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What is life?

RobotRipping

RobotRipping

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Okay, so no bullshit answers here where people wax philosophical on me. However if you have a spiritual view point that's fine or a scientific one or a hybrid, either will suffice.

I've been thinking about the nature of life itself for a while now and maybe this thread can help me grasp it a bit better. The way i see it is that since the beginning of life or life forms, there has been life, like a torch that has been kept lit forever. Life has not appeared or come from nothing, ie life can't come from something not living. Therefore life has always existed less we come to an infinite regression.

So ever since there were humans (i know evolution and such but just for example) there has never been one time, not a single time, where human life did not exist. It's been continuous and if humans were completely destroyed, humans would never again live.

This brings me to a bigger point. At some point in the future we are going to have the technology to create a human from scratch, we'll have the brain figured out and the body figured out and can look at it as some sort of bioelectrical machine. However how do we get that life part of it in that machine? Wouldn't we need something living to add to that machine to make it alive and conscious? or is consciousness formed from our sensations and something that a computer or a machine could develop with the right technology?

If that is the case then we can make a claim that the universe just happened, big bang, everything formed, somehow life formed, evolved, gained consciousness and here we are. If it's not the case then something had to hit that first button to create the domino effect of life (in other words, there is a God).

Well those are my thoughts and i'm curious to see how people interpret these ideas and whether there are holes in my theories or if they have been already expanded upon by others. Some of my ideas are influenced by Aquinas and others from psychedelic states. I'm not looking for answers as to why? but more on the nature of life itself. What is life? how can we create it without life already?
 
RobotRipping said:
Life has not appeared or come from nothing, ie life can't come from something not living. Therefore life has always existed less we come to an infinite regression.
Click to expand...

That is almost certainly false.

At some point in the future we are going to have the technology to create a human from scratch, we'll have the brain figured out and the body figured out and can look at it as some sort of bioelectrical machine.
Click to expand...

Such an unlikely set of eventualities is anything but certain. You seem naively overconfident in the explanatory power of mathematics and the limits of human technology and scientific understanding. Have you ever read any recent literature on artificial intelligence (other than WIRED articles), for instance? As it currently exists, AI is a discipline fraught with discord over theory and methodology alike. We may be able to more effectively program a linguistic application these days, but, as far as I'm aware, we're not even at the 'plausible fantasy' stage w.r.t. to fully conscious, fully synthetic machine brains (or whatever other outlandish sci-fi trope you have in mind).
 
i posted the the tree of life in s&t. have a look, if you are only looking at humanity, you are looking at virtually nothing.

life can be defined in degrees. how animated in animate, how conscious is conscious, questions like these have an infinite spectrum of possibility. are animals life? of course. trees and plants? yes. insects and fish? sure. microbes and viruses. undoubtably. chemicals? ummm.... what if they react in certain ways when combined with others? .... less clear. does the process of crystalisation constitute life? intuitively of course not, but hey what is the difference?

can robots be conscious? well, it's hard to say for certain we are....
 
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P A said:
That is almost certainly false.



Such an unlikely set of eventualities is anything but certain. You seem naively overconfident in the explanatory power of mathematics and the limits of human technology and scientific understanding. Have you ever read any recent literature on artificial intelligence (other than WIRED articles), for instance? As it currently exists, AI is a discipline fraught with discord over theory and methodology alike. We may be able to more effectively program a linguistic application these days, but, as far as I'm aware, we're not even at the 'plausible fantasy' stage w.r.t. to fully conscious, fully synthetic machine brains (or whatever other outlandish sci-fi trope you have in mind).
Click to expand...

well almost certainly isn't a definite answer, which is really my problem with it.

It's not that i am naive, i am just speaking hypothetically.

@L2R: Are you saying that 'life' is just not well defined? is a rock alive? a tree? a human? what is the difference between a rock and a human?
 
yes, it is not well defined.

480697_593966157299508_803172951_n.jpg
 
Ah the age old question 2 end all questions,lol...To me,life can b as simple as a single atom which then somehow reacts with another and becomes a molecule,which becomes a Universe. This is where life truly begins,what it took 2 get to this point varies by individual,but there will b few(if any,lol) to deny that the Universe does not exist and that "life" exists within it. So now that we have gotten to the beginning creation of life,the nxt logical question would be,where do humans who are conscious,motivated, and intelligent fit into the idea of life?

My take on this is that no matter what a persons belief system,they all have a common goal. This goal is to see where we fit into the life of the Universe,which puzzle piece are we? It has been established that the Universe is still growing so it is still producing "life",even though we may not understand the concept of the kind of "life" it is creating. But maybe as we live our life, continue to ask the question of what is life,and ppl continue to die who have experienced the 2 things mentioned prior 2 dieing,the Universe will continue 2 grow.Thus producing life.I think if we ever come 2 the point of living forever,life loses its meaning which in turn causes the Universe to loose its meaning, which ultimatly leaves the Universe no option but to collapse on itself and give life meaning once more.

Pariahprose
 
To me, we pretty much are just machines, interpreting stimuli and responding how we are taught to. The complexity of the human machine allows us to reason out future responses and actions giving us a limited amount of "free will." However, the degree to which we can exert that will is heavily constrained by circumstance.
 
well a big difference between a computer (current) and humans is that we have free will. For example we can pick random numbers out of thin air whereas a computer has to use a complicated algorithm to come up with a 'random' number. It also uses binary, whereas humans use an undiscovered system, possibly an analog system but could also store things in a digital manner but who knows.

At some point in the future, like even 1000 years from now (or maybe 10,000 or 100,000) we may figure out how the brain interprets reality and how it stores this data. At such point we could create a machine that uses a similar system. If you think about the brain it is an incredible processor of stimuli, a computer doesn't even come close to taking in as much information and processing it as the brain does. Basically another point i am getting at is that would this biological machine we created in say 1000 or however many years from now be any different than a human born naturally if all parts were physically the same? How would we get that 'living' part of the machine working? or would the machine be so complex that it would just become self conscious? that'd be a strange thing lol.

sorry this isn't incredibly well thought out but that's why i made the post, to further my understanding.
 
How will we see if there's consciousness?

My answer to the original question is that life is conscious experience. There's no way to be sure anyone but you is actually conscious. We assume it, but for all you know, your world is solipsistic.
 
RobotRipping said:
well a big difference between a computer (current) and humans is that we have free will. For example we can pick random numbers out of thin air whereas a computer has to use a complicated algorithm to come up with a 'random' number.
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I can use a gieger detector and a simple algorithm to produce *truly* random numbers with a computer. I can use a simple mechanistic process like a dice roll to produce them with a hand and pen and paper. But even the fast and easy pseudo-random numbers produced by deterministic algorithm in a computer are waaaay more random than random numbers picked by people.
 
^agreed

Physical Non determinism does not essentially mean random/chaos.
 
there is a theorem that nothing could be denied some sort of concioussness lets look at our brain its a huge circuit that interacts in 3d space unlike the computer which have its circuits deployed in 2d .lets look
at sun now can we deny that sun probably has huge electromagnetical flows in it through which electrons are floating and generating information some sort that is really alien or out of humans perception? that almost aplies to anything a rock has electromagnetic flows a tree has electromagnetic flows anything could be a part of bigger concious being even humans are part of humanity which is the collective concioussnes of humans .
 
Life started in a freak accident.

Millions of freak accidents (coupled with an organisms ability to survive) later and we have consciousness.
 
LucidShroomDmtier said:
there is a theorem that nothing could be denied some sort of concioussness lets look at our brain its a huge circuit that interacts in 3d space unlike the computer which have its circuits deployed in 2d .
Click to expand...

Nope...I.C.'s are 3 dimensional objects too. In both the sense of having circuits layered over each other, and in the sense that nothing with a non-zero size is anything less than 3 dimensional in reality.
 
i think of "life" as an evolved, subjective phenomenon we're experiencing as the atoms and molecules we are.. after all, if you take into consideration the size of space and you look at our solar system, the earth is simply a proton-esque ball revolving around a nucleus (the sun). who's to say that isnt just some cellular basis for larger, imperceptible life..
 
Not quite, The Earth and the Sun don't exactly exist as a probability distribution and a mix of smeared out wave-like properties and particle like properties.

Also, if the Earth was like a Proton going the Sun (a nucleus) it should be being repelled quite vigorously, given their positive charges.
 
playing devil's advocate again on this one, rangrz. you can't take for granted the rules in one scale are identical to those of another.
 
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