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Comment by vanderZwan | Hacker News Reader

I agree with your general sentiment, but I don't see why we should expect "machines and complex systems" (as related to life) to exist at the level below molecules and atoms. If that was the case then we should expect otherwise identical organic molecules to have differences when they're created by living things and synthesis in the lab (ok, ok, there's chirality and carbon-14, but you get what I mean).

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I'm reminded of an early machine learning experiment where a system self-trained to perform a certain task on a piece of dedicated hardware did so unexpectedly. The researchers "knew" the solution but wanted to learn how their project solved it.

At some point, the sensing for analog effects became the most efficient way to achieve the result by exploiting flaws or unique properties in the individual components, sort of like that inductance backdoor where a particular set of instructions in a certain circuit leaks into another until it's energized enough to trigger it like a relay. Anyway, the result was unintuitive but worked.

Anyway, there's no doubt that after millions and millions of years, there are natural principles at the quantum and atomic levels that biologics are taking advantage of that we're basically only at the "allegory of the cave" level of understanding.

The micro is very much relative.

There is an emerging subfield "quantum biology" that studies biological systems under quantum mechanical influence [0]. Photoreceptor systems seem to be a prominent example.

[0] https://quantum.ch.ntu.edu.tw/ycclab/wp-content/uploads/2015...

I guess my issue was more with the implication that we'll find more fundamental building blocks of life.

Are you more comfortable with the implication that we won't?

Comfortable or uncomfortable doesn't even enter the discussion. You can't go down much further without entering the domain of high-energy physics. Which is not the domain of life.

How so?

It's hard for structure to form in burning hot plasmas. But hell, we only know about ourselves. That's the flaw in all the dogmatic thinking about what life is. Life is after all, just structured computation, and computation is just action, and action..just the passage of observer time:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q_CQDSlmboA

Before we go into the discussion of whether life may or may not be able to exist in hot plasmas (which is fine, in a speculative hypothetical physics kind of way), the point is that we are talking about the building blocks of our form of life. Which is not the kind that exists in hot plasmas.

I get what you're trying to say, however this is a flawed assumption right up there with just getting an FTP account, mounting it locally with curlftpfs, and then using SVN or CVS on the mounted filesystem. Time and innovation are both not on your side, in this case. Complex systems are complex and extend far beyond the focal depth of our squinting.

Wöhler proved in 1828 that there was nothing special with organic molecules by synthesising urea.

I guess you could view molecular formation as a complex system involving atoms and atoms as a complex system involving quarks. That would define chemistry and particle physics as the study of said complex systems which makes sense to me. Still at that level that’s not generally viewed as the study of organisms. What we view as biology, the study of the mechanisms of life, really starts at the molecular level. If you go lower, things stop being specific enough.

I genuinely don't understand what your analogy is supposed to convey, could you elaborate?

It's a reference to an old HN comment back when the creation of Dropbox was announced here. Someone commented something along the lines of "you could just" do that whole thing with the FTP server etc. It's lived on as an example of "peak HN" attitude.

So any form of disagreement with someone can be reframed as being dismissive and missing the point, and therefore "peak HN".

That's quite the non-starter for any discussion about whether an idea holds up under scrutiny.

Individual atoms and molecules are identical in a vacuum. Are they in context? They at least have quantum degrees of freedom, which is quite a lot. But whether that has functional value is tbd

A statement like "complex machines all the way down" implies precisely that molecules would be different without context because of some lower-level machinery that forms a more fundamental building block of life. This is what I am skeptical of.

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