Life ≠ Alive | Hacker News Reader

Life ≠ Alive

aeon.co

67 pointsbookofjoe35 comments

Since reading Christopher Alexander's Nature of Order series (verbose, probably could be trimmed down quite a bit), I find it much more natural to view everything as living to various degrees across all sizes / compositions of matter, which he argues for on a mathematical basis. Here's a snippet from the first volume, lifted from the linked wiki page:

> Centers are those particular identified sets, or systems, which appear within the larger whole as distinct and noticeable parts. They appear because they have noticeable distinctness, which makes them separate out from their surroundings and makes them cohere, and it is from the arrangements of these coherent parts that other coherent parts appear. The life or intensity of one center is increased or decreased according to the position and intensity of other nearby centers. Above all, centers become most intense when the centers which they are made of help each other.

Unfortunately, this perspective makes mankind's treatment of nature all the more repellent as the horror of our actions towards the rest of life (and ultimately, ourselves) is so, so self-defeating. We just can't seem to evolve past self-interest where self is defined by the boundary of our body / family / tribe. :(

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

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

> Unfortunately, this perspective makes mankind's treatment of nature all the more repellent as the horror of our actions towards the rest of life (and ultimately, ourselves) is so, so self-defeating. We just can't seem to evolve past self-interest where self is defined by the boundary of our body / family / tribe. :(

You're packing a lot of 20th century cultural angsty baggage in that thought. Your worldview is not universal.

I don't think you understood the previous paragraph; the view I'm espousing that Alexander laid out is universal and objective. It has nothing to do with culture, but everything to do with physical systems, it is a lens by which to measure the nature of order, or in other words, life itself as a universal quality of configurations of matter.

We are not sustainably increasing order on the planet Earth, and if current trends continue, we will see an incredible amount of life / order disappear into entropy. That's a fair prediction given current evidence. Your statement about my worldview is akin to saying 2 + 2 = 4 is not universal, never mind that that formalism is dependable in this universe. Maybe in some other universe 2 + 1 = 4, but not in this one.

You can disagree with the model that Alexander lays out, but the correctness of that sentiment has nothing to do with "20th century cultural angsty baggage".

You miss my point. I don't disagree that events are unfolding in the manner you describe. But you have a preference it seems, to the way in which you would rather have them unfold.

"Unfortunately", "repellent", "horror" are all value judgements, and they might not be universal.

I don't think the terms and definitions (life vs. alive) are the best possible for making sense of this topic.

I think we can distinguish between:

* A living cat

* A dead cat

* A cat's living or dead skin cell

* A self-replicating 3D printer called Alice

I don't like the term "life" to refer to both the living and the dead cat. It seems bizarre to have concepts of "living life" and "non-living life."

I would rather say "living organism" and "dead organism," the latter of which implies that at once point it was a living organism.

And the cat's skin cell is not an organism at all; it is a living (or dead) _part_ of an organism.

Alice, on the other hand, is not an organism or a part of an organism. I would not use the same term for Alice as I would for biological life. Philosophically, does Alice constitute artificial life? Maybe. But calling Alice "living" with no qualifiers seems off.

Why is the skin cell not an organism though? The definitions for 'organism' vary, but a common theme seems to be an interdependant system comprised of 'organs' with different specific functions that together form a greater whole. But is a cell not comprised of organelles? Mitochondia have their own dna and it is theorized that they were originally a seperate lifeform in a symbiotic relationship. The same goes for other specialized structures like chloroplasts in plants. On the other end of the spectrum, would we classify groups or societies as organisms, with individuals carrying out specialized purposes? Is a society, nation or company alive? Perhaps not in the biological sense we commonly use the words, just like Alice. But that might just be our own carbon-based bias ;)

Skin cells die rather quickly without their support networks.

Isn't this true for any organism, for varying definitions of "quickly" and "support network".

Compared to extremophiles like waterbears [1], most of us seem very fragile and dependent on our environment.

1. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tardigrade

Yes, but multicellular organisms have evolved specifically to contain lineages of cells that form specialized tissue that allows them to better exploit certain ecological niches. These specialized tissues are only possible if the lineages of cells that make up the tissue specialize to a degree that makes them unviable on their own. That is categorically different from, say, a bacterial cell, which is evolved to exist and reproduce on its own.

A gear, by itself, is not a machine.

A skin cell, by itself, cannot function or survive as a living organism.

How long would the average human survive if placed in an environment with no other humans?

Are we talking about someone from Silicon Valley or an Alaskan bushman?

The Alaskan could do it.

But without another person to share information with (genetic or cultural), he's a dead end.

And?

The mental exercise was if a human could last a significant time away from the aid of other humans. Not if one human can continue humanity.

With food and water, pretty long I'd say. Whether they'd stay sane is a different matter.

Meh, we're still losing sanity even when around other people. Sanity is relative.

You should see a psychologist if you feel like that.

So, are you unaware of the mental health crisis that's been popping up in 1st world countries in the past, oh, I don't know, 10-20 years?

I am, that's why I'm suggesting you seek professional help.

I think it’s worthwhile to distinguish a gear from a lump of rock though.

Ants are estimated to be arround 20% of all terrestial biomass, so clearly they are succesful. And yet, can the ant survive without the colony? Many individual ants are so highly specialized they cannot survive by themselves. Queens cant forage for food or defend themselves, there are soldier ants with jaws so large they require others to feed them and worker ants cant reproduce. Even we humans, sometimes touted as nature's best generalist, have become more and more specialized as we organized in larger and larger groups. We require others to produce our food, keep the lights on and help us when we are sick, too old or too young. Sure there are still people who survive on their own, but that is becoming rarer every day. Is that really a criteria for being 'alive'?

Then your argument train of thought stops at the station of "there is one ant organism" and "there is one human organism".

Yes, the inherent ability of surviving on one's own is important. An ant can. A Silicon Valley software engineer can. A Wall Street hedge fund manager can. However, it will not be long. Mostly due to their stupidity. Don't base disconnection of survival needs and general societal stupid as a way to define "alive" as well. The specialization factor creates ecosystems. Ecosystems are not organisms. We can draw parallels, yes. There are plenty of fun parallels. The same way we can draw parallels to galaxy clusters and the way an eyeball iris structure is formed. But let's not be silly about it. This is literally the joke Douglas Adams was making in Hitch Hiker's Guide. We are all not one big computer (organism) with one goal.

What I'm trying to understand is the desperate want for "machines are alive" argument. It's now come to the point that a dead cat should be considered alive and a functioning human is now not alive? This is some serious post-modern logic that just blows my mind.

Let's take it a step further. So an ant can't survive long outside of a colony, it's not alive. If you pull a fish out of water and it can't survive long, then it was never alive to begin with? But since some people can't survive in Alaska by themselves (or anywhere else isolated), that means humans aren't alive. Perhaps isolate someone by shoving their face in water and they end up not surviving long, they were never alive anyways. Because they couldn't survive outside their environment. Like an ant to a colony. Love to see that logic used in court. Oh but, because we still have the corpse, the person should still be considered alive, thus there was no murder to begin with.

> It seems bizarre to have concepts of "living life" and "non-living life."

So all the dinosaurs found on earth are not "life" according to your definition?

If we found a bone on Mars, wouldn't all the press say "life found on Mars?"

They are not life anymore.

They WERE life.

The English language has mechanisms to differentiate past and present. Ignoring those mechanisms do not prove points.

No, bone could have come off-world.

Would your intuition on Alice change if we had herds of escaped Alices roaming the Serengeti, mining metals and quietly carving out a life for themselves? What if they were entirely carbon based, and constructed themselves out of natural biomaterials? What if they were also very small, and formed colonies on food that had been left out?

I think it's simpler and more general to consider that "life" simply refers to any member of a lineage of self-replicating cellular phenomena on Earth. Anything else is just a description of said phenomena.

Alive/dead seems to me to be a generic descriptor for any dynamic phenomena that has a limited time span. Stars that are actively maintaining hydrostatic equilibrium could be called "alive", planets with plate tectonics and atmosphere could be considered "alive", which is to say that they are a dynamic process that is still active. It just so happens that _life_ is also a dynamic process and therefore goes through a period of "alive" time followed by a state change where we become inactive and "die".

Under this definition, it's meaningless to speak of life on other planets. What would you call xenoreplicators?

That's exactly what I'm getting at! My idea here is strongly influenced by the thinking of Stanislaw Lem, who tackles this problem extensively in his works. He points out that it's very earth/bio-centric to assume that "life" on other planets would resemble in any way life on earth, and comes up with hypothetical life-forms that demonstrate this principle.

If we come up with some abstract definition of "life", then it seems like "life" is a fundamental thing of which "life on earth" is just one particular manifestation. Following that, we imagine that there are other specific instances in the universe that implement that general principle.

On the contrary, I think biological life is highly determined by its history and the geo-chemical particulars of earth itself, not by some fundamental principle. If we find extra-terrestrial "life" it's possible that the history and geo-chemical particulars of its evolution are so different from ours that we fail to recognize it as life at all.

An incredible piece of work, thank you Santa Fe Institute!

To be even more pedantic: how do you distinguish between different instances of life? Do you require them to be a minimum distance apart? What if they are sitting right next to each other? Do you require them to be separable by a minimum distance? What if they need each other's presence (e.g. mother and unborn child)? Perhaps the only thing we can say for sure is that the universe is alive.

The sofa is an example of the concept of an "extended phenotype," isn't it?

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

There was a long-running definition debate on the now-semi-defunct C2 wiki: http://wiki.c2.com/?DefinitionOfLife

This seems to be a semantic argument. That is, an argument that attempts to describe or reframe an existing semantic meaning.

It is interesting in the way it attempts to shoehorn this meaning into broader idea of information theory (or perhaps also pan-psychism or stoic philosophy). However, rather than taking the lead from information theory, that nothing in particular is special or has meaning, the article digs it's semantic heels in and claims a differentiation between life and not-life. Why? Or at least, why the arbitrary line it has drawn?

All particles process information as far as we can tell. Why the differentiation between those things we "know" to be alive vs those we are not sure of. Surely any decent improvement on the current semantic categorisation of life cannot take as a starting point that very categorisation.

Whenever i read someone trying to redraw semantic definitions always reminds me of xkcd 927.

Are ideas alive? They are the replicating units, after all. The concept of capitalism is certainly alive and well.

Both genes and DNA are alive?Red blood cells are as dead as hair. But still as alive as a non reproducing grandma.

James Lovelock's Gaia hypothesis is relevant here -- even the earth's air is as alive as our body's the intercellular protein matrix.

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