The trick lies in the fact that life forms have no obvious boundary. The fact that two creatures are two creatures, and not just a single creature is something that is just endowed to them by us humans. If one of the creatures dies, does it really die, or does the combination of the two creatures just loses half of its brain cells? That second view is just as valid. Hence, in that second view, nothing really ever dies; we (i.e., the universe) just lose brain cells. And, of course, we gain them as well.
That is closer to the heart of what makes life unique, in that life can (and does, as a matter of existence) decrease entropy. At least locally. Life will rebuild a ship instead of watch it rot.
This way we could say the entire universe is just a big chemical reaction. It wouldn't even be an incorrect view. It just wouldn't be useful for anything.
This is the real value of models and concepts we use - not their grand philosophical sense, but how useful they are. We set up boundaries between creatures, define concepts like life and death because they allow us to understand and predict the world better. It's usually more useful to treat two creatures as two creatures instead of one, but sometimes it's the reverse - for instance, it's often more useful to treat an entire colony of ants as a single being, individual ants becoming just cells / organelles.
It is useful for something. It's just not useful for problems that require a high degree of specificity. And not all problems do; in fact, some are hindered by it. (For instance, focussing on individual atoms won't really help you do politics.)
>This way we could say the entire universe is just a big chemical reaction. It wouldn't even be an incorrect view. It just wouldn't be useful for anything.
It's a world view, I wouldn't jump to the conclusion that it's useless. Religions are world views, and they have certainly been put to use.
If it's true, does it even matter if it's useful? Maybe truth is more important than utility.
There is no meaning in asking whether it's true or not, because "chemical reaction" is a model we create, a map describing territory. In no way is the "universe is a big chemical reaction" more 'true' than "universe is composed of stars, stars have planets around, at least one planet has life on it" than Pale Blue Dot is more 'true' than Google Maps. Different maps, same territory, and the only thing that matters is which one is more useful for given purpose.
We set up boundaries between creatures, define concepts like life and death because they allow us to understand and predict the world better.
I think that's what "eating the fruit of the tree of knowledge" means. If the universe is unity, when you die, the universe is still here. As Christians put it, "One with God". If you see yourself as separate to the universe, when you die, you're dead. And Hell = consumed by ego, which likes comparing you and others.
That's going into philosophy, and it's useful in so far it helps people feel content.
Life is special because it's complex. Modern human society on Earth is the most complex thing in the history of the known universe. Complex things, though, tend to be very fragile.
(paraphrased from David Christian's "Big History" Great Courses lecture)
I would say there are much more complex phenomena than a few bajillion atoms and electricity bouncing flailing about on the surface of a mostly-water planet.
I'd add to that in that we are not only complex, but complex in a way that makes us the sole bastion of models of relevance in the universe, and that this capability is relatively fragile.
Shuffle a deck of cards. If you did it properly, the new arrangement is unique. No deck of cards has ever been arranged like that before, and none will ever again, unless you deliberately preserve it.
I just drew a scribble on a post-it note. Nobody else has a scribble quite like it, or ever will again, after I throw it away.
Every time a snowflake melts, something beautiful and unique is lost forever.
None of these things are special, unless you're using a really weird meaning of "special".
You can say that they might be unique, but they're sufficiently similar to other things that they might as well not be - but what distance metric are you using? You're using one shaped by your own values, which say that one human is special even in the presence of another seven billion humans, but that one snowflake is unimportant in the presence of another seven billion.
It might be that rareness is a prerequisite of specialness. It's not the only factor.
The order in a deck of cards is unique, but it's not complex. The nucleotide sequence in a chromosome is unique and complex.
An analogy of your comparison would be comparing a single sentence to the sum of mankind's written works, with the latter being life. A complex, organized source of information like that is special.
If you shuffle a deck of 3 billion cards, the order is less compressible than the human genome. It's still not special. Is it complex, by your definition?
If you randomly generated 3 billion alphabet characters, would it be instructions for building a Saturn V rocket? The blueprints for building a single cell?
Why would a shuffle of 3 billion distinct cards be less unique than a shuffle of 52 distinct cards?
> If you randomly generated 3 billion alphabet characters, would it be instructions for building a Saturn V rocket? The blueprints for building a single cell?
No. It would be a unique string of worthless jibberish.
Meanwhile, the instructions for a Saturn V rocket have probably been written down in at least two places. So if you have a copy of them, they're less unique than my random string, yet more special.
Maybe along with Kolmogorov complexity we could measure "usefulness" of a bit string, i.e. how much utility an agent would agree to pay for it. The idea is that "complex" things, like life, are likely to contain solutions to many problems we care about. Of course that approach depends on the agent, but maybe you could get a general definition by referring to a general agent, like AIXItl.
As far as mathematics go, it's as probabilistically likely as any other sequence, but among deck orders, this particular sequence is special because not only it happens more often than most other deck orders, but it even has a name. As it turns out, that sequence can be easily reconstructed from a mnemonic and it's often used in magic tricks.
But sequence is unique, but could arguably randomly come up like you say. My point was that biological information is both complex and unique, which makes it special.
That definition is meaningless without a distance metric (for "different") or a scoring function (for "better, greater"). And some reference point for "usual" - are we comparing this snowflake to all the other snowflakes? To a grain of sand?[1] To every other subset of atoms in the universe?
In the context of this article, I'm pretty sure "special" is intended to mean things like "valuable [to humans]" and "worth preserving [to humans]", and to distinguish life from mundane things like snowflakes and scribbles. It seems really weird to me, to ask "is life special just because it's rare?" in a context where the word "special" applies to snowflakes.
First off, random !== unique, not even close, ESPECIALLY for things with discrete properties.
We know from the pigeon-hole principal, that from enough instances, something will be repeated. So, unique it is not.
In your card example, there are 52! (factorial) permutations, but if you shuffle a deck of cards (52! + 1) times, you will have repeated at least one permutation at least once. It's been proven, you can't avoid it.
The permutation is pseudo-random however, meaning that we cannot distinguish it from pure chance.
But, beyond that, special !== valuable. Those words are different, not synonyms. Same to "worth preserving", it's not a valid meaning of "special".
Furthermore, life isn't just random, there are seemingly an infinite number of variables that influence it. That's not discrete, meaning it's beyond "just random", it actually can be unique, such that even with infinite time, it might not ever be repeated.
So yes, life is special, it's not just a permutation, at least, it hasn't been proven to be so yet.
Additionally, I'd rather view life as being special that live in a world where everything is considered "mundane".
You're never going to shuffle a deck of cards 52!+1 times. It's unique within the extent of this physical universe. If that's not the universe of discourse, you're going to need to specify what is.
Of course life is special. But it's not special just because it's rare. I don't know why it's special, but I do know that's not it. And I know that whether or not life is random, even if it would be repeated in a universe with infinite time, it would remain special.
If your definition of "special" relies upon subtle facts about the universe that may not ever be knowable... I'm going back to "that's really weird".
Similarly, I know that special and valuable aren't the same thing. But I don't have a good definition of special (you gave a bad one), so I was attempting to point at the sort of things that correlate with it.
While I agree somewhat with what you're saying, I'd like to ask something about the playing card example.
In a deck of cards, if you consider any ordering without any meaning added, then it is literally just 1/52!.
however, what if you started ascribing meaning to the different cards?
Would it be special then if your shuffeling resulted in all face-cards being grouped together? What about if all like-numbers were grouped together (i.e. all 1's, all 2's, all 3's) and so-on?
What about the case when the cards get shuffled and end up in ascending/descending order? i.e. {1H, 2H ... KH, 1S, 2S, ...}. There are only 4 such permuations possible, making it an infinitesimal chance that you arrive at that specific ordering.
Couldn't that be viewed as special? I guess in this case, I'm saying that the tuple of {Meaning, Uniqueness} is indeed special, not just uniqueness alone.
I think this statement nails it: "we are imprisoned within our own cosmos of meaning. We cannot imagine a universe without meaning. We are not talking necessarily about some grand cosmic meaning, or a divine meaning bestowed by God, or even a lasting, eternal meaning. "
"Special" is a human construct. If something is special, it's because we say it is. Life has no relevance to anything beyond that which we ascribe to it.
Unless, of course, you believe that life was designed according to some kind of grand design. But even that presupposes that we mortals have a chance of understanding an intelligence that can shape reality. I'm sceptical any human interpretation of 'special' in that context is useful.
When I was in school, we knew of no extra-solar planets. Now that we know how to look, they seem to be everywhere. Similarly, I suspect life will turn out to be common once we can send probes to the places that could harbour them.
Intelligent life might well be an order-of-magnitude rarer, and life intelligent enough to be detectable by SETI rarer still. (And we could well be the most advanced civilization in our light cone -- someone has to be.)
I'm skeptical, if not for the sheer improbability of our own abiogenesis event on Earth.
I think that if we do find naturally occurring "life" elsewhere in the universe, it will be unlike anything that we have ever dreamed of and challenge our definition of the word. Or maybe it will be cellular just like ours and responsible for seeding Earth.
In this universe, for whatever its nature happens to be, where laws of entropy realize themselves relentlessly and indefinitely to increase chaos forever, bit by bit; where everything left to rot will eventually turn into pieces, shards, and break apart into dust there is―I might say―a force, or at least a mechanism―again, whether guided or scientifically spontaneous―that is working its way on the same river as this destructive chaos but to the exactly opposite direction of the downstream where, as shattered pieces of existence and remnants of structure, chaos is slowly but endlessly flowing down.
This force is what we call life and this force is of the nature that it just keeps pushing itself against all the natural destruction that is inherently prevalent in this world. This force constructs and maintains growth, structure, and produces organisms that are enough in some balance―chemical, physical, maybe spiritual, who knows―to survive further.
The force will push through the slightest openings in this river which is chaos, and just keeps growing and growing despite being forever torn down, consumed, and worn by the elements of entropy at the same time. This force, when put down and extinquished in one place will again and again remanifest itself in another place, and continues to create and grow against all the odds and the universal tendency for any space and matter to cool down and energy to return to the lowest possible potential.
Life is nothing but rare. If we blew up this planet into smithereens, I wonder, why would that force that is life stop swimming upstream at the very once? Why would it not reappear elsewhere? Some might say that the live organisms would just die with the Earth, but what started it here? Why wouldn't it emerge again elsewhere just like it did here?
If the force is divine it will exist somewhere regardless of the physical circumstances, merely waiting for a new opening in the physical world; if the force is not divine, then maybe it's some internal counter stream, an energy flow, in the the universe itself, where one part of the energy flows towards chaotic stillness but where the other part flows back into motion and higher potential: while entropy reduces the energy in action the potential must increase somewhere else, as energy cannot disappear. Or maybe you might choose consider the divine to be the universe itself―about that I cannot say a word. But there is something that makes this thing called life opt-in to this world where everything else keeps crumbling to pieces.
If that force is not special in itself, given the setting, then I don't know what is.
If 1) we are part of the universe, and 2) we generate meaning, then 3) we are the meaning generators of the universe. The universe is meaningless only when we look out and ignore life, and ignore ourselves. But the universe has us, and has life. We are significant, not because we are more important, but simply for being a part of it all. We exist. We're here. That say's it all.
The moment we tied the emergence of what we perceived as metaphysical to something physical, it all became physical and the ghosts disappeared along with the word metaphysics from our sciences. The mind-body duality was non-scientific.
The same can be done with the exceptional view on life. The moment we tie the emergence of what we perceive as special to everything mundane, it all becomes mundane, and life is no longer special. Special is subjective. If we concede to the emergence of life from non-life, then it's either all non-life, or it's all life -- or we could decide to call it something else.
Much of the awe we express through pieces like this can be attributed to the fact that sheer scale still never fails to baffle us. Distance, complexity, time, and probability all become "dramatic" once they become intuitively disproportionate. But the universe as a whole is just as complex as it is, and pointing to two places and comparing their complexity says nothing about the capacity of the universe. The universe is huge, it's old, it's chaotic, and everything in it is rare. But baffled it is not. Or rather, it is, just through us.
I always find these type of questions specious and entirely dependent on frame of reference for both question and response.
Our language and conceptions evolved specifically to do important things like inform companions under which trees the most delicious nuts could be found and remember where the hidden tiger was sleeping.
"Special" and "Rare" in these primitive contexts (which is all we really have right now) don't mean anything objectively nor on a cosmic scale (of which we know very little incidentally). So the whole question is just.... off.
46 comments
[ 3.1 ms ] story [ 110 ms ] threadAnd indeed, we are the cosmos contemplating its own existence.
This is the real value of models and concepts we use - not their grand philosophical sense, but how useful they are. We set up boundaries between creatures, define concepts like life and death because they allow us to understand and predict the world better. It's usually more useful to treat two creatures as two creatures instead of one, but sometimes it's the reverse - for instance, it's often more useful to treat an entire colony of ants as a single being, individual ants becoming just cells / organelles.
It is useful for something. It's just not useful for problems that require a high degree of specificity. And not all problems do; in fact, some are hindered by it. (For instance, focussing on individual atoms won't really help you do politics.)
It's a world view, I wouldn't jump to the conclusion that it's useless. Religions are world views, and they have certainly been put to use.
If it's true, does it even matter if it's useful? Maybe truth is more important than utility.
I think that's what "eating the fruit of the tree of knowledge" means. If the universe is unity, when you die, the universe is still here. As Christians put it, "One with God". If you see yourself as separate to the universe, when you die, you're dead. And Hell = consumed by ego, which likes comparing you and others.
That's going into philosophy, and it's useful in so far it helps people feel content.
(paraphrased from David Christian's "Big History" Great Courses lecture)
http://padlet.com/dpetersen/c6c8g49ynt19
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Big_History#Complexity.2C_ener...
Shuffle a deck of cards. If you did it properly, the new arrangement is unique. No deck of cards has ever been arranged like that before, and none will ever again, unless you deliberately preserve it.
I just drew a scribble on a post-it note. Nobody else has a scribble quite like it, or ever will again, after I throw it away.
Every time a snowflake melts, something beautiful and unique is lost forever.
None of these things are special, unless you're using a really weird meaning of "special".
You can say that they might be unique, but they're sufficiently similar to other things that they might as well not be - but what distance metric are you using? You're using one shaped by your own values, which say that one human is special even in the presence of another seven billion humans, but that one snowflake is unimportant in the presence of another seven billion.
It might be that rareness is a prerequisite of specialness. It's not the only factor.
An analogy of your comparison would be comparing a single sentence to the sum of mankind's written works, with the latter being life. A complex, organized source of information like that is special.
How about my scribble, or a snowflake?
If you randomly generated 3 billion alphabet characters, would it be instructions for building a Saturn V rocket? The blueprints for building a single cell?
> If you randomly generated 3 billion alphabet characters, would it be instructions for building a Saturn V rocket? The blueprints for building a single cell?
No. It would be a unique string of worthless jibberish.
Meanwhile, the instructions for a Saturn V rocket have probably been written down in at least two places. So if you have a copy of them, they're less unique than my random string, yet more special.
There are multiple copies of the Saturn V blueprints, just as there are multiple copies of the human genome in your cells.
Is Lord of the Rings not unique because it's stored on multiple mediums?
Literally: "better, greater, or otherwise different from what is usual."
So...if a snowflake is "beautiful" and "unique", you have the necessary and sufficient conditions for "special".
Just saying....
In the context of this article, I'm pretty sure "special" is intended to mean things like "valuable [to humans]" and "worth preserving [to humans]", and to distinguish life from mundane things like snowflakes and scribbles. It seems really weird to me, to ask "is life special just because it's rare?" in a context where the word "special" applies to snowflakes.
[1] https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Sand_under_electron_...
We know from the pigeon-hole principal, that from enough instances, something will be repeated. So, unique it is not.
In your card example, there are 52! (factorial) permutations, but if you shuffle a deck of cards (52! + 1) times, you will have repeated at least one permutation at least once. It's been proven, you can't avoid it.
The permutation is pseudo-random however, meaning that we cannot distinguish it from pure chance.
But, beyond that, special !== valuable. Those words are different, not synonyms. Same to "worth preserving", it's not a valid meaning of "special".
Furthermore, life isn't just random, there are seemingly an infinite number of variables that influence it. That's not discrete, meaning it's beyond "just random", it actually can be unique, such that even with infinite time, it might not ever be repeated.
So yes, life is special, it's not just a permutation, at least, it hasn't been proven to be so yet.
Additionally, I'd rather view life as being special that live in a world where everything is considered "mundane".
Of course life is special. But it's not special just because it's rare. I don't know why it's special, but I do know that's not it. And I know that whether or not life is random, even if it would be repeated in a universe with infinite time, it would remain special.
If your definition of "special" relies upon subtle facts about the universe that may not ever be knowable... I'm going back to "that's really weird".
Similarly, I know that special and valuable aren't the same thing. But I don't have a good definition of special (you gave a bad one), so I was attempting to point at the sort of things that correlate with it.
In a deck of cards, if you consider any ordering without any meaning added, then it is literally just 1/52!.
however, what if you started ascribing meaning to the different cards?
Would it be special then if your shuffeling resulted in all face-cards being grouped together? What about if all like-numbers were grouped together (i.e. all 1's, all 2's, all 3's) and so-on?
What about the case when the cards get shuffled and end up in ascending/descending order? i.e. {1H, 2H ... KH, 1S, 2S, ...}. There are only 4 such permuations possible, making it an infinitesimal chance that you arrive at that specific ordering.
Couldn't that be viewed as special? I guess in this case, I'm saying that the tuple of {Meaning, Uniqueness} is indeed special, not just uniqueness alone.
In this case, you've just wiped out your whole statement with weasel words. What does it mean to shuffle a deck properly?
"Special" is a human construct. If something is special, it's because we say it is. Life has no relevance to anything beyond that which we ascribe to it.
Unless, of course, you believe that life was designed according to some kind of grand design. But even that presupposes that we mortals have a chance of understanding an intelligence that can shape reality. I'm sceptical any human interpretation of 'special' in that context is useful.
Reality just is. It has no moral weight.
Intelligent life might well be an order-of-magnitude rarer, and life intelligent enough to be detectable by SETI rarer still. (And we could well be the most advanced civilization in our light cone -- someone has to be.)
I think that if we do find naturally occurring "life" elsewhere in the universe, it will be unlike anything that we have ever dreamed of and challenge our definition of the word. Or maybe it will be cellular just like ours and responsible for seeding Earth.
This force is what we call life and this force is of the nature that it just keeps pushing itself against all the natural destruction that is inherently prevalent in this world. This force constructs and maintains growth, structure, and produces organisms that are enough in some balance―chemical, physical, maybe spiritual, who knows―to survive further.
The force will push through the slightest openings in this river which is chaos, and just keeps growing and growing despite being forever torn down, consumed, and worn by the elements of entropy at the same time. This force, when put down and extinquished in one place will again and again remanifest itself in another place, and continues to create and grow against all the odds and the universal tendency for any space and matter to cool down and energy to return to the lowest possible potential.
Life is nothing but rare. If we blew up this planet into smithereens, I wonder, why would that force that is life stop swimming upstream at the very once? Why would it not reappear elsewhere? Some might say that the live organisms would just die with the Earth, but what started it here? Why wouldn't it emerge again elsewhere just like it did here?
If the force is divine it will exist somewhere regardless of the physical circumstances, merely waiting for a new opening in the physical world; if the force is not divine, then maybe it's some internal counter stream, an energy flow, in the the universe itself, where one part of the energy flows towards chaotic stillness but where the other part flows back into motion and higher potential: while entropy reduces the energy in action the potential must increase somewhere else, as energy cannot disappear. Or maybe you might choose consider the divine to be the universe itself―about that I cannot say a word. But there is something that makes this thing called life opt-in to this world where everything else keeps crumbling to pieces.
If that force is not special in itself, given the setting, then I don't know what is.
The moment we tied the emergence of what we perceived as metaphysical to something physical, it all became physical and the ghosts disappeared along with the word metaphysics from our sciences. The mind-body duality was non-scientific.
The same can be done with the exceptional view on life. The moment we tie the emergence of what we perceive as special to everything mundane, it all becomes mundane, and life is no longer special. Special is subjective. If we concede to the emergence of life from non-life, then it's either all non-life, or it's all life -- or we could decide to call it something else.
Much of the awe we express through pieces like this can be attributed to the fact that sheer scale still never fails to baffle us. Distance, complexity, time, and probability all become "dramatic" once they become intuitively disproportionate. But the universe as a whole is just as complex as it is, and pointing to two places and comparing their complexity says nothing about the capacity of the universe. The universe is huge, it's old, it's chaotic, and everything in it is rare. But baffled it is not. Or rather, it is, just through us.
Our language and conceptions evolved specifically to do important things like inform companions under which trees the most delicious nuts could be found and remember where the hidden tiger was sleeping.
"Special" and "Rare" in these primitive contexts (which is all we really have right now) don't mean anything objectively nor on a cosmic scale (of which we know very little incidentally). So the whole question is just.... off.
Widow: "Why do people have to die?"
Nate Fischer: "To make life important. None of us know how long we've got, which is why we have to make each day matter."