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Comment by qubex | Hacker News Reader

What’s astonishing is not the ability to block radiation (after all, biology will always defer to chemistry first, and physics second—there’s no way biology can come up with something that exceeds the capabilities of its substrates) but rather life’s way of rapidly adapting to make use of whichever energy source it can find to eke out an energy budget to thrive on.

P.S. Who else heard Dr Ian Malcom say “Life... finds a way” in their head?

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On the contrary, I’d argue that most “life” (in the sense of our Eucledian definition of it) relies on exceeding the capabilities of its substrates via emergent properties - at least from the perspective of our current infantile understanding of the universe. Photosynthesis is so efficient because electrons jump multi-molecule gaps due to quantum effects, as we’ve found only a few years ago. The theory that most biological brains heavily leverage quantum processes is rapidly gaining ground as well - we simply lack the intelligence and processing capacity to design anything like it, since compared to our current computational abilities, millions of years worth of entropy may as well be an infinite amount.

Reductionism fails as completely as it does hilariously when it comes to systems where the whole does indeed exceed the sum of its parts due to laws of the universe we have yet to grasp. A much more sane approach is to think of the matter something is comprised of as nothing more than a filter/transformer for the entropy and environment it exists within. Life routinely harnesses entropy whereas our current technology is so ass backwards it does little but struggle against it (dendrites in batteries, for example). What science considers to be degradation or wear and tear is the very process living things rely on to exist - let that sink in.

I think you’ve missed my point entirely: the jumping of electrons that makes photosynthesis “so efficient” (which it isn’t—as a recent post here mentioned, it’s tuned for stability) is not in defiance of the laws of physics, but entirely compatible with them.

Only density can attenuate nuclear radiation, that’s the fundamental physical intuition here (which is also absent from the article/video posted). Nothing “merely biological” is going to change that. Now, making use of some of the energy that is attenuated by the non-dense biological medium... thta’s entirely within the biological domain.

> Photosynthesis is so efficient because electrons jump multi-molecule gaps due to quantum effects, as we’ve found only a few years ago.

That's true, but is a short lived and very local effect.

> The theory that most biological brains heavily leverage quantum processes is rapidly gaining ground as well [...]

No, there is only some handwaving. It's impossible to keep the quantum coherence in a system that weight 1.5kg at 310K.

> That’s true, but only local and short lived and very local effect.

And critically for my argument, photosynthesis works (less efficiently) even when this effect is absent. It’s not a mystery ingredient that makes the whole thing work.

Life can't exceed the capabilities of its substrates on their own terms, but it's not clear that life can be fully explained in or reduced to those terms either.

Anyways, yes, this is super cool.

I’m glad you made this point, because it allows me to issue a cautionary word to those dualists who think that somehow the mind is something disjoint from the brain.

Yes, I'm glad you mention that; unfortunately I think sometimes the idea that causation may be multi-dimensional (in other words, that there is not necessarily a single implicative model capable of wholly explaining all things) gets mistaken for some sort of dualism.

But that view does not imply that mind and body are disjoint, are separate "essences", etc.

“Minds are what brains do, like beats are what hearts do” is my favourite summary of that.

Earth has always been radioactive, so my guess is that this is an ancient ability rarely used/seen, not something that evolved since 1986.

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