Is Life Fundamental? by Sara Imari Walker

Oh Sara, you speak like a scientist and I am a wild visionary in search of entertaining ideas. I try to make sense of the world and the vision above makes perfect sense. More than any other idea I've heard. Especially, the Internet, how it evolved, the viruses and worms... It makes you wonder how did real viruses evolve? They cannot exist, unless there is already in existence a cell (and not just one!) with all its machinery running so that they can take over and make copies of themselves. It would seem that the widespread hypothesis that viruses are protolife from which a primitive cell eventually evolved is illogical. Some rightfully doubt that viruses can even be considered alive! The same is with the computer viruses. These little programs can exist and function only when a sophisticated system is in place and it is used often exchanging information with other systems (and the vector is a memory key, lol). But again I got carried away... You Sara, just get my brain going.

But, returning to your question "where would the first intelligent designers come from in your particular example?"

Ah! This is actually easy. Here we have to invoke the most ancient of myths and envision something like this: imagine a god, the one and only, alpha and omega, beginning and the end. And he is oh so lonely. There is nothing but him in the whole world. He is the world. With infinite time on his hands. And so it came to pass that God got bored. And he created a mirror. His image kept him entertained for an infinite while, as he kept company with himself. But then this too was no longer enough. God was overcome with terrible longing, longing for something he could not name. And so in a fit of frustration he smashed the mirror and it shattered into a myriad of pieces. That's how the first world was made.

You have other questions?

I had fun :)

PS

Or take the topic of many essays here, like Does nature have faithful mathematical representation? (by Roger Schlafly). Roger argues againts the prevailing notion of modern theoretical physics that the true nature of reality is mathematics. But why not? If our world is someone's computer, this would make perfect sense. After all, before computers were linked into a world wide network and became the main source of entertainment, their first designation was to compute. They are highly logically organized. And the stuff they can do! My last job was in LA, in a special effects studio. Already then the quality was such that you can hardly tell what's the real footage and what is rendered. Hey, the rendered stuff is usually better! Have you ever wondered, what goes on in between those blocks of 1's and 0's through which processes crunch for days on end? That's logically organized space represents a virtual world modeled on ours.

Hi Sara,

Having had the advantage (and pleasure) of reading your preprint "The Algorithmic Origins of Life," that George Ellis kindly linked on his site, I would like to reproduce here part of my reaction, as it applies to your current essay:

"Take the statement, "To say that information is 'instructional' (or algorithmic) and 'coded' represents a crucial conceptual leap -- separating the biological from the non-biological realm -- implying that a gene is 'for' something."

Even though I strongly subscribe to the view -- as I believe both Ellis and Davies also do -- that the universe is suffused with meaning and consciousness, I just can't get my mind around what the statement above logically entails: that ' ... coded instructions are useless unless there is a system that can decode. interpret, and act on those instructions.'

In fact, we don't have a warrant to believe that the world is algorithmically compressible. If it isn't, there is no posssible non-arbitrary demarcation between organic and inorganic life. Self-replicating systems, demonstrably, are sustained on the concept of adaptation alone. In my local ecosystem, a mosquito is useless to me, while globally, my continued existence may depend on the mosquito larvae on which the fish feed and on which I in turn feed. I agree with the authors that analog systems are less adaptable than digital-switching memory processing, such as a CNS-endowed creature possesses; however, analog processes in complex systems allow robust network switching of useful resources for required task performance. So I have to disagree that ' ... in informational terms ... analog systems are not as versatile or as stable as digital systems and as such likely have very limited evolutionary capacity.' In fact, the evolutionary capacity of the complex system is measured in variety and redundance of resources. Nature trades efficiency for creativity, and those created products are manifestly analog systems which provide new input for creating more novel digital mechanical systems producing new analog creations.

I don't know how -- with this piece -- Davies escapes joining the side of biological determinism (The "gene machine" of Dawkins) which in *The Matter Myth* he and John Gribbin criticized: 'Many people have rejected scientific values because they regard materialsm as a sterile and bleak philosophy, which reduces human beings to automatons and leaves no room for free will or creativity.' Personally, I still regard myself as a materialist and reductionist, though like Gell-Mann, I find no conflict between a continuum of consciousness (quarks to jaguars) and free will. If one refrains from drawing boundaries between life and non-life, algorithmic subroutines that define life and imbue its creatures with free will are not discontinuous with the complex system by which such life is sustained, though which itself is not demonstrably algorithmically compressible.

I support the 'information narrative.' I think I'm more prone, though, to accept an approach that treats the narrative *itself* as an evolutionary continuum, such as Gregory Chaitin's newly published *Proving Darwin: Making Biology Mathematical.*"

Having said that, though -- I appreciate the meticulous care that you have invested in identifying and demarcating non-trivial properties of biological life from the inorganic. I agree up to the point that coded instructions are useless without a decoder -- after all, just as genes contain a great number of "switched off" or undecoded potential functions, I find no reason to think that the rest of nature might not be so endowed -- i.e., assume infinite creativity, and infinite variety and redundancy must follow. This subverts biological determinism -- because we do not have to efficiently match codes to decoders -- without sacrificing the idea that life is emergent. Subsystems can just as well re-program themselves for adaptability. Life can just as well emerge from the quantum vacuum.

If all reality is information-theoretic as Wheeler proposed, and all life is problem solving as Karl Popper proposed, the reality of life is sustained evolution, dependent on an infinitely varied potential of both used and unused resources in any time interval.

Thanks for a great read and best wishes in the contest. I do hope you have a chance to visit my essay ("The Perfect First Question").

Tom

Sorry, lost my log-in. The above is mine.

Tom

My guess, in terms of causation, is that in non-life the feeding process (including the gathering) is a matter of bottom-up causation and in life it is a top-down causation. I mean, the photons emitted from a tasty piece of food are hardly enough to make us reach out and eat the food, but this is what happens nonetheless.

I start to think a chemical reaction to obtain a self-replicating rna.

The chemical composition of the rna is a trace of the creation zone: I wish to obtain a zone on the Earth where we had concurrently sulfur, phosphorous, oxygen, carbon, nitrogen and hydrogen.

I think that only hydrothermal vent can transport in a zone all these element, from the inner layers of the Earth (I read a similar idea of Wachtershauser): only a transport phenomenon can melt different molecules.

The hot hydrothermal vent in deep see, with high temperature, can form chaotic toroidal flux (close flux of water, enriched with chemical component), that cook the chemical soup, breaking the weak covalent bond, and recombining (cold phases far away from the hydrothermal vent) the break molecule in a complex way (hot stage, cold stage) in a chaotic way (the path of each molecule is different for chaotic vortex, so that each reaction time is obtained casually): the chemical deposition is a proof of the close path (that can be slow).

It is an idea similar to Miller-Urey, using thermal energy instead of lightining, this can be simulated for high pressure and temperatue (I don't know, when I write, what is the critical thermodynamical point for the life, and if this point exist).

The rna far away the hydrothermal vent have not feeding, the rna near the hot zone is favorite, but it is necessary a more complex life form (for a robust hot environment life), then the evolution start.

Saluti

Domenico

It's hard for me to say how such behaviour can be quantified, but I'm sure that it might have something to do with what's being investigated here.

If I draw a fictitious spherical boundary around a region of space and then send in some blackbody radiation, I will reach the conclusion that absolutely nothing special is going on within the sphere if the blackbody radiation exits without delay (beyond that given by the finite speed of light) and without a change in the number of or frequency of the photons. If there is a delay, or change in the light's makeup, then I know that there is some kind of buffer inside the sphere that is allowing for the imbalance of input versus output power.

So, I am wondering if we can somehow draw a distinction between life and non-life by analyzing the input vs output power over long periods of time. Surely there is information to be gained from this "holographic" analysis, if specific patterns in interaction are a hallmark of living matter.

I am not an expert in organic chemistry, but at first sight these remember me the cracking process.

In the cracking process (600 kpa or 7000 kpa, a column of water of 60m or 700m, and less of 900°C) there are obtained aromatic intermediate product (I think to the rna nucleobases), and a vast class of intermediate chemical compound.

The interesting thing is that the cracking in the hydrothermal vent (if it is true) work like the crossing over, deletions and translocation (a thermal evolution before a genetic evolution): if this is true, the genes learned the method from the environment!

Saluti

Domenico

You are welcome,

Ps do you know the works of Oparine about the amino acids in a kind of primordial mixture ?

Regards

Steve D.

We are all scientists here, each in our own way ;)

I am glad that the majority no longer thinks that viruses came first. I stopped following this issue long ago, when I settled it for myself. I am afraid it will be a while before I could recommend you a book of mine, but something tells me you will read it anyway.

I feel like perhaps I need to apologize for my playful posts above and hope to be forgiven on the grounds that everyone could use a moment of levity in a discussion as serious as ours.

All the best to you!

Sara,

It will not be possible to develop a "universal communications language," based upon DNA, until we have a full understanding of the DNA coding algorithm. It seems we do not. Junk DNA

The scientific community doesn't learn from its past mistakes, probably because they do not "bother" telling new students about past mistakes.

I read an article some years back about the statements the Germans made about the content of the ancient Egyptian medical papyrus that came into their possession. The German physicians that participated in the translation used the term "sewer medicine" when the translation revealed that crocodile "dung" was used to cover open wounds. It was not revealed until 1951, after the antibiotic discoveries preceding that date, that crocodile "dung" had very strong antibiotic properties.

I think Georgina Parry should have been somewhat less diplomatic in her essay, topic 1316, when she used the term " incomplete information," as there are many instances where the term "ignorance" should be used.

The statement made by the eminent scientists that declared most of DNA is "Junk DNA" is no less ignorant than that made by the German physicians. Are the esteemed scientists so narcissistic that they cannot say, "We do not know."?

Hello,

I have several ideas, I like this topic :)

If the serie of uniqueness is inserted, so we can have a specific spherical architecture with the volumes.

The amino acids and their combinations of HCNO are incredible.The ionic links can be correlated with the number for the quantization, the volumes are essential at my humble opinion considering a good taxonomy for the exchange of informations. The atomic links and the hydrogen bridge also are under this logic. Like the interactions of London that I find very relevant personally.

The ARN this acid ribonucleic is so an interesting link for the encoding.If the bosonic fields and the gravitational stabilities are analyzed with the serie of uniqueness, and its number of spheres, finite.So it is relevant considering the rule of H and its serie of uniqueness. This quantum number is the same than our cosmological number.So the volumes of this serie are important.If the light is differenciated of the mass with a different sense of rotation, so we see the links with the singularities. The two roads are far of us, The informations and their complexity are there in the two senses.

Regards

Hi Sara,

"I am not yet convinced that information control would be nearly as robust in a purely analog chemical system, and therefore its capacity for reliable network switching should be limited as compared to an analog digital chemical system. I'd be very interested in any examples to the contrary."

I see any self organized system as fundamentally analog, because it must be bounded and continuous. What I mean by that, is that the network node switching continuum examined on varying time scales reveals that the discrete effects of multi-scale variety (Bar-Yam) can vary widely as measured at short time intervals, though the system shows little change over the long term. The Braha--Bar-Yam approach to dynamic link utilization sheds light, I think, on why self organized systems -- whether organic or inorganic and by definition both self similar and self limiting -- are metastable. Even considering any multicellular organism as a corporation of cooperating cells that are constantly communicating, we see varying centers (hubs) of activity at short local intervals and stable coherence globally.

Where is the boundary between the inorganic chemical self organization, and the organic? System-wide, they are interactive. We can always prescribe arbitrary boundaries among systems when we isolate characteristics, though we inevitably regress to systems of systems, when we deal with the deepest foundational questions.

Yaneer Bar-Yam advanced the idea of " ... scale of response and the effect of coordinated versus uncoordinated response as a key attribute of complex systems ..." that integrates hierarchical control with distributed control in a compellingly rigorous fashion, in my opinion.

I'm not disagreeing with you. I'm just questioning the idea that we may make any non-arbitrary distinction between life and non-life in the context of complex system self organization. If not, a logical entailment tells us that we can make no non-arbitrary distinction between consciousness and non-consciousness. *Then* from this continuum, digitsl schemata and thinking processes can be derived. The analog function is primary.

You write, " ... somewhere in that potential continuum a major shift in the way information is handled and processed does occur and ... this is a constructive way of thinking about life's origins." Yes, I strongly agree -- that's the way that self organized criticality (Per Bak) works, and which supports the Gould-Eldredge model of punctuated equilibria in evolutionary biology.

All best,

Tom

Semantic of the life

I think that the life can have had the evolution from self-replicating rna, viroid, virus with capsid (the simplest membrane), macrovirus and bacteria.

The passage from a low level life to high level is identified by closed system (capsid membrane): the chemical reaction chains must be in a closed system (no dispersion of the chemical products), so that multiple chemical process are possible.

The chemical reaction are equivalent to a logic, where the word are the chemical compound, and the rna is the logic program (A +B=C is equivalent to: if A and B then C ): the chemical reaction in a closed system are a language (logic, programming or brain), this remember me the De Arte Combinatoria of Leibniz.

The self-replicating rna is a semantic "I" (existence : the egocentricest being), there are not information processes.

The simplest virus is "I think", where there is a chemical process that from two inner word produce a sentence: this is the life start, the consciousness.

A colony of virus is a complex slow thought (years for a complete sentence): there are logical chemical sentences, where only the more intelligent (in the environment) virus is the winning idea (is it a brain thought a chemical process?).

Saluti

Domenico