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Comment by xorbax | Hacker News Reader

Also, recreation is technology. If it turns out that ten mammoths are more efficient and require less human maintenance to modulate tundra and encourage the ecocycle, we know how to do it. We don't need to start a 50 year investment in 2050 and hope it works. Mammoths are likely to be equally or more useful than AI image generation or gigantic warehouses that sequester carbon given various precision-machined parts and chemical engineering. Animals are more efficient and require fewer externalities than most human endeavors. Even if we just ignore the externalities and admire these new impressive technologies. Life is very efficient.

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Agree with all, except for:

> Life is very efficient.

I mean, is it? It's a total tangent, but I've long been having a problem wrapping my mind around the topic of efficiency of life. At whichever scale I look, from ecosystems to inner workings of cells, I see systems held in balance by negative feedback loops, zero-sum games. That is, everything fights everything else for resources, and what we call "balance" is a temporary equilibrium between reproduction, destruction and starvation. Feels like the exact opposite of efficiency. And yet, I can't deny that life can and does a lot with very little. I'm not sure how to reconcile this.

I have this general image in my head wrt. efficiency. Imagine you want to put a box a meter above the ground. There are many ways to do it. You could strap a PLC controller and a rocket engine to it, and keep it up actively. You could put it on a floating platform, filled with hot air, or better, helium or hydrogen. Or, you could just put a mast in the ground and bolt the box to it. The first one is obviously the least efficient, and the last one the most.

When I look at life, I see a lot of things being balanced by means equivalent to the rocket engine approach.

Ok, so, try dividing time into a view of it repeating, and progressing.

Time "repeats" in that we have days, years; your heart repeatedly beats about once a second; menstruation is about a month.

Time "progresses" more literally in that nothing repeats, "repeating" seems like an abstraction. Tuesday, Nov 12, 2024 only happens once; Tuesday happens every week; Nov 12 happens every year.

It's not very workable to keep in mind the literal physical view that every day, every second is unique. Interferes with using experience.

Here's [0] a nice video on Schrodinger's equation, where it's written nicely

H psi = ih d/dt psi

H is doing a lot of work. psi is the mysterious wave function. h explains what it's talking about by giving the units.

The i on the right side, in this writing, is associated with the time partial derivative d/dt. i, the imaginary number, is associated with rotations, which means in a way this writing of Schrodinger's Equation is implying rotational time, repeating time.

Suppose time really is legit repeating even way down deep. Then try reinterpreting your negative feedback loops as repeating time.

To extend speculatively, invoke the notion of fractals, where you can iterate and find more complexity thereby.

So suppose that life repeats time, but in the manner of a fractal where you uncover more structure by iterating.

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2WPA1L9uJqo

It's been a while since I took any classes about it, but I don't think i implies "repeating time." I'm pretty sure it's just from the fact that waves themselves are repeating, i.e. periodic. But Schrodinger's equation doesn't say anything about the nature of time itself IIRC.

Yeah, yes, Schrodinger meant no such thing. But suppose for a moment that a wave, in going up and down repeatedly, is manifesting time itself repeating. Like time legit has an aspect where it's a repeating thing.

To reconcile that with the common experience of time progressing, it could be a sort of statistical matter of time not repeating exactly, where the accumulation of little differences produces the experience of passing time out of quantum-level mostly repeating time.

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