
> Why wouldn't Earth be alive?
Because it's not, it's a big rock, it has life on the surface, but is not itself alive.
> We love separating things by arbitrarily naming and defining them, but the universe is completely connected, we can't exist outside of it or disconnected from it.
More strawmen.
> If anything, the only life that exists is the entire universe and we are just tiny tiny pieces of it with a very limited view and awareness of the whole.
The universe is not alive.
What's clear is that you just don't know what you're saying, you're just pontificating woo woo.
Life self replicates, metabolizes something for energy, and grows through cellular division. None of the things you just called alive do that, so they're not alive; you don't get to change the meaning of the word life to suit your narrative.
It usually turns out that you’re arguing over the preferred definition of an English word, and you can actually find a point of agreement on the underlying models.
Try discussing religion with someone of a different faith without invoking God(s) or any specific prophets. It turns out that you're left with origin theories, a system of morals, and a mostly observations-based prototype to modern science.
Now try international politics without using the terms war, peace, or border.
Basically, this concept looks at the causality of language in reverse.
I followed Shrodinger's ethos to its limits and all I got was perfectly isotropic relativistic spacetime foam.
I suppose that's what our universe will eventually decay into - and then what happens is up to anyones interpretation (conformal cyclic cosmology or what have you..)
I need to implement gravity, some type of coupling that can prevent equipartition of states from happening so quickly.
In any case, nothing interesting happens in small universes by the process of evolution. Evolution requires a balance between specifity of search/selectivity and magnitude. Less specificity will require more brute force magnitude. Just like any search of a space or data struct. Silicon just doesn't have the magnitude that even a mole of molecules does. Not even in the same ballpark.
The source is up here and easily portable to platform other than Windows
https://github.com/churchofthought/ScatterLife
I need to update the video - the video is before I added a projection matrix to fix the hexagonal skew.
Another framework but using complex valued cells: https://github.com/churchofthought/HexagonalComplexAutomata