We just don’t know, we are unable to say ‘everything would be dead’. Maybe, maybe not.
I distrust ‘we don’t know’ style arguments. A Bayesian should always have a guess, and all too often ‘we don’t know’ is just a way to hide an a priori implausible hypothesis behind a wall of unobtainable evidence.
True, we can’t examine all possible laws of physics, but we can look at simpler examples and get a good prior from those.
Conway’s game of life is a good example, it is an interesting universe which allows for self replicating patterns. You could take the fundamental constants of life, the birth/death conditions, and replace them with almost any other possible combination, to see if you get anything interesting.
I’ve tried. Most of the time, one homogeneous pattern fills the whole screen, often its just white-space. The rest, you usually just get total meaningless noise that looks like video snow. Occasionally, if you’re lucky, you get something with a few curiosities and it keeps you entertained for an hour or so.
I’ve yet to find anything that looks like it has the slightest hope of producing self-replicators, or anything else remotely as interesting as life.
So, there’s your prior. We don’t have much evidence to update it, so I guess you’ll just have to accept it or find a better one.
Well, if you pick a random sphere of 1 m out of our universe, it will—with a huge probability—be empty. I doubt we have the time/space resources to simulate the equivalent of the resources that our universe employed to produce an iPad. The fact that you could see something interesting in the limited computational resources that you likely put into your simulations might even mean that Conway’s game is more interesting than our universe, and more apt to give birth to a mind (after all, it is Turing-complete).
We have never discovered a self-replicating pattern in a random life-field. I once saw a calculation that showed you would need a computer with the volume within a few orders of magnitude of the solar system to do so (not mass, volume). All the ones we have are intentionally constructed.
Most theoretical work done on self-replicators in life works by assuming ultra-low density fields, maybe one live cell per billion at the start (a proportion which immediately plummets much lower owing to the fact that cells need 2 neighbours to survive) so the empty space rule will probably be similar. Even if you use a higher density, most of the space will end up filled with the same mixture of small scale still-lifes, oscillators and high entropy regions, busy but not interesting. Much like most of the empty space in our universe still mostly contains background radiations (I think).
As for the fields I looked at, in general it was quite easy to prove mathematically that they were uninteresting. Interestingness requires a mixture of stability and complexity which even the ones where I couldn’t manage a proof lack.
We have never discovered a self-replicating pattern in a random life-field. I once saw > a calculation that showed you would need a computer with the volume within a few
orders of magnitude of the solar system to do so (not mass, volume). All the ones we have are intentionally constructed.
Well, per Bekenstein bound, an apple gets approximately 10^41 bits, so I think our universe really has no problem in allocating space for computational resources.
I distrust ‘we don’t know’ style arguments. A Bayesian should always have a guess, and all too often ‘we don’t know’ is just a way to hide an a priori implausible hypothesis behind a wall of unobtainable evidence.
True, we can’t examine all possible laws of physics, but we can look at simpler examples and get a good prior from those.
Conway’s game of life is a good example, it is an interesting universe which allows for self replicating patterns. You could take the fundamental constants of life, the birth/death conditions, and replace them with almost any other possible combination, to see if you get anything interesting.
I’ve tried. Most of the time, one homogeneous pattern fills the whole screen, often its just white-space. The rest, you usually just get total meaningless noise that looks like video snow. Occasionally, if you’re lucky, you get something with a few curiosities and it keeps you entertained for an hour or so.
I’ve yet to find anything that looks like it has the slightest hope of producing self-replicators, or anything else remotely as interesting as life.
So, there’s your prior. We don’t have much evidence to update it, so I guess you’ll just have to accept it or find a better one.
Well, if you pick a random sphere of 1 m out of our universe, it will—with a huge probability—be empty. I doubt we have the time/space resources to simulate the equivalent of the resources that our universe employed to produce an iPad. The fact that you could see something interesting in the limited computational resources that you likely put into your simulations might even mean that Conway’s game is more interesting than our universe, and more apt to give birth to a mind (after all, it is Turing-complete).
We have never discovered a self-replicating pattern in a random life-field. I once saw a calculation that showed you would need a computer with the volume within a few orders of magnitude of the solar system to do so (not mass, volume). All the ones we have are intentionally constructed.
Most theoretical work done on self-replicators in life works by assuming ultra-low density fields, maybe one live cell per billion at the start (a proportion which immediately plummets much lower owing to the fact that cells need 2 neighbours to survive) so the empty space rule will probably be similar. Even if you use a higher density, most of the space will end up filled with the same mixture of small scale still-lifes, oscillators and high entropy regions, busy but not interesting. Much like most of the empty space in our universe still mostly contains background radiations (I think).
As for the fields I looked at, in general it was quite easy to prove mathematically that they were uninteresting. Interestingness requires a mixture of stability and complexity which even the ones where I couldn’t manage a proof lack.
Well, per Bekenstein bound, an apple gets approximately 10^41 bits, so I think our universe really has no problem in allocating space for computational resources.