The Grayness of the Origin of Life
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The meaning of "grayness" would appear to have something to do with the fuzzy line between life and non-life.
There is a footnote to the article "The Seven Pillars of Life":
https://www.pps.net/cms/lib/OR01913224/Centricity/Domain/333...
But it doesn't mention grayness at all.
This gets cleared up a little a few paragraphs in:
> The ability to clearly distinguish between abiotic and biotic systems is considered by many a prerequisite for effective astrobiology studies. However, since no natural demarcation truly exists, there is a profound difficulty in advancing the field if we rely on a strict dichotomy. ...
Where do viruses sit on this scale of grayness?
Yes, viruses have organic molecules, information storage systems, and compartmentalization. No, viruses do not have metal catalysis (correct me if I’m wrong) nor do they have energy currencies (they rely on hosts for energy). Viruses appear rather gray indeed.
Can the grayness framework be modified/extended to describe superorganisms?
Superorganisms like bee colonies are only mentioned in passing and the authors do not try to apply their grayness framework. Organic molecules and metal catalysis aren’t as relevant beyond the molecular scale, but information storage systems, energy currencies, and compartmentalization apply just as well to superorganisms. Perhaps those are the more generalizable attributes of life.
I’m reminded of concepts from Schrödinger’s What Is Life?. Schrödinger describes local reduction of entropy to be a key feature — combining energy currencies with compartmentalization is one way to achieve that. Separately, he discusses the hereditary mechanism and suggests an “aperiodic crystal” could encode heritable information.
What would be the contents of a sister article titled “The Grayness of the Origin of Consciousness”?
I would love to see an outline.
RNA viruses would generally have an RdRp polymerase which requires a metal ion.
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-021-23258-x
https://ui.adsabs.harvard.edu/abs/2020AGUFMP001...01C/abstra...
From that perspective the freshwater cycle is still a major component of biochemistry (bulk ion transport) on Earth, despite arguably being a physical state change and not chemistry per se.
The Sun provides photons that most cells need in order to live but Desulforudis audaxviator have decoupled themselves from that source of energy. In theory they could outlast the solar system or hitch a ride on a rogue planet.
I suspect it's the opposite; first there was life and then it evolved to use sunlight.
How did life arise on earth right after the rocks stopped being red hot? The only reasonable theory in my opinion is that the original life forms were inside the rocks on some jetsam that wasn't totally molten and if you go back further, lived off a little heat and water underground, quite possibly on a "rogue planet".
One reason this seems obvious to me is that there must be orders of magnitude more planets without stars than with. Just like there are more asteroids than planets, more dim red stars than sun-like stars, etc.
The other reason is that I think it helps a great deal with the Fermi paradox. If life just zapped into existence on Earth, 4.5 billion years ago, then it could've happened at any time, anywhere else, over the prior (almost) 10 billion years or so.
But if it took most of that time, since the Big Bang, to develop what we think of as the most primitive life, in the much larger arena of rubble or rogue planets in deep space, then it looks more like we are the earliest life that could develop, and that's why we wouldn't have been overrun by space invaders.
Looking the exponential development of life, even if you choose somewhat arbitrary milestones, it's basically a self-similar curve; each "step" takes a fraction of the previous one. Going backwards, each step should take the corresponding multiple. The great oxidation event was about 2.5 billion years ago. The first life we know about was about twice that. It seems to me a near perfect fit, timing wise, for the origin of that life to be about twice that ago, rather than suddenly arise from nothing in a few million years.
What it comes down to is I think creationists who are skeptical of abiogenesis really have a good point, about how the simplest life is unbelievably complex, in spite of not having a viable theory to explain it. But I think the answer is staring us in the face.
And of course panspermia isn't new or my idea particularly, but what bugs me is instead of saying there needs to be more evidence, it should be the default assumption. Our environment is just not representative of most of the universe even if you ignore non-baryonic dark matter.
One might dismiss this by invoking the anthropic principle (a blunt argument, sorry). Most of the universe is void, and planets with no sun have little energy being tossed into their closed system. It seems adding whatever the hell can be found on asteroids into a planet bombarded by energy (a star being most convenient) is a necessary catalyst for life.
I'm sure I haven't thought about this as much as you have. What makes you think life can be formed without the presence of a star? Is it simply how much more not-near-a-star places there are?
That planet then was destroyed or fragments broken off, scattering life enriched matter into star forming nebulae. This seeded more planets, which then broke up scattering more life enriched matter. After several cycles of this you’d end up with life, or at least sophisticated organic molecule enriched matter all over the galaxy.
It seems to me the very concept of a "habitable zone" tends to imply liquid water on the surface of a planet is implausible/rare. There's a whole bunch of additional requirements besides distance and temperature, which some people think makes life in red dwarf systems doubtful, and even looking at earth's history, surface dwelling life seems precarious with all the extinction events.
And we have Enceladus as an example of the alternative. There must be orders of magnitude more bodies like this, with undersea oceans and some internal warmth, than bodies with surface conditions conducive to life. Perhaps life needs an environment like earth to develop fully, but if 99.x% of the potential habitat for the most basic life is indifferent to our particular conditions, then it seems to me overwhelmingly likely that's where it started.
It remove salt from the water but more importantly move it to the top of mountains, which adds energy into the system. Chemistry happens when the water disolves sediments and carry them back to the oceans.
Just to clarify, I don't mean that these distinctions are meaningless, just that their meaning is inherently embedded in human experience.
I don’t think it’s arbitrary. There’s a clear distinction between say a rock and a cell, even if you view the rock on geological timescales and the cell on biological timescales. I don’t think it’s arbitrary or even surprising that humans view things from our own vantage point in reality.
This isn't a big deal for science, but it's a moral victory for atheists.
If "souls" aren't defined precisely enough that there's an experiment that give different results depending on whether they exist, then the statement "souls exist" is meaningless, and anyone saying it is not even wrong.
> This isn't a big deal for science, but it's a moral victory for atheists.
Theists won't care, although I suppose some will mutter something about separate magisteria.
Well and also in the sense that it takes some pretty arbitrary decisions to distinguish living from nonliving.
I don't mean that these distinctions are useless or unimportant, just that for the most part they may not be all that fundamental... You end up drawing lines in the sand.
For example, are you gonna exclude viruses from the tree of life? Why? Because viruses don't have any known local macroscopic motility? Because they rely too heavily on their environment ("host") to reproduce? Those are summaries of the arguments I've heard against viruses being alive, and imo they're pretty arbitrary.
On the other hand, viruses reproduce and are subject to selective pressures, as are most phenomena with a lifecycle and an external environment. So then if you include viruses are you gonna include RNA? What about reactions, e.g. combustion? Are these alive? Well then and what about consumer product/producer systems? Don't they have lifecycles of their own? Some feedback loops that cause selective pressures? Environments to survive and reproduce in?
It's fuzzy.
A lot of rational, materialistic categorizations of living vs unliving look to me like hunches based on assumptions about motility or consciousness, and might as well be reframed as "does it move?" or "can I communicate with it?" or "does it see me?"
Lynn Margulis and Dorion Sagan wrote a nice essay called "the uncut self" that's really great and related to this in my view. It's all about where the tendency to draw boundaries around "individual selves" when looking at living systems, boundaries that might not be so fixed or obvious when you look carefully.
Back to cows...
You can remove the heart of a cow and keep the heart alive in a proper device, and keep the rest of the cow alive with an artificial heart. (I don't know if someone has tried this with cows, but this should be possible with the same technology for hearts transplants in humans.)
Are both parts alive? What happens if I unplug one of them? Is the heart-less-cow is the real cow? I think we all agree about this last question, but from the cellular level it's just an arbitrary classification, in spite it's useful for us.
What level of complexity is required for experience?
You could just as well assume that a rock has the processing power of a computer CPU but it just lacks input and output.
IIRC It can keep beating even without brain signals. It's not the ideal rate of beating, and there are other problems, but the heart somewhat beats on it's own.
I don't know how many sensing neurons the heart have and how they interact with the beating. The heart is not as "smart" as a brain, but it's "smarter" than a rock.
Stealing the examples from other comments: Is the heart of a cow smarter than a planaria? Is the heart of a cow smarter than a hydra?
My point is simply the presence of interconnected neurons running a certain program is not sufficient to give rise to sentience or conciousness. I believe what we call sentience or conciousness is not an accident or even really an "emergent" phenomenon but rather the direct, purposeful result of specific structure that was selected for by evolution.
The phrase "level of complexity" is inartful because it implies there is one axis or dimension to complexity when that is not the case. If you make a random soup of 100 billion interconnected neurons and teach it to classify images it is highly unlikely that you will get a sentient being by accident although you may have a very efficient neural network at the task it was designed for. If however you take a 100 billion neurons and subject them to the selective pressures of evolution in the real world, where a sentient or self aware self may have advantage then it is not unlikely perhaps that you end up with a sentient or counscious being. Thus sentience is the result of specific selected for structure not the random outcome of a certain level of complexity. I don't see why this is even contraversial.
General intelligence does not exist divorced from the real world and it does not just happen as the side effect of a certian "level" of complexity.
With regard to the question is the heart of a cow smarter than a planiar (worm) whole organism I do not see this as a meaningful question because the starting premise is wrong. The starting premise assumes that there is some abstract quality "sentience" or "intelligence" that exists on a single axis, a continuum of "levels." I'd say the axis does not exist, there are no levels, what matters are functions and it is not meaningful to argue whether or not the planarian or the heart is at a higher level of intelligence because the preform different functions. Notably one is a free living creature while another is an organ inside another creater. I think they are incomparable. Neither has the specific brain structure that gives humans and other higher animals sentience so it does not make sense to argue whether one or the other is at a higher level when neither is at any level at all in terms of a structural or functional comparison with a brain. A worm is not further ahead or behind a heart when compared to a brain because neither is anything like a brain. Maybe a plannarian can learn. I doubt a heart can learn but maybe it can. But overall the idea of levels of sentience or sentience simply emerging from complexity that does not intentionally provide for it is silly in my opinion.
That's a very interesting question! (Do we have here some biologist that can try it?)
The difference between an isolated organism and a part is sometimes no so clear. For example in Clonal Colony https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clonal_colony Is each trunk of Pando a different organism? Why not each branch? (Plants do very nasty things to other plants, but in slow motion. It's nice to see time lapses videos of plants "fighting".) Most examples of clonal colonies are plants, some of them have specialized members and some have identical members. If you prefer animals, one nice example is https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Portuguese_man_o%27_war
The individual insects in a hive are typically 75% identical genetically.
It is popular to admire the selfless ants or bees who willingly give their lives for their society.
But if you think of them as cells of an organism, that happens in every living being.
When you see a hive sacrificing itself, we can talk :)
The point being that as technology continues to develop in this area, our understanding of when someone is "dead" may also continue to shift.
There's also the classic example of comatose people.
Origin of life and origin of consciousness are as I see it the two major mysteries of the universe. I see them as separate.
That a materialist perspective gives us some nice hard rules for understanding certain things, it also by definition struggles to help us understand the nature of other things, i.e. 'most important bit' which is 'life' itself, so maybe we should be thinking about that problem a little bit differently. 'Emergence' seems to be a least one idea, among many.
Interesting and plausible, but you didn't give an argument or any example for that.
We have difficulty with biological distinction, but we can still confidently categorize something as being a 'Horse' and 'Not A Horse' ... even if sometimes it's a little bit ambiguous, aka 'Kind of a Horse'.
Edit: and as for 'other ways of thinking' it very quickly goes into metaphysics so it's hard to talk about because we don't spend much time in that realm. 'Emergence' and 'Biocentrism' are interesting ideas (fields?) that sit within more or less regular bounds of science and so they're just examples of what I'm referring to.
I don't think biologists would agree with you about the horse. It's actually consider a crisis in the philosophy of biology that the concept of species is ill-defined. [1] Like I said, the resolution to me is pragmatic: the definition will depend on whether it is effective relative to some purpose.
While 'value' is surely in the eye of the beholder ... whether or not something fits into the category is not as subjective.
And frankly, the 'big question' is 'who is the beholder' - which is something that materialism is struggling to tell us.
A paleontologist might disagree with you.
What does that add? Do we have better models if we say we're all hallucinating the same seemingly-kind-of-objective reality?
What if I'm the only human, you're all p-zombies, BUT all dogs are conscious?
Not necessarily, some animals have the same perception. Some carnivores don't eat dead animals, others primarily eat carrion and they interreact differently with inanimate objects.
In that case, describing the distinction as "arbitrary" seems wrong.
It is still very interesting to research this subject, because it might help us to learn more about the possibility of life on other planets.
I hope that you are right, that we might be able to replicate portions of it. It might help us understand something more about what we call life. It might also help us understanding alternative forms of life that might exist on other planets.
A big bang of another sort.
I don't think there's a calculation to prove it because it would require a very thorough definition in the first place, which could be taken as a sufficient answer in its own right. The answer is of course 42.
On another note, at "17 hours ago" and no response I guess they are still writing trying to work it out, or gave up, if they are anything like me and my random blurts
You can't ever test anything in the past, so by your logic nothing in the past can be considered scientific. By your logic, plate tectonics can't explain the past movement of continents.
Which is, of course, wrong.
We can absolutely test aspects of a theory, verify its general validity, see that it best correlates with past evidence, and therefore infer past causes. Nothing of that is unscientific -- to the contrary, that's precisely how science works.
Luckily, we have things like fossil records to justify such conclusions. They provide the second point with which we can "fit a curve" when exploring history.
With this "origin of life" stuff, we don't have that second point of confirmation. We think up a bizarre process, execute it, and see that it produced some molecules that we see in modern day life. We then have the gall to say that we've discovered "the origins of life"? Yeah right... https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27974369
Do they have a deeper understanding? Perhaps. Have they come anywhere near the "origin of life"? Nope.
Really? I'd not have expected that.
> but I hate that it gives the impression
Oh yes. Rather than being towed, the payload explores its entire tethered configuration space between one step and the next. Not a donkey walking along a river towing a barge, but a mouse clinging to wire and a balloon a hurricane. The nanoscale moshpit from hell.
It's like creating education content about human locomotion, for aliens completely unfamiliar with it, and with no sense of what's plausible, and showing them only one of those stop motion videos where someone floats along not touching the ground. An extremely biased selection of video frames to tell a very false narrative.
Worse, this and other misconceptions engendered might be mitigated by very briefly including other representations... but the folks who created the video explicitly prioritize "pretty" over "do no harm". Which rather diminishes my appreciation of their beauty.
> cool to visualize the organized thermodynamic
Years ago I saw a video at a talk, of simulated viral icosahedral capsid assembly. The panels are tethered together, to maintain proximity, as they bounce and slam together and apart, incrementally assembling and misassembling. I wish I could link to it. If anyone knows of content to give a visceral feel for nanoscale dynamics, I'd appreciate hearing of it.
For example, you can look at a single bacterium as an organism. But you can also look at a colony of bacteria as an organism.