Difference between revisions of "Defining life"

Latest revision as of 00:10, 19 February 2023

What is the meaning of life? Is it in your trousers? Is it in the cupboard? Only the fish can know. But seriously, this is a question that has vexed theologians and comedians, both. It vexes me. If it doesn't vex you, you're both very lucky in some respects and... are reading this for reasons I don't understand. None of this seems like it should interest you.

From an objective perspective, my preferred definition is that life is a self-sustaining chemical reaction embedded in the flux of matter and energy. To me, life is a wave not a particle. You're the pattern of organization that coheres within a coalition of matter across a span of time before it dissipates. However, from a subjective perspective, the rather anodyne description above can still be true while also being a slender cover thrown over the wild magnifence of being a subject embedded in a biochemical event. Right?

If time is an illusion of self-perception, which is simply a delusion of certain self-sustaining patterns of matter at certain specific scales (your blood cells are alive too! Even though they have no "consciousness" that you can recognize and presumably enjoy no access to the consciousness you recognize as "yourself"), then it stands to reason that everything you're doing is eternal. Every "now" that you have marched through has been engraved into the cosmos. It doesn't stop being just because the needle of your self-awareness passed that groove in the vinyl of space-time. "Time" is a product of putting the record on the player. "Consciounsess" is the needle moving through the groove and translating the econded pattern into the release of kinetic energy that we recognize as "sound." But "music" (or if you will, "soul") is encoded in the matter and exists eternally without reference to time (though of course, what a different kind of existence than when it's being 'sounded' into the world!).

From a strictly subjective perspective, life is nothing but what you acknowledge it to be. And in that case, a very narrowly constrained definition of life starts looking like a narcissistic projection. If we beg the question and just assume that all of our fellow humans are "alive" in a manner similar to ourselves, then any reasonable observer of human nature would conclude that humans have big variances in their subjective states of existence. We're already reaching across chasms of subjectivity to form a society together and that society depends on the mutual recognition of subjectivities *like unto ourselves, yet different too*. Without that, you have a solipsistic universe.

Rejecting solipsism is the first step of engaging the reality of external subjects who can disturb the medium of your space time to suit an agenda different from your own. And from there, one finds a moral thicket of how generously to draw the line. The man who talks to objects is considered insane. But is a human in a coma an object or a subject? We don't know, but we craft working assumptions that we base our behaviors on. If you decide that a comatose human really isn't a subject, there is no reason to visit their bedside and talk to them. They're not there anymore. But if you're more agnostic on the subject, you will do it because they might be listening. So much of our politics hinges on the debate about which people we intend to eject from humanity, or which non-people should be granted moral standing equivalent in stature to the allowance we grant other people.

As a Catholic, I was taught per Aquinas that only humans have souls and anything that is not human is therefor excluded from the moral calculus that applies to our engagements with people. To the extent that we are morally accountable for the violence we do to animals, it is not because of the injury we've done to the souls that they lack, but from the injury we've done to ourselves by acting on an impulse to hurt others. Which, whatever. Catholic casuistry is a layered trap that catches some folks and lets other escape. But my noodle got twisted around that point. And while it's a dissatisfying baseline, it is frankly the one I fall back to for practical affairs. *Within the context of human life, all human lives are equal to each other and superior to all other moral considerations.* Lots of people give hedonic priority to themselves, and modulate how much they want to care about other people to suit how much they want to obtain a benefit for themselves. I have opinions about that, which nobody likes and don't really matter in this context, so moving on...

When we get into the realm of the speculative, we get into some really dangerous territory. There are people who believe that we have a moral duty to intervene in the cruelty of evolution. We can recognize fear and suffering in animals that certainly appears to emulate subjective states most of us recognize and seek to avoid. And so some argue that we have a moral duty to interfere in the natural world in order to reduce its cruelty and suffering that is perhaps equivalent to or greater than our duty to construct societies that are just and humane towards ourselves. And like, maybe they're right and I'm a meta-hedonist on a species level. And maybe I'm right, and many people are tossing out moral challenges to our imagination about non-human lifeforms lately in order to blind us to the manifest injustices happening in front of our eyes every day to people who we incontrovertibly recognize as moral subjects equivalent to ourselves.

Within the confines of this project, however, none of those questions need to be specifically resolved. Instead I am working from a few basic presumptions that I aspire to make configurable.

1. Recognition of subjectivity is unilateral
2. Recognition of subjectivity is altruistic
3. Misrecognitions of subjectivity can lead to violence
4. Any chosen level of sociopathy could be adaptive or maladaptive depending on external contexts (I really like the idea of a quiz-based seed engine for initializing the simulator that asks the user to speculate whether the universe is fundamentally benign, indifferent or malevolent, and then shapes the evolutionary pathway accordingly)

So from that perspective, I have a list of hypothetical biochemistries that is meant to be ludicrously expansive because it's trying to catch theoretically plausible pathways in radically different environments. Is life possible inside a star? Inside a gas giant? Only in an ocean? I don't know and until I do, I prefer to leave the question open. (This preference is even pushing me to design pathways for lifeforms that I personally have never had much patience for. I have a personal distaste for spacefaring lifeforms, shapeshifters, and teleological evolution that leads to some 'higher' stage of life... all of which I'm now leaning to make adjustable dials for anyone else who discovers this little Eazy-Bake oven for xenologic lifeforms, if it comes together)

The list of metabolic pathways was what inspired me to learn the I/O routines necessary to start storing data in a systematic way. My simulator assumes that life requires an external source of energy (sunlight), an available source of liquid, and an available gas, which can then be photosynthesized into a complex molecule. The base that I started with is the sugar/alcohol of carbohydrate polymers (C6-H12-O6). Most of the proposed alternative xenobiologies made by respectable thinkers adhere closely to this model, substituting near cousins of each component (carbofluorate life, etc) or just different ways of accessing carbon, hydrogen and oxygen.

I decided to allow in the wildest speculations of organo-metallic life, salt-based life. Currently I have 330 speculative metabolic pathways, many of which would certainly be laughed at by anyone who's taken high school chemistry or given it a modicum of thought. But, one, I want to make the assumptions configurable so you can set your own level of skepticism, and two, we are really outside the bounds of what we know when we're speculating about what could happen chemically in totally alien environments across billion year timespans. So I'd hope that most of my biochemistries actually don't have any environment they occur in (their constitutive elements never align in a liquid/gas/solid cycle that can be generated) but weird and wild ones occasionally rise to the fore from combinations of luck and circumstance.

While theory suggests that silicate life should be pretty viable, observations suggest the levels of energy required to get it started are more than we've observed. But... my simulator generates planets with deuterium atmospheres and seas of molten lead. I mean, if solar energy is the "x factor" that sparks life in the first instance, we should expect the universe to be full of "hot life." In fact, one of the problems with my first tries at an evolutionary generator was that it turned out to heavily favor evolution on super hot planets. We're not the "goldilocks zone" we're the "stroke of luck" zone.

So now I'd like to make the question of what triggers life more open-ended. I'm thinking that there will be three basic states you can choose from - stellar energy input (if you don't mind phototrophic life being the starting point, which isnt the case on earth), kinetic energy input (which means that chemovores will generally be the "first" kind of life and then will evolve into phototrophic species (or maybe not)), and then what I'm calling xenogenic input. And that is something you can set at the galactic scale when you initialize the simulator. If you go with the "x-factor" route to sparking life, then the chances of it emerging on any given planet will be independent of the energy flow within that planet's material system. But it will be dependent on how high you set it. Set it close to 1.0 and I'd like you to get abundant life on nearly every system. Set it close to 0.0 and you'll have a sterile universe that maybe one or two evolved species will emerge and seek to engage. (let's not forget I have a bit of a underpant gnome problem when it comes to scaling the compute that this project would require to do completely)

Another question I'm grappling with, and maybe it's off topic for this page, but anyone who engages me on these topics eventually hears about my theory that carbohydrate life may just be the "booster stage" for silicon-based "lifeforms" - the constructs equipped with rudimentary "intelligence" that we end up sending to the stars because it can survive across timespans that we cannot. Mechanical constructs who turn upon or displace or just outlive their makers are staples of science fiction. They also satisfy the bare bones definition of "life" that I laid out above. And as such, raise the question about whether or not civilization itself is part of the evolutionary process or apart from it.

At the moment, I'm planning to treat lifeforms as ecosystems from which civilizations can evolve, just as they evolve from the planetary systems of energy flow. The basic idea, which still sounds crazy to me when I say it but really ... will make a lot more sense as I bring it into form... is the hypercubic evolution engine. I know, I know, I know, it sounds nuts.

So... anyways. What's the definition of life? I'm hoping to leave it up to you, if you actually end up wanting to take a look at this thing (which would have to evolve to a level I'd be comfortable putting it up on github, and even then you're gonna have to do a lot of nerding to make it work. this isn't some streaming game).