So how would this process work in the context of a self-organizing criticality (SOC) [0]? I've long taken that to be one of the more plausible mechanisms for getting to simple automata.
I guess this could work in conjunction with SOC, providing discrete stages for development. Interesting stuff.
This is one in a number of papers exploring how biological phase separation/condensation may have provided favourable microenvironments for early life development.
Some other work on phase separation as a means for primordial evolution and biochemistry includes a paper from Christine Keating in 2012 (WAY WAY ahead of the curve) [1], elegant work by Frank Jülicher [2], and more recently a nice paper from Keating and Phil Bevilacqua [3].
These papers (IMO) tie rather nicely into some theoretical predictions on self-organization from Jeremy England [4].
[1] Keating, C.D. (2012). Aqueous phase separation as a possible route to compartmentalization of biological molecules. Acc. Chem. Res. 45, 2114–2124.
[2] Zwicker, D., Seyboldt, R., Weber, C.A., Hyman, A.A., and Jülicher, F. (2016). Growth and division of active droplets provides a model for protocells. Nat. Phys. 13, 408.
[3] Poudyal, R.R., Pir Cakmak, F., Keating, C.D., and Bevilacqua, P.C. (2018). Physical Principles and Extant Biology Reveal Roles for RNA-Containing Membraneless Compartments in Origins of Life Chemistry. Biochemistry 57, 2509–2519.
[4] England, J.L. (2013). Statistical physics of self-replication. J. Chem. Phys. 139, 121923.
> Boekhoven explains the principle of phase separation with an analogy: "Imagine an old and rusty car. Leave it outside in the rain, and it continues to rust and decomposes because rusting is accelerated by water. Put it in the garage, and it stops rusting, because you separate it from the rain."
Is the writer sure about this claim? I've seen cars and bicycles in the garage rust due to humidity and condensation, especially from the day-night temperature cycles.
I find it fascinating that we have not witnessed self reproduction and evolution in a simulated world as of now. Unless we manually put it in of course.
Any guesses when this will happen? Life springing up in a 2D-Automata or something like that? What size will it be? How many cells does the smallest self reproducing 2D-Automata need?
Hmm... They created random computer programs and say that one in 10000 turned out to be self replicating.
But that is just because they gave them all the necessaray tools to do so. So the program only has to 1) Set pointer A to its beginning 2) Set pointer B to somewhere 3) Copy from pointer A to pointer B 4) Increase pointer A 5) Increase pointer B. 6) GOTO 1
If you look at the actual instruction set they use, it's even worse. They served the opcodes needed for replication on a silver plate.
That does not count. You could just as well give the programs an opcode that says "copyMyself" and say that creating life is easy because many programs used that opcode.
This is true, but not unusual. Any time you ask for the simplest/earliest/minimal X, you quickly get bogged down in the gray area of what exactly counts as an X.
So the above doesn't count, okay, make it a bit stricter and it takes a few orders of magnitude more computation to generate self replication. A bit stricter again, another few orders of magnitude. Then we run out of computing power, but can conjecture that by the time you get to the physics of our universe, self replication will presumably still appear at least once in, say, every 1e1000 Hubble volumes. Which is still silver plate territory compared to e.g. Conway's game of life, which has no uphill paths. So you get to pick what level you're satisfied with.
Also, I think most people would expect that "organisms" (as opposed to the more usual A-Life term "agents") are capable of homeostasis—that random bit-flips of their internal structure, or even another replicator attempting to "eat" into them, won't break their replicating ability. That's one of the (more implicit, oft-left-unstated) bars by which we usually measure whether something is alive. (E.g. it's the one that allows us to separate viruses from dormant bacteria.)
Right, but then you need a universe where string replicators then proceed to evolve to the point where they paint the Mona Lisa and come up with general relativity. That might be the much harder problem.
Oh how I wish we all weren't trying to abuse human psychological weaknesses to get cheap clicks and views. At this point I'm tempted to dump the entire Internet just like I dumped TV...
Then I remember you can't live without it nowadays. Then it swallows me back.
You know what, I'm gonna back you up, you got a point. But it's certain human psychological weaknesses that lead us to abuse human psychological weaknesses to get cheap clicks and views. Just take it as something fun to observe and think about.
No, this is not a serious proposal, but I am afraid that nothing less will help. When you have a strong financial incentive to do something, saying "but it's not nice" is not going to convince many people; in best case, those convinced by the argument will change their business, and someone else will take their place.
I think advertising is great. It allows people in need of a product/service to be able to purchase it, and it allows people providing said product/service to be known and deliver the value.
As always, the problem is not the concept itself, but to what degree you allow it to grow.
A civilized society has laws and rules limiting individual freedoms so that things don't get out of control. Different societies have different values and put laws in place to enforce those values on the people.
About advertising, did you know that in France, the law literally says "The dental profession may not be practised as a business.", which means no direct or indirect advertising ? This is a consequence of the belief that citizens health is more important than private gains (that doesn't stop French dentists to earn very good money compared to the rest of the population).
On the other end of the spectrum, you have all these insane marketing tactics who use known human psychological mechanisms to push products/services into their mouth until they swallow it. In other words, people create a need from nothing in their own interest, at the expense of other people. I believe that is bad, and we should have laws preventing that.
Parent's point is absolutely valid, and my killjoy-meter registers nothing.
The web did not use to be like this. There were banner-ads (oh, take me back!) and there were sensible headlines, and it isn't all that much more than ten years ago.
Sure maybe. But there's a long way from "life was intentionally created on Earth" to "an interventionist God created the entire universe". Perhaps aliens seeded life on Earth. So even if the appearence of life on Earth couldn't be otherwise explained, I don't think it would be particularly compelling evidence for the kind of religion that people tend to believe.
How does the existence of the universe prove that there is some timeless, extra-universal intelligence with the power to create universes? If there were a creator, it would add more questions than it would answer.
Look around you... the fact that earth is habitable...the gases of the atmosphere are ideal for humans...the rotation of the planet allow for day and night...the distance from the sun(a little bit closer or further away and we would have been in trouble)...the human body in all its intricacies.
Did your god intentionally design the system so that the sun sometimes gives people skin cancer? And is it intended that this cancer causes them to die slow and painful deaths?
And we have finally come to the first line of defence for atheists...why do bad things happen. I could go on for hours but I would suggest to maybe take this off YN if you are really interested in my answer?
Did you not say the system was "a perfect construct"? The side effect where it kills people prematurely doesn't seem very perfect. Anyways, nice programmed deflection you have there.
The only thing that proves is that the universe exists. Claiming that someone created it is only moving the question, because who then made the creator?
This is a very famous point raised by theologians many centuries ago. Circular reasoning can hardly count as valid. What if the creator always existed? And besides no major religion deals with this point so I wouldn't have an answer.
What if the universe has always existed, and every few billion years or so, a portion of it explodes outwards into a completely new direction of space?
Or for the other side to prove that you are wrong. Let's be honest here, none of us can "proof" the existence or non existence of a creator but we have been endowed with intelligence and humility to hopefully come to the right conclusion.
> Let's be honest here, none of us can "proof" the existence or non existence of a creator.
Indeed, let's be honest, we cannot prove anything.
> but we have been endowed with intelligence and humility to hopefully come to the right conclusion.
So then, the right conclusion would simply be that we don't know, right?
You are free to have some preference, i.e, you prefer that a creators exists, and that's fine, but as you said earlier, let's be honest we cannot prove it.
So with the humility that was endowed to us, let's just acknowledge what we don't know.
And that's why people are trying to understand :)
Religion isn't unquestionable, doubt is a key to faith. There's an entire academic discipline devoted to critically studying the divine, theology.
That is not an excuse for avoiding and denying any insight into creation or trying to fill the gap with gods of course. I strongly disagree with the thread starter's sentiment
I didn’t mean to suggest that one is not allowed to question religion (these days), I meant questioning religion becomes either a useless spiral of circular logic or you finally wind up at the point I made about faith. That’s been my experience at least.
All that said, reading Jordan Peterson’s book has increased my opinion of the Bible and the knowledge about the human condition that it contains, but as an allegory, not a literal history.
Not quite. Since we know the markup of the chemicals of the universe we also know that it has a beginning and an end date or simply put that energy was required to set it off. That would explain that it can't be timeless whereas we simply do not have any attributes or what the creator is made of hence can't come to a conclusion regarding his mortality
Causality is a concept found in this universe/reality. All meta-reality concepts like causality, time, place, identity, information, and such originating from within are underjustified for considerations outside it.
I guess this could work in conjunction with SOC, providing discrete stages for development. Interesting stuff.
[0]: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Self-organized_criticality