Well, the categories of this post suggest one way we might do it that’s more satisfying than the naive way we draw the boundaries of “life”.
We could equate life we active systems.
We could equate life with active, purposeful systems.
We could equate life with active, purposeful, teleological systems.
The test would then be to see which one is most useful to us if we use that to mean “life”. Are we happy with the kinds of things that end up in the category? Does it seem natural? Or are these categories cutting at something orthogonal to what we mean by “life” and we would actually prefer to define it some other way.
I suspect the answer is that by “life” we mean something orthogonal to this classification system such that things we consider alive cut across the boundaries it draws.
Again, what is the difference between living things and non-living things from a first principles physics perspective. At which point do atoms and molecules become “living”? At which point do atoms and molecules acquire purpose?
I understand that we use words like living and purpose to denote large movements of atoms moving in complex and interesting ways. But at no point along the way does something acquire “livingness” or “purposeness” or “spirit” or “elan vital” or “emergence” (see Eliezer Yudkowsky on emergence). If we’re going to try to understand the behaviour of organisms it’s necessary to see that the behaviour of organisms is just trillions of atoms and molecules behaving in very interesting ways.
This is asking for quite a lot of answer, but also mostly seems beside the point of this post.
If the question is just about the terms considered, “active” would seem to clearly be about how much the energy in the system is being fed to it vs. being generated by it. “Purpose”, as I propose, is about thermodynamics and whether entropy is increasing or decreasing. “Teleology” is about feedback, which I wrote about here.
But I’m not sure what your real objection is here since nothing I wrote contradicts the idea that the world is just made up of stuff and nothing is possessed of any essential nature. Yet there is in fact some point at which the world takes on enough local structure that we place it in some category, otherwise we wouldn’t be able to use words at all.
So I’m not sure how to read your objection other than you don’t like the word “purpose”?
I think part of the difficulty I have in understanding your post is the distinction between active and passive systems, and it’s why I linked the article on emergence. No matter which way I think about it, I can’t disentangle a living (organic) system from its surrounding environment. It’s why I posed the question of what distinguishes living systems and non-living systems; when I look deep enough I still see the same fundamental rules of physics applied in each instance.
Under this view that all matter, living and non-living is indistinguishable and each running under the same laws of physics, purposefulness and purposelessness do not appear anywhere in these systems. Living objects can be regarded as atomic components moving and interacting in very interesting ways. So I cannot distinguish between purposefulness and purposelessness. Colloquially, of course, I know what you mean. You are talking about the behaviour of living organisms; but on a deeper inspection I can’t find purposefulness.
Is the argument you’re making that there are localized areas of space that possess lower levels of entropy, and that living systems can be generalized as simply lowering the entropy in an area of space?
Is the argument you’re making that there are localized areas of space that possess lower levels of entropy, and that living systems can be generalized as simply lowering the entropy in an area of space?
Yes, that’s part of it. As to what is “local”, that’s a question of where we draw boundaries, and in fact this gets at an issue fundamental to all of this, which is we have to have some way to even draw these boundaries. That’s a free variable that has to be fixed, ironically, by telos.
Well, the categories of this post suggest one way we might do it that’s more satisfying than the naive way we draw the boundaries of “life”.
We could equate life we active systems.
We could equate life with active, purposeful systems.
We could equate life with active, purposeful, teleological systems.
The test would then be to see which one is most useful to us if we use that to mean “life”. Are we happy with the kinds of things that end up in the category? Does it seem natural? Or are these categories cutting at something orthogonal to what we mean by “life” and we would actually prefer to define it some other way.
I suspect the answer is that by “life” we mean something orthogonal to this classification system such that things we consider alive cut across the boundaries it draws.
Again, what is the difference between living things and non-living things from a first principles physics perspective. At which point do atoms and molecules become “living”? At which point do atoms and molecules acquire purpose?
I understand that we use words like living and purpose to denote large movements of atoms moving in complex and interesting ways. But at no point along the way does something acquire “livingness” or “purposeness” or “spirit” or “elan vital” or “emergence” (see Eliezer Yudkowsky on emergence). If we’re going to try to understand the behaviour of organisms it’s necessary to see that the behaviour of organisms is just trillions of atoms and molecules behaving in very interesting ways.
This is asking for quite a lot of answer, but also mostly seems beside the point of this post.
If the question is just about the terms considered, “active” would seem to clearly be about how much the energy in the system is being fed to it vs. being generated by it. “Purpose”, as I propose, is about thermodynamics and whether entropy is increasing or decreasing. “Teleology” is about feedback, which I wrote about here.
But I’m not sure what your real objection is here since nothing I wrote contradicts the idea that the world is just made up of stuff and nothing is possessed of any essential nature. Yet there is in fact some point at which the world takes on enough local structure that we place it in some category, otherwise we wouldn’t be able to use words at all.
So I’m not sure how to read your objection other than you don’t like the word “purpose”?
I think part of the difficulty I have in understanding your post is the distinction between active and passive systems, and it’s why I linked the article on emergence. No matter which way I think about it, I can’t disentangle a living (organic) system from its surrounding environment. It’s why I posed the question of what distinguishes living systems and non-living systems; when I look deep enough I still see the same fundamental rules of physics applied in each instance.
Under this view that all matter, living and non-living is indistinguishable and each running under the same laws of physics, purposefulness and purposelessness do not appear anywhere in these systems. Living objects can be regarded as atomic components moving and interacting in very interesting ways. So I cannot distinguish between purposefulness and purposelessness. Colloquially, of course, I know what you mean. You are talking about the behaviour of living organisms; but on a deeper inspection I can’t find purposefulness.
Is the argument you’re making that there are localized areas of space that possess lower levels of entropy, and that living systems can be generalized as simply lowering the entropy in an area of space?
Yes, that’s part of it. As to what is “local”, that’s a question of where we draw boundaries, and in fact this gets at an issue fundamental to all of this, which is we have to have some way to even draw these boundaries. That’s a free variable that has to be fixed, ironically, by telos.