Universal Life

Various luminaries have spent years muddling over a DefinitionOfLife, apparently without success. This page suggests they're lumbered with a FrameProblem. They begin with the assumption, common in Western culture, that the universe is a dead place in which life has somehow occurred by accident or intent. They attempt to distinguish living parts or processes from dead ones and use the distinctions to squabble over which is which.

Consider instead the proposition that the universe is itself alive on all available scales. That when we look up into the night sky or squint down into the water drop what we see are the bones, hands, eyes, and tongues of UniversalLife. That rather than being some rare commodity on Earth, EvolutionAndEnthalpy, DecayAndRenewal?, are ubiquitous and eternal.

Then all matter and energy, everywhere, is involved in strands of this great life, and our own lives are those of cells within cells within cells, neither more nor less meaningful than the whole. The DefinitionOfLife, at least in the sense of distinguishing living from dead, is futile, because nothing is dead. -- PeterMerel

Individual molecules within living cells are dead. Atoms everywhere are dead.

Are there individual molecules? Quantum things are all non-locally correlated across the universe. And since you have no DistinctionOfLife your assertion about atoms is hand-waving.

The meaning of words is determined by use - distinctions are only needed to recognize them in cases where the application isn't well-known.

As demonstrated on DefinitionsOfLife, there are many uses of the word. Pick one and we can discuss it in this context.

Well, I personally would go with the one on DefinitionOfLife, which I know works.

There have been dozens of counterexamples on that page for which it failed. RK simply deletes 'em. For myself, I have a number of problems with RK's description - perhaps none with his intent, but without an adequate description I can't divine that. Whenever I've raised these on DefinitionOfLife they've been summarily deleted, but in short:

I have no idea what internal function is supposed to mean. RK talks about the mechanism of a clock, but I presume would argue that a clock is not alive even though it has an internal function. Perhaps if he required that the internal function be one that maintains its own order ... but he doesn't. I understand he's attempting to avoid circularity of definition but this fails to account for the iterative essence of a living process.
I have no idea what system is supposed to mean. Is a molecule a system? Is my hand a system? Am I a system? Is my family a system? Is my culture a system? For me, systems are merely distinctions that I make about work we do - there are no nice clean interfaces in life where we can say, "this is the start of one system" and "this is the end of that system". If you define your system in terms of genes you're screwed by prokaryotes, who go about swapping genes promiscuously. If you define it in terms of ingestion and excretion you've got problems with symbiotes. And so on. LifeIsAnAttributeOfProcess?, not system.
I have no idea why RK's definition refers to energy rather than enthalpy. I'd have thought he'd have got the point on EvolutionAndEnthalpy, but apparently not. You can have all the energy in the world, but if none of it is useful to do work you're screwed.
I have no idea how a definition that doesn't entail evolution - surely an external function - can be relevant to living processes.

So you see that no matter how much you know it works, unless we can both know it works, it's useless to us.

Well, to address point for point:

A system is an object together with a set of behaviors that object performs - for instance, an automaton is a particular type of system. An internal function is one of the inherent behaviors, rather than how it relates to other objects.
Wheels within wheels: apart from your mere perception of an object, what's an object?
Enthalpy doesn't do anything, any more than energy. Differences in free energy do work, differences in enthalpy are differences in free energy at constant pressure (which most chemical systems are, so we use enthalpy because it's easier to measure).
And?
Evolution is just a natural consequence of self-reproduction. All living things came about through reproduction, but not all can reproduce, and things like corpses and fossils came about through the same process. I don't see why evolution is important - it's discussed in detail on NaturalSelection.
Self-reproduction does not entail evolution. Or else a crystal or a fire would evolve.

Most of the ones on DefinitionsOfLife simply don't define - or distinguish, if you prefer - life. For instance the logistic map, which doesn't describe some living things but does describe plenty of non-living ones.

The intent stated on DefinitionsOfLife is to look at a whole bunch in different contexts to try to understand their common elements. The LogisticMap has some advantages - it's simple and iterative - but obviously it needs some framing before it can serve as an adequate definition. The advantage of DefinitionsOfLife over DefinitionOfLife is that it's open to discussion of any definitions, including insufficient ones - it's a work in progress rather than someone's WalledGarden.

Please go ahead, you'll notice I haven't made any move to stop that page. But if you want your results to make sense, you have to have some criteria for evaluating them, for seeing whether they do correspond to life at all. If I added "made of pure uranium" as a definition, you'd need some way to get rid of it, or you're wasting your time. Well, any distinction that leaves out typical squid isn't life, and any distinction that includes molecules isn't either, for the same reason.

Why isn't it?

Because it doesn't match the existing concept of life. If I define life to be those objects at temperatures where water boils, then people hopefully aren't alive, while ovens are from time to time. It's a perfectly good definition - the problem is, it has no correspondence with what people think of as life. If I want to use it, I should make up a different term, let's say boiling. This is described below, and somewhere on DefinitionOfLife, although the latter has gotten somewhat tangled.

Boiling water is essential to some living processes - extremophiles. Likewise fire is essential to other living processes - eucalypts. The point of all this foofooraw is that what people think of as life isn't obviously consistent enough to create a clear agreement on its definition.

It's clear enough to give constraints. Nobody disputes that boiling water and fire are essential to some living things. It doesn't take much to realize that's not the same as them being alive. If you can't understand why "objects at temperatures where water boils" can't be used to define life, I don't think there's much more to say.

Correlation is a reasonably well-understood effect that has never had any impact on whether individual molecules exist, only on how they interact.

Your counterexample was individual molecules. I'm asking whether there are any individual molecules, noting we only observe 'em in interaction with one another, and that these interactions aren't limited to one locale.

And in answer, I'm saying there are individial molecules. I don't dispute that they all interact (even Newton knew that), or that they don't just do so in one locale, it's inherent to being waves. But why does that matter?

Because I'm asserting that life is inherent in the process of their interaction and you're asserting that there are some who don't have such a process. Since I've never heard of same, I'm challenging you on it.

I have no idea what you mean here. Life involves interactions of molecules. Not all interactions of molecules are life. Molecules themselves aren't alive. What's the difficulty?

Nobody, from the physicists who study correlation, to the chemists who study molecules, to the biologists who study life, to the common English-speaker who made up the word, considers your average molecule alive (some RNA might be an exception, but that's not your complaint).

AdPopulam?.

Exactly. Words acquire meaning through use, and the popula are the ones who use them. Inventing your own words is fun, but if you make them sound like common words and then use them in common speech, you're creating needless confusion. Why would you want that? If you're not using the usual concept of life, or don't think it's coherent, make up a new one - but give it a new name.

So for a distinction to be life, it has to leave them out. That's already laid out on this and associate pages.

Distinctions change and recombine, rise and fall in popularity, move into and out of agreement. As for the various pages, as far as I can see they're quite inconsistent and inconclusive.

About the distinction, and about some border cases. But not about standard, familiar examples like squid and molecules. For a comparable example, people might debate about what defines a dictatorship, and might wonder whether certain countries fall under its umbrella. But everyone knows Mussolini was a dictator, and any definition that excludes him is wrong. Things like life and dictatorships are fuzzy concepts, but that doesn't mean they aren't concepts at all.

You're redefining life. You're destroying the concept of life. You're identifying the living and the dead. None of this is interesting, nor even new or novel.

Is this a joke Peter? I know from MemesShmemes that you're beyond such BS. If it was, then I apologize for ruining it. -- RK

No joke, RK. Read FrameProblem to see what I'm trying to get at. I woke up this morning realizing that "Tao" is best translated as "Life". You may consider this metaphysical if you like, but I mean it pragmatically.

As for atoms being dead, who said there are atoms? Atoms are merely theoretical beasts conjured to explain empirical results. The fact that the explanations require outright math cheating - ReNormalization and so on - to work tells us explicitly that atoms have a FrameProblem of their own. See http://www.cryonet.org/cgi-bin/dsp.cgi?msg=23914 and its prequelae for the beginning of an attempt at ReFraming physics minus this guff. -- Pete

Atoms work incredibly well, especially since they can be imaged, and extremely minor tweaks to mathematics don't influence that.

I can see rainbows without a microscope. And epicycles worked incredibly well ...

Given that elliptic motion is the same thing as circular motion plus an infinite number of finely tuned epicycles, I have nothing against them - they're just a way to make approximations to paths, like we do with polynomials or Fourier series.

Yes. But they're uneconomical, and the symptom is these infinities popping up. I assert without proof that infinities are invariably a symptom of FrameProblems in theories. I believe we discussed this before on ThereIsNoInfinity.

Absolutely. Someone actually using epicycles, of course, would never notice there are an infinite number. They'd just keep adding them until they have some large number that explains all their observations, and in the event that a new observation pops up, add some more without ever noticing what they are approximating. If I may be so bold, though, this reminds me a lot of adding terms in your binary polynomial.

To avoid adding terms to a polynomial you need to define a resolution hierarchy. Start by labelling gross regions of the entire range of description. Then label subregions within those regions. Then subregions within subregions. And so on until your theory is predictive enough to cover your empiricism. Damn, now that gives me good reason to revive TheReformSociety where there's a discussion of same. Ah well, time to bump it up the priority chart. Which means sticking a priority chart up on my wall needs to happen sooner ... TimeManagementIsaBitch.

Epicycles were predictive enough to cover empirical observations. A long time later, new observations made it clear more were needed, so they were added. A very long time later, new observations made it clear even more were needed, and Kepler figured out a way to forgo the whole process. What I'm suggesting is that you may never get a polynomial with genuine predictive power, that your theory won't contain more than what's put into it. The whole point of a physical model is to explain as much as possible with as few assumptions as possible, I think the binary polynomial will simply end up being a restatement of what you facts you've chosen to explain. Yes, I'm aware physics often has this problem, but to a much lesser degree because it does allow you to abandon epicycles.

There are always ways to abandon epicycles. The procedure, I agree, requires a little more work than I've described.

I can't see cells without a microscope, I can't see air directly, and most people never end up seeing Papua New Guinea at all. So I don't know what your point with the former is. Is it that rainbows aren't real? Because they are, they just don't correspond to an assemblage of atoms like most things do.

My point is that because you can visualize something that you believe is explained by a theory does not demonstrate anything in particular about the theory. Except that you haven't got an empirical refutation of it in that photo over there. Of course we can just as easily see those nuggety atoms and indeed whole molecules as waves, for which see the latest NewScientist article on diffracting C70 molecules. Is dey little waves or is dey little rocks? It's presumptous to think they're anything but patterns in your empiricalscope.

Likewise rainbows. They are quite real - I've seen them in my garden more often than fairies. That they are an artifact of my sensory apparatus does nothing to diminish their reality either.

Rainbows are a genuine effect external to your sensory organs, and any theory of optics that doesn't explain why you see them will be incomplete. Likewise there has to be some effect that explains what shows up as atoms, and at that level I'm willing to call any such thing an atom, regardless of whether it is a wave (all that's necessary in modern QM, by the way) or a particle or a mere confluence of other things.

Oh, refraction is a genuine effect, sure. But my interpretation of my sensations of light refracting through mist as a beautiful multihued arch that I feel like I could climb over, that's an artifact of my eyes and mind. So for waves, particles, transactions, strings, branes, or whatever realities your physicists are serving up this week.

By these standards, all interpretation is in your mind, but still corresponds to physical reality. Ok, what's your point? In what sense are atoms different than refraction, light, or anything else?

The rainbow and the image of the atoms are visually compelling, but don't necessarily correspond to any particular theory. Atoms, I grant work well in the particular domains where we've been able to make 'em work well. But who knows what technology we might conjure from another theory? Certainly the history of human knowledge carries no suggestion that we are not presently afflicted with a FrameProblem, So it's worth exploring.

ReNormalization is something present in some quantum models, but not in all, and there are good reasons why it works.

I'd like to understand this better Joshua - say more?

I'm not an expert on why it works, I just know there is a mathematical model behind it. Since some versions of physics, like string theory, don't use renormalization at all I've never bothered to learn the huge amount of often poorly explained math necessary to understand it. My apologies.

String, M, and LQG theories rapidly exceed my GreekLetterThreshold too. http://www.physicsforums.com/showthread.php?t=7293&page=3 suggests even those that feel they grasp these things don't agree very well with one another. I take your point however - it may be that there are QuantumTheorys that aren't subject to this weakness. One day soon I'm going to have to bite the bullet and dive in there.''

Why would you have more faith in your binary polynomial? For all you know, it might never be sufficient to make predictions, or more likely could end up mathematically equivalent to a present model. Mathematically equivalent models aren't really different, they're just different ways of viewing things.

It assumes less, so by OccamsRazor is preferable. And it can have no infinities a.k.a ambiguities. And science is not a matter of faith but exploration and discovery. If you declare QM a TOE, equivalent to all possible mathematical models, then by faith there's no need for anything but QM. If you OpenYourMind, there are viable alternatives left dreadfully unplumbed.

The process you're using to generate the polynomial may not assume much, but the polynomial itself may end up assuming a great deal, probably far more than QM. I'm not close-minded to possible alternatives, but I'd want to see actual theories rather than assertions that something will inevitably and miraculously produce better results. Until then, they're just possible alternatives, which may or may not be viable. Fair enough?

Heck yes, and gracious too.

All this is beside the point, though. The concept of Tao isn't the same as that of life, because the latter isn't everywhere.

So you assume. The point of this page is to challenge that assumption. So show me a place where life demonstrably isn't.

The meaning of words is determined by use. By common use, atoms and rocks aren't alive (yes, rocks may having living things in them, but by our use that isn't the same thing). If you don't make such assumptions, you don't end up with a concept related to our word life.

Changing the meaning of life to match is simply robbing us a useful term. If you don't find the distinction it expresses useful, then don't use the word, but don't muddy the waters for everyone else by setting up an alternate and redundant meaning. - JoshuaGrosse

I beg your pardon, but all words achieve meaning by a process of negotiation. Dictionaries aren't handed down engraved in stone. We're entitled to discuss and consider alternatives. If you don't enjoy this discussion, don't tell me to shut up - go find yourself another discussion you do enjoy. Of course I'll miss you, but that's preferable to you experiencing distress.

No, meanings aren't engraved in stone, and no, that doesn't mean it's worthwhile to assign any meaning to any word. I could talk about universal chair, but then my use of the word chair wouldn't have much correspondence to anyone else's, so why wouldn't I use a new word? The concern here isn't that I might get annoyed, it's that things you have to say might become hard to understand due to linguistic conflicts.

I mean "life" in exactly the ordinary everyday sense. Look, to a bacterium our guts seem to have no life either. There's this sunlike source of enthalpy up toward the top of the gullet that radiates food energy beneficently and homeostatically down on the bacterium in its vast microcosmos. There's an entropic sink like a night sky down below. The proposition that such orderliness has occurred due to living processes on larger scales and longer timeframes will appear preposterous to J.Bacter no matter how strenously P.Bacter draws analogies with the internal thermodynamics of bacteria. And if you tell me that J. and P. Bacter can't possibly be complex enough to discuss the matter I'll point out that SiTi remains an unfunded project ...

I'll be honest - I don't think bacteria have a concept of life that corresponds to ours. But that's beside the point. When Pylori tells James that he thinks the whole body is alive, what does he mean? Without a distinction between living and non-living things, he's just making stuff up. If there is such a distinction, there may or may not be an answer. The two may not smart or travelled enough to find it out, but that's no reason to force them to consider the fecal matter they live beside as alive as them.

The matter in the faeces will go straight into my veggie patch after due processing, and eventually again become part of P and J or their descendants who will have read of their ancient debate in the great library of the upper sigmoid. P2 and J2, bacterial scientists, construct an experiment whereby they pack some heavy carbon into distinctive configurations in the faeces. Their descendents, P3 and J3, observe these distinctive configurations reissuing from the white hole of the gullet. "Hah!" declares P3, "now you see direct evidence of UniversalLife!". "Pish," responds J3, "It's just SpookyActionAtaDistance?, nothing more."

Or J3 might say, that's an interesting effect, but why would that be considered evidence of UniversalLife?

P3 responds, "the universe is taking our entropic remains, adding enthalpy to 'em, and recycling them. Only life does that."

Well, if that's the distinction these bacteria are using, J3 should accept that. Myself, I've seen any number of machines which do exactly that, and that aren't normally considered alive.

And at this point P3 should go back, look at what life means in the common bacterial tongue. Then he might find the universe has properties like living things, has properties like dead things, has only known properties that aren't definitely either, or possibly that the concepts of alive and dead don't apply to such things. Meanwhile, various objects in his universe remain definitely alive, definitely dead, undecided, or ambiguous. That's where we are now.

That's where you are now. If life is an attribute of ProCess, what relationship do things have with it? Is this relationship necessary to the description of life? I'm suggesting we simply regard things as complexes of distinctions per WhatsaDistinction and thereby relegate them to the realm of thought.

An interesting proposition (well, okay, interesting understanding), Peter. After some consideration I find I really can't improve on it, other than to change terminology, staging, and stuff like that.

I listened to a couple of hours of discussion yesterday evening having to do with the DrakesEquation for determining the likelihood of intelligent life or civilization within scopes like our quadrant, our galaxy, our universe, and so on. The astronomy professor who tendered the explanation for the math and the foundations for the thinking process then remarked that a completely different set of probabilities is reached if one allows that the universe was "by design" rather than "by accident." His next statement set the interviewer back a bit; he stated that he supported the "by design" concept.

His two collaborators support the "by accident" scenario. All three are experts, practicing astronomers. All three are working with the same evidence.

I find that with some variation, I support the "life did it" approach over the (more popular) "life happened." I realize that the "it's all dead except for what's alive" viewpoint is (recently) increasingly more popular, but popularity, even among scholars, is the first measure of validity that I reject.

In general I would say I agree with you. Our differences, discussed, would probably yield ViolentAgreement.

Can I "prove" that life is essentially a spiritual phenomenon? Not to the satisfaction of anyone who demands such proof. Hell, I've got kids that don't buy it. They accept the "educators" as authority, I'm just a parent. Oh, well, at their age I didn't buy it either. Plenty of time to draw their own conclusions. -- GarryHamilton

I'm always dismayed to see physicists fall back on "by design" - PaulDavies? is the most egregious, having accepted money for the practice. If these guys had a shred of respect for the ScientificMethod they'd say IdontKnow. Here we're suggesting that "living until proven dead" is a good way to approach physics itself - since everything in our experience is literally bursting at the seams with life, even the rocks under our feet, nothing on Earth suggests there is anything dead anywhere else.

Indeed, with all that SpookyActionAtaDistance? connecting our every move with our every other move, not to mention every other move, since we're alive how could it be possible that the rest of the universe is not? I thought the MotherGaia junk was BS until I learned a little thermodynamics. Now I think, since thermodynamics gives rise to us - EvolutionAndEnthalpy - well then MotherGaia is kind of wimping out on the idea. -- Not-a-BigOmegast-Though-Pete.

Everything is connected, but that doesn't mean that things can't be distinguished!

That's not what I said. PartToWholeAsWholeIsToPart. Since we see connections and correlations between all our Earthly interactions and the phenomena that occur in other parts of the cosmos, why assume that the rest of the cosmos is distinctly dead when here on Earth everything is distinctly alive?

That distinctions are selected arbitrarily doesn't mean they are worthless.

I'm not certain to what you refer here.

And you can find plenty of non-living things on Earth, they just tend to have living things mixed up in them. Besides, even with living until proven dead you should still have a distinction.

Should you? We have universal energy - the vacuum energy. We have universal information - SpookyActionAtaDistance?. We have a universal origin - the BigBang. Why not UniversalLife too?

All this seems to me, by the way, to be based on an idea that there is something wrong with dead things, that things should be alive. But an object being dead doesn't prevent it from being active, useful, interesting, and the like. It just means it's different from the class of things we call alive. - JG

Is life an attribute of objects? I thought it was an attribute of process. You show me your dead object and I'll bet it's involved in living processes at some scale or other. Watching rotting leaves shore up the roots of a tree prior to their reconstruction as green leaves ... they're not dead, just pining! -- Pete

Oh, absolutely! But being involved with living things doesn't make it alive. Life is an attribute primarily of objects: people, fish, amoebae may be alive, all the rocks, winches, and atoms we have encountered are not.

I strenously dispute that objects are inherently alive. Freeze your amoeba and, ZenoBuddhism notwithstanding, its life is not evident in any regard. But thaw it and away it goes again. Or consider cells in the GameOfLife - by distinction they seem not to live, but their process may. For that matter, I wonder if you regard a glider in the GameOfLife as possessing life, or how you might distinguish it from, say, a prion with no greater complexity ...

We divide things like this because it's useful to talk about the common properties of the former. That's not meant to ignore the common properties and connections of all of them.

The connections, as they change and propagate signals, are all the life I can see in anythings. Organism does not happen in isolation; living processes require cycles, yes?

You know as well or better than I do that objects are mental structures imposed on a physical reality they reflect incompletely. Nonetheless, they're an important abstraction, and it's nice to be able to say things about them. Since living things are a class of objects, it's not surprising they don't exist in isolation, especially since they're defined by their behaviors, which inherently include interaction with their environment. That doesn't make the concept invalid, and neither does the existence of gray areas like prions and cysts, it just means the distinction could be refined in several directions.

Does water run, or does the tap? We may say that I leave the tap running. But this is just loose language - it doesn't go any place. When the water runs, that has a consequence. When the tap runs, if there is no water there is no consequence.

As for the game of life, by the way, gliders don't match the criteria on DefinitionOfLife or any of the "standard" definitions. They're active but non-living, somewhat like a sound wave. The replicators found in similar universes come closer, though I personally wouldn't call them alive either. Basically, the concept has a tough time when transposed into universes structured completely different from ours. No, that doesn't bother me.

The point is it's not the objects - the cells - that do the propagating of pattern. Nor does the pattern propagate in isolation. Take the pattern and embroider it into your table-cloth, it won't propagate. It's the use of the pattern as a parameterization of the process that has, as an epiphenomenon, this propagation of pattern. If you acknowledge that propagation of pattern is a fundamental of life, then you acknowledge that life is an attribute of process.

I'm not sure what you mean by this, then. A glider isn't outside of a life-like cellular automaton, and an electrical lamp isn't unless there are physics allowing electricity, light, and its particular structure to turn one into the other. As I said, objects can't be defined without reference to their behaviors and environment. This doesn't prevent us from ascribing properties to the objects that related objects don't have. Both a lamp and a desk are involved in providing light for me, but that doesn't make them both luminaries. Both an ant and a nest are needed to make a colony, but that doesn't make them both alive. Or are you hinting at something else entirely?

Life can be understood as a dynamic relationship between objects and their properties as they are observed at one moment and as they are observed at the next moment, or at a series of moments over time. Life seems then less an object than a function.

This strikes me as a false dichotomy. Life refers to the functions of an object. It doesn't make any sense without the behavior, but it doesn't make any sense without the object, either.

Without the object you have UniversalLife, because there is no inherent distinction between elements of process except as conveniences of our conversation.

The suggestion of viewing the universe as alive can be useful for internal psychological/spiritual purposes. It is definitely not helpful for scientific purposes.

Can you explain why you think this? Science begins with IdontKnow; to assert death as the fundamental state of reality and then life as an epiphenomenon seems rather a drastic jump away from IdontKnow. In fact it seems an article of faith. OpenYourMind?

Choose your purpose and communicate it clearly when making such suggestions.

I have no purpose and all my communications are muddled and cloudy. But I nurse at nature's breast.

As it happens, the problem with defining "life" scientifically has little to do with life, and everything to do with what we think we mean by "definition". Some kinds of "definition" cannot withstand counterexamples. Other kinds can. It's an epistemology issue, not one about life. You run into similar troubles if you try to define "blue" and "green" in a way that there are no examples of colors that are hard to categorize. Good luck with shades of blue-green. -- DougMerritt

You can define blue and green by contrast; this colour against that colour looks blue; that colour against this colour looks green. Simply account for all the ontologies of the experience and you reproduce the experience. This has been a fundamental of interior design for a long time, and no mystery to those skilled in the art.

As for definitions that don't withstand counterexamples, they're sometimes useful stepping stones on the way to a distinction (WhatsaDistinction ...) but no more than that.

As for epistemology, consider the LeibnizianDefinitionOfConsciousness, to which it is central. I'll go further and assert that that definition covers "life" just as well as well. -- Pete

Incidentally, it may be noted that relativitistic models completely lack action at a distance, though they have other things to replace it.