Comment Re:Life form? (Score 1) 391
Rocks are expected (from operation of simple physics laws), so are not life-y self-causal by particular information.
And what happens when we discover a means to create what we would categorize as life from non-life by way of the operation of simple physics laws?
I mean, we do largely assert that this is what happened. And although we don't know how to "make" it happen today, it may be that its not altogether that exotic.
If something was inevitably going to happen anyway to some matter and energy, due to its statistical distribution and the surrounding thermodynamic regime and fundamental forces, do we say that that future state (or equivalence class of states) required a particular cause (beyond the operation of the simple physical laws on the situation?) No.
That's the rub. Are the sub-cellular molecular interactions of my body not individually quite predictable by the simple physical laws on the situation. Protein folding might be quite complicated, but its guided by simple rules.
Are you categorizing life then as nothing more than emergent deviations from expected outcomes due to the cumultative effects of complex interactions that don't lend themselves well to simpler modelling?
Is then a galaxy alive, if it does something we don't "expect" simply as the cumulative addition of all the sub-processes that we didn't individually model?
Or conversely, if we successfully modeled a life form such that we could predict from simple laws of physics the sorts of things that it will do does that strip from it the label of "life"?
Because that definition of life sounds much like the definition of magic. The more we understand physics the the less will qualify. First we'll reduce simple organisms to predictable machines, then ever more increasingly complicated ones will fall until the robots we build and count as non-life and the insects and bacteria we count as alive intersect...