23 Matching Annotations
  1. Feb 2024
    1. The experiences of the atomic scientists clearly show the need to takepersonal responsibility, the danger that things will move too fast, andthe way in which a process can take on a life of its own. We can, as theydid, create insurmountable problems in almost no time flat. We mustdo more thinking up front if we are not to be similarly surprised andshocked by the consequences of our inventions.

      Bill Joy's mention that insurmountable problems can "take on a life of [their] own" is a spectacular reason for having a solid definition of what "life" is, so that we might have better means of subverting it in specific and potentially catastrophic situations.

  2. Jan 2023
    1. As British philosopher Galen Strawson recently put it, to imagine that one can travel from insensate matter to a being capable of discussing the existence of insensate matter in a mere two jumps is simply to make emergence do too much work.
    2. emergentism. The argument here is that once a certain level of complexity is reached, there is a kind of qualitative leap where completely new sorts of physical laws can “emerge”—ones that are premised on, but cannot be reduced to, what came before.
    3. To exercise one’s capacities to their fullest extent is to take pleasure in one’s own existence, and with sociable creatures, such pleasures are proportionally magnified when performed in company. From the Russian perspective, this does not need to be explained. It is simply what life is. We don’t have to explain why creatures desire to be alive. Life is an end in itself. And if what being alive actually consists of is having powers—to run, jump, fight, fly through the air—then surely the exercise of such powers as an end in itself does not have to be explained either. It’s just an extension of the same principle.

      I'm not sure I like that Graeber waves away the question "why play?" here. I don't think there's an equivalency to the "why life?" question.

      It will take some additional thinking to build something up to refute this idea however.

  3. Sep 2022
    1. I have a long list of ideas I want to pursue in cosmology, quantum mechanics, complexity, statistical mechanics, emergence, information, democracy, origin of life, and elsewhere. Maybe we’ll start up a seminar series in Complexity and Emergence that brings different people together. Maybe it will grow into a Center of some kind.

      https://www.preposterousuniverse.com/blog/2022/03/06/johns-hopkins/

      Somehow I missed that Sean Carroll had moved to Johns Hopkins? Realized today when his next book showed up on my doorstep with his new affiliation.

  4. Feb 2022
    1. You may remember from school the difference between an exergonicand an endergonic reaction. In the first case, you constantly need toadd energy to keep the process going. In the second case, thereaction, once triggered, continues by itself and even releasesenergy.

      The build up of complexity which results in the creation of life with increasing complexity must certainly be endergonic if the process is to last for any extensive length of time. Once the process becomes exergonic or reaches homeostasis, then the building of complexity and even life itself will cease to exist.

      Must this always be true? Proof? Counter examples?

  5. Jan 2022
    1. Autopoiesis has been proposed as a potential mechanism of abiogenesis, by which primitive cells evolved into more complex molecules that could support the development of life.
    2. Until recently[30][31][32] there have been almost no attempts to compare the different theories and discuss them together.
      1. Letelier, J C; Cárdenas, M L; Cornish-Bowden, A (2011). "From L'Homme Machine to metabolic closure: steps towards understanding life". J. Theor. Biol. 286 (1): 100–113. Bibcode:2011JThBi.286..100L. doi:10.1016/j.jtbi.2011.06.033. PMID 21763318.
      2. Igamberdiev, A.U. (2014). "Time rescaling and pattern formation in biological evolution". BioSystems. 123: 19–26. doi:10.1016/j.biosystems.2014.03.002. PMID 24690545.
      3. Cornish-Bowden, A; Cárdenas, M L (2020). "Contrasting theories of life: historical context, current theories. In search of an ideal theory". BioSystems. 188: 104063. doi:10.1016/j.biosystems.2019.104063. PMID 31715221. S2CID 207946798.

      Relationship to the broader idea in Loewenstein as well...

    3. Autopoiesis is just one of several current theories of life, including the chemoton[20] of Tibor Gánti, the hypercycle of Manfred Eigen and Peter Schuster,[21] [22] [23] the (M,R) systems[24][25] of Robert Rosen, and the autocatalytic sets[26] of Stuart Kauffman, similar to an earlier proposal by Freeman Dyson.[27] All of these (including autopoiesis) found their original inspiration in Erwin Schrödinger's book What is Life?[28] but at first they appear to have little in common with one another, largely because the authors did not communicate with one another, and none of them made any reference in their principal publications to any of the other theories.
  6. Nov 2021
    1. For if I wait out the uncomfortable night by the river,I fear that the female dew and the evil frost togetherwill be too much for my damaged strength, I am so exhausted, and in themorning a chilly wind will blow from the river; 470 but if I go up the slopeand into the shadowy forest,and lie down to sleep among the dense bushes, even if the chill andweariness let me be, and a sweet sleep comes upon me,I fear I may become spoil and prey to the wild animals.’

      There's something about the description here that reminds me of the closing paragraph of Charles Darwin's On The Origin of the Species (p 489):

      It is interesting to contemplate an entangled bank, clothed with many plants of many kinds, with birds singing on the bushes, with various insects flitting about, and with worms crawling through the damp earth, [...]

      Both authors are writing about riverbanks, life, and uncertainty.

  7. Jul 2021
    1. Complexity: your partner needs to be sufficiently autonomous. Autonomy is promoted by growing inner complexity of the system. Its inner complexity depends on both the number of notes and their relationships with each other.

      The complexity of a system promotes autonomy.

      How do we define autonomy here? Is this statement really true? Useful? How might this related to the origin of life?

  8. May 2021
  9. Dec 2020
    1. In the second idea, German chemist Manfred Eigen described what he called a “hypercycle,” in which several autocatalytic sets combine to form a single larger one. Eigen’s variant introduces a crucial distinction: In a hypercycle, some of the chemicals are genes and are therefore made of DNA or some other nucleic acid, while others are proteins that are made-to-order based on the information in the genes. This system could evolve based on changes—mutations—in the genes, a function that Kauffman’s model lacked.
    2. In 1971 Gánti tackled the problem head-on in a new book, Az Élet Princípiuma, or The Principles of Life. Published only in Hungarian, this book contained the first version of his chemoton model, which described what he saw as the fundamental unit of life. However, this early model of the organism was incomplete, and it would take him another three years to publish what is now regarded as the definitive version—again only in Hungarian, in a paper that is not available online.
    3. In 1966 he published a book on molecular biology called Forradalom az Élet Kutatásában, or Revolution in Life Research, a dominant university textbook for years—partly because few others were available. The book asked whether science understood how life was organized, and concluded that it did not.
    4. That’s because he devised a model of the simplest possible living organism, which he called the chemoton, that points to an exciting explanation for how life on Earth began.

      Tibor Gánti

  10. Oct 2020
    1. they found that the glyoxylate and pyruvate reacted to make a range of compounds that included chemical analogues to all the intermediary products in the TCA cycle except for citric acid. Moreover, these products all formed in water within a single reaction vessel, at temperatures and pH conditions mild enough to be compatible with conditions on Earth.
    1. In the meantime, the classification of viruses remains unclear. Tupanviruses seem to be dependent on their hosts for very little, and other viruses, according to one preprint, even encode ribosomal proteins. “The gap between cellular organisms and viruses is starting to close,” Deeg said.

      Is there a graph of known viruses categoriezed by the machinery that they do or don't have? Can they be classified and sub-classified so that emergent patterns come forward thus allowing us to trace back their ancestry?

    1. Chetty is also using tax data to measure the long-term impacts of dozens of place-based interventions, such as enterprise zones, which use tax and other incentives to draw businesses into economically depressed areas.

      It wasn't this particular piece of text, but roughly at about here I had the thought that these communities could be looked at as life from an input /output perspective in relation to homeostasis. Essentially they're being slowly starved out and killed in a quietly moral yet amoral way. As a result entropy is slowly killing them and also causing problems for the society around them that blames the them for their own problems. Giving them some oxygen to breathe and thrive will fix so many of the problems.

  11. Jul 2019
    1. If all giant viruses turn out to share translation-related genes that are unique to their group, then it would mean they had a large common ancestor, an ancient virus that diversified over time, and it would lend support to the idea that giant viruses started out big and constitute their own domain of life.
    2. That mingling has sparked contentious debate among scientists about when and how giant viruses evolved. All of viral evolution is murky: Different groups of viruses likely had very different origins. Some may have been degenerate “escapees” from cellular genomes, while others descended directly from the primordial soup. “Still others have recombined and exchanged genes so many times in the course of evolution that we will never know where they originally came from,” Fischer said.
  12. Feb 2019
    1. ಅನಾದಿಯಾಗಿ ಪಶು ಪಾಶ ಮಲ ಮಯಾಕರ್ಮಗಳುಂಟಾದರೆ,ಈ ಜಗವನೊಬ್ಬರೂ ಸೃಷ್ಟಿಮಾಡಿದ ಕರ್ತುವಲ್ಲ.ಎಂದೆಂದೂ ಜಗವಿದ್ದಿತ್ತು ನಿತ್ಯವೆನ್ನು.ಎಂದೆಂದೂ ಜಗವಿದ್ದಿತ್ತೆಂಬೆಯಾದರೆ,ಶಿವನ ಸೃಷ್ಟಿ, ಸ್ಥಿತಿ, ಸಂಹಾರ, ಸ್ಥಿರೋಭಾವ, ಅನುಗ್ರಹವೆಂಬಪಂಚಕೃತ್ಯಗಳು ಹುಸಿಯೆಂದೆನ್ನು.ಶಿವನಿಗೆ ಸೃಷ್ಟಿ ಸ್ಥಿತಿ ಸಂಹಾರಾರ್ಥವುಂಟಾದರೆ,ಈ ಜಗತ್ತೆಲ್ಲವೂ ಶಿವನ ನೆನಹು ಮಾತ್ರದಿಂದ ಹುಟ್ಟಿತ್ತಲ್ಲದೆ,ಎಂದೆಂದೂ ಉಂಟೆಂಬುದು ಶೈವ ಪಶುಮತವಲ್ಲದೆ,ವೀರಶೈವರ ಮತವಲ್ಲ.ವೀರಶೈವರ ಮತವೆಂತೆಂದಡೆ:ಘನ ಗಂಬ್ಥೀರ ವಾರಿದ್ಥಿಯೊಳಗೆ ಫೇನತರಂಗಬುದ್ಬುದ ಶೀಕರಾದಿಗಳು ತೋರಿದಡೆ,ಆ ಸಾಗರ ಹೊರಗಾಗಿ ತೋರಬಲ್ಲವೇ?ಆ ಪರಶಿವಸಾಗರದಲ್ಲಿ ತೃಣಾದಿ ಬ್ರಹ್ಮಾಂತವಾದ ದೇಹಿಗಳುಉತ್ಪತ್ತಿಯಾಗಿ ಮತ್ತಲ್ಲಿಯೇ ಅಡಗುತ್ತಿಪ್ಪರು ನೋಡಾ.ಇದು ಕಾರಣ, ಲಿಂಗನಿರ್ಮಿತದಿಂದ ಜಗತ್ತಾಯಿತೆಂದೆ ಕಾಣಾ,ಮಹಾಲಿಂಗಗುರು ಶಿವಸಿದ್ಧೇಶ್ವರ ಪ್ರಭುವೇ.
  13. Nov 2018
    1. ಅನಾದಿಯಾಗಿ ಪಶು ಪಾಶ ಮಲ ಮಯಾಕರ್ಮಗಳುಂಟಾದರೆ,ಈ ಜಗವನೊಬ್ಬರೂ ಸೃಷ್ಟಿಮಾಡಿದ ಕರ್ತುವಲ್ಲ.ಎಂದೆಂದೂ ಜಗವಿದ್ದಿತ್ತು ನಿತ್ಯವೆನ್ನು.ಎಂದೆಂದೂ ಜಗವಿದ್ದಿತ್ತೆಂಬೆಯಾದರೆ,ಶಿವನ ಸೃಷ್ಟಿ, ಸ್ಥಿತಿ, ಸಂಹಾರ, ಸ್ಥಿರೋಭಾವ, ಅನುಗ್ರಹವೆಂಬಪಂಚಕೃತ್ಯಗಳು ಹುಸಿಯೆಂದೆನ್ನು.ಶಿವನಿಗೆ ಸೃಷ್ಟಿ ಸ್ಥಿತಿ ಸಂಹಾರಾರ್ಥವುಂಟಾದರೆ,ಈ ಜಗತ್ತೆಲ್ಲವೂ ಶಿವನ ನೆನಹು ಮಾತ್ರದಿಂದ ಹುಟ್ಟಿತ್ತಲ್ಲದೆ,ಎಂದೆಂದೂ ಉಂಟೆಂಬುದು ಶೈವ ಪಶುಮತವಲ್ಲದೆ,ವೀರಶೈವರ ಮತವಲ್ಲ.ವೀರಶೈವರ ಮತವೆಂತೆಂದಡೆ:ಘನ ಗಂಬ್ಥೀರ ವಾರಿದ್ಥಿಯೊಳಗೆ ಫೇನತರಂಗಬುದ್ಬುದ ಶೀಕರಾದಿಗಳು ತೋರಿದಡೆ,ಆ ಸಾಗರ ಹೊರಗಾಗಿ ತೋರಬಲ್ಲವೇ?ಆ ಪರಶಿವಸಾಗರದಲ್ಲಿ ತೃಣಾದಿ ಬ್ರಹ್ಮಾಂತವಾದ ದೇಹಿಗಳುಉತ್ಪತ್ತಿಯಾಗಿ ಮತ್ತಲ್ಲಿಯೇ ಅಡಗುತ್ತಿಪ್ಪರು ನೋಡಾ.ಇದು ಕಾರಣ, ಲಿಂಗನಿರ್ಮಿತದಿಂದ ಜಗತ್ತಾಯಿತೆಂದೆ ಕಾಣಾ,ಮಹಾಲಿಂಗಗುರು ಶಿವಸಿದ್ಧೇಶ್ವರ ಪ್ರಭುವೇ.