What is life?

August 22, 2021 11:12 PM

Scientists Are Proposing a Radical New Framework to Redefine Life on Earth - "The union of two energetic and informatic processes that can encode and pass on adaptive information forward through time. Using this definition vastly increases what can be seen as life, to include concepts such as culture, forests, and the economy. A more traditional definition might consider these as products of life, rather than life itself." (previously)

I've looked at life from both sides now
From up and down and still somehow
It's life's illusions I recall
I really don't know life
At all
--@jonimitchell, Both sides now[1]
Life's Edge by Carl Zimmer review – what does it mean to be alive? - "This profound meditation on the science of life explores where it has come from and how it evolves."

At a medical research laboratory in California, Alysson Muotri has used chemistry to change skin cells into neurons, which have multiplied to form “organoids” – globes of interconnected brain cells. The organoids can expand to hundreds of thousands of cells, live for years, and even produce detectable patterns of brain waves, like those of premature babies. “The most incredible thing is that they build themselves,” says Muotri. He even wonders whether they could one day become conscious.

Such unsettling scientific creations, unknown even 10 years ago, challenge our ideas about life, raising questions for bioethicists and philosophers. As the American science writer Carl Zimmer writes: “Brain organoids are troubling because we feel in our bones that making sense of life should be easy. These clusters of neurons prove that it’s not.”

Lab-made mini brains grow their own sets of 'eyes' - "Scientists recently grew mini brains with their own sets of 'eyes', according to a new study."

Organoids are miniature versions of organs that scientists can grow in the lab from stem cells, or cells that can mature into any type of cell in the body. Previously, scientists have developed tiny beating hearts and tear ducts that could cry like humans do. Scientists have even grown mini brains that produce brain waves like those of preterm babies.

Now, a group of scientists has grown mini brains that have something their real counterparts do not: a set of eye-like structures called "optic cups" that give rise to the retina — the tissue that sits in the back of the eye and contains light-sensing cells, according to a statement.

Neuroscientist Anil Seth: 'We risk not understanding the central mystery of life' - "His new book, Being You, proposes an idea of the human mind as a 'highly evolved prediction machine', rooted in the functions of the body and 'constantly hallucinating the world and the self' to create reality."

I was interested in your section about memory in the book, in particular about Clive Wearing. Wearing is someone who, as a result of a devastating brain infection, lost all conscious memory and lives in a permanent present tense, as if perpetually waking from coma. Yet the studies show that he demonstrates an abiding love for his wife. How is that explained?

I’ve never met Clive or his wife, only read about the case. But it highlights the fact that some of those things we think are necessary for selfhood are obviously not. There are all sorts of different forms of memory. Explicit conscious recall, autobiographical memory, is just one of them. In neurological patients, you often see how the mind is built of processes that in normal life we never see...

There’s a lot of argument about the evolutionary function of consciousness. But the answers you get to that depend on what distinction you’re trying to make. If you’re trying to say why is anything conscious at all, rather than just mechanisms evolving in patterns in the dark?, then you’re simply up against the “hard problem” again. But if you reframe it as what is the evolutionary benefit of the organism having these specific experiences?, then you see that an experience of selfhood is clearly important because it maximises the organism’s chances of survival...

I do think it’s very likely possible for AI to mimic that. In fact, in the book I talk about the pace of this ability to mimic being really quite scary, with the combination of “deep fake” things and natural language processing machines. Instantiation is another thing, though... Building an AI system or a robot that does subjectively experience having a self, as opposed to being a sophisticated machine that gives the appearance of having a self but with nothing actually going on...

A lot of what we know about human consciousness is based on animal experiments. One of the stories in the book is about the time I spent studying octopuses, which was fantastic. They really do demonstrate a wholly different way of being. One of the things that has become more and more embedded for me is that tension between using humans as a benchmark, which we somehow have to do, and recognising that humans are not the benchmark by which all other conscious species should be assessed. It’s important to recognise that if other species have experience, the very first things that they are going to be endowed with by evolution are abilities to feel pain or pleasure or suffering rather than complex, intelligent thinking. When we decide how to treat other animals, we should bear that in mind, rather than assessing how smart they seem to be.

also btw...
Mutant 'daddy shortlegs' created in a lab - "Researchers were able to 'switch off' the genes behind the arachnid's famously long legs."

“To assert that mind can construct the world on its own, or to say that the universe is guaranteed to take the right path without being made to, is in either case to downgrade the real constructive role of intelligence.” --@pgodfreysmith, Complexity and the function of mind in nature[2,3]

posted by kliuless (32 comments total)

A New Physics Theory of Life

From the standpoint of physics, there is one essential difference between living things and inanimate clumps of carbon atoms: The former tend to be much better at capturing energy from their environment and dissipating that energy as heat. Jeremy England, a 31-year-old assistant professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, has derived a mathematical formula that he believes explains this capacity. The formula, based on established physics, indicates that when a group of atoms is driven by an external source of energy (like the sun or chemical fuel) and surrounded by a heat bath (like the ocean or atmosphere), it will often gradually restructure itself in order to dissipate increasingly more energy. This could mean that under certain conditions, matter inexorably acquires the key physical attribute associated with life....

Self-replication (or reproduction, in biological terms), the process that drives the evolution of life on Earth, is one such mechanism by which a system might dissipate an increasing amount of energy over time. As England put it, “A great way of dissipating more is to make more copies of yourself.”
posted by They sucked his brains out! at 11:44 PM on August 22, 2021 [5 favorites]

Reading the first linked article, my reaction is both that this is astounding stuff but also somehow obvious. I mean that in a good way -- truth often seems obvious in retrospect. I really want to dig into the full paper when I have time.

The further links here are interesting, but I don't understand how they support the main argument. The creation of organoids is still based on DNA and harvested cells, so an argument as to why they are alive could equally be made about their information/energy collecting properties as in the first link, or the fact that they are made of living material from animals.

The interview with Anil Seth talks about the hard problem of consciousness more that the concept of life. The arguments in the first article about what is "life" doesn't necessarily stretch to the question of what is "consciousness". Especially when Anil says, first:

If you’re trying to say why is anything conscious at all, rather than just mechanisms evolving in patterns in the dark?, then you’re simply up against the “hard problem” again. But if you reframe it as what is the evolutionary benefit of the organism having these specific experiences?, then you see that an experience of selfhood is clearly important because it maximises the organism’s chances of survival.

But then a few moments later:

Why is it not possible for artificial intelligence to at least mimic that organising perception and therefore mimic other aspects of conscious selfhood?
I do think it’s very likely possible for AI to mimic that. In fact, in the book I talk about the pace of this ability to mimic being really quite scary, with the combination of “deep fake” things and natural language processing machines. Instantiation is another thing, though.

What do you mean by instantiation?
Building an AI system or a robot that does subjectively experience having a self, as opposed to being a sophisticated machine that gives the appearance of having a self but with nothing actually going on.

Like... what's this? Anil doesn't want to tackle the "hard problem" and only seeks to understand the benefit of consciousness, suggesting it's an evolutionary inevitability. But then moments later he says that AI can probably only offer a simulation of consciousness, which now rests once again on the hard problem -- what is consciousness anyway.

Anil's argument is now a contradiction with the first article, because if life is an energetic/information process, then AI systems may certainly fulfil the requirements, and then there is no reason why their simulation of consciousness is any different than our own experiential consciousness -- unless consciousness is based outside materiality?

There is a heck of a lot of stuff to think about here. I like it.
posted by sixohsix at 1:39 AM on August 23, 2021 [3 favorites]

What is life?

Baby don't hurt me
posted by Foosnark at 4:23 AM on August 23, 2021 [39 favorites]

Foosnark: You are confusing life with love. However since you opened up this area, perhaps the deeper question is really whether since Live is defined as Life, does the reverse also hold?
posted by biffa at 5:10 AM on August 23, 2021 [2 favorites]

This is one of those posts/topics that is fascinating and yet feels like the author is ultimately saying "I can explain it to you, but I can't make it understandable to you." And then we're back to Joni Mitchell who was right all along. We really don't know life. AT ALL.
posted by pjsky at 5:21 AM on August 23, 2021 [7 favorites]

Been watching just a whole, whole lot of next-gen-era Star Trek during this endless pandemic, going through TNG and DS9 and VOY I'm not sure how many times now, and last night caught "The Measure of a Man" for the first time in a while. (Trek is often my wife's background binge, so I'll catch whatever episodes are on a home that she didn't watch have on at the office earlier in the day.) Now "Measure of a Man," in mid-season 2, is probably the first "great" TNG episode, and covers ground that later episodes will hit upon again and again (particularly with the Doc in Voyager) but what's really great about it, what makes it work in a lasting way, is that it doesn't claim that 300 years is going to give us a stable, working definition of sentience, of consciousness, of life. And the judge's ruling in the episode doesn't ultimately come from any insight into such matters that determine Data to fit those definitions, but rather doubt about whether he necessarily doesn't. Which is a very smart, restrained way to handle that sort of material.

Of course, in that episode, what's at stake is the rights of a character whom the audience loves by this point (and sees as "alive" no matter what anyone else has to say about it.) In reality, the stakes of this sort of conversation are really "if we define 'life' such that it includes cultures and economies, what can that viewpoint teach us?" Which is a much more interesting question and one that is difficult to predict.
posted by Navelgazer at 5:38 AM on August 23, 2021 [3 favorites]

“A man's at odds to know his mind cause his mind is aught he has to know it with." is a line from Cormac McCarthy's Blood Meridian that always struck a chord with me.

I only started reading about consciousness and how ill-defined and understood it actually is in the past few years. Definitely one of the more fascinating edges of science to me and I agree that it's one of the most interesting mysteries of life. I may have to pick up Anil Seth's book on the subject as really enjoyed the perspectives in that Guardian article.

From the first link on life: To explore this, the researchers broaden the definition of "life" to the union of two energetic and informatic processes that can encode and pass on adaptive information forward through time.

I don't know if this definition of life has an equivalent definition of death. Is it when the union can no longer happen or when the information ceases to adapt or when it ceases to move through time? (Answering that same question from a biological standpoint, I'm fond of this video: This Ciliate Is About to Die)

Lots more to go over (and try to get my head around), thanks for posting these.
posted by slimepuppy at 6:12 AM on August 23, 2021

In reality, the stakes of this sort of conversation are really "if we define 'life' such that it includes cultures and economies, what can that viewpoint teach us?" Which is a much more interesting question and one that is difficult to predict.

a bit like..
S.Korea to grant legal status to animals to tackle abuse, abandonment
posted by kliuless at 6:14 AM on August 23, 2021 [1 favorite]

a sophisticated machine that gives the appearance of having a self but with nothing actually going on

I could easily be one of those. How would I know? I mean, it all feels really convincing from in here, but then it would, wouldn't it?
posted by flabdablet at 6:20 AM on August 23, 2021 [2 favorites]

Echoing Navelgazer here. It feels like we have a tangle where we have concepts like legal duty, moral duty, life, experience, and consciousness; it seems that they're bound up together (many moral duties are said to exist because of others' presumed consciousness and/or the ability to have subjective experiences, which appears to be co-incident with being the right sort of life, and many legal duties exist because of moral duties) but we don't have satisfactory definitions of any of these things! I think it's entirely possible that a more expansive definition of life leads to a more expansive definition of moral duty, but it's also entirely possible that a more expansive definition of life would also make it clearer that "life" is not actually a sharp boundary when it comes to moral duty, and it's some other quality that goes along with some life (and maybe some non-life).
posted by the antecedent of that pronoun at 6:23 AM on August 23, 2021 [2 favorites]

Life is "The union of two energetic and informatic processes that can encode and pass on adaptive information forward through time. Using this definition vastly increases what can be seen as life, to include concepts such as culture, forests, and the economy...."

Mmmm no. Those concepts are abstract artifacts of OUR consciousness, and how we've perceived, classified and organized the stuff around us.
posted by Artful Codger at 7:10 AM on August 23, 2021 [6 favorites]

So what? Literally: What is the benefit of this? Does it lead to a testable hypothesis that would not otherwise exist? Naturally lead to a modeling approach that scientists might not otherwise think of?
posted by Mr.Know-it-some at 7:53 AM on August 23, 2021 [3 favorites]

First they said corporations were people,
and I didn't speak up, because I wasn't a corporation.
posted by Mchelly at 8:56 AM on August 23, 2021 [7 favorites]

Scientists Are Proposing A Rube Goldberg Version Of An Indigenous Worldview
posted by Nibbly Fang at 8:59 AM on August 23, 2021 [8 favorites]

From the monist perspective, life is an attribute of the whole of reality, ie. reality is a continuum not only of space and time and matter and energy, but also of life and mind. We distinguish components of this continuum according to our own capacities and interests. From this perspective, culture and economy are products of the human life-form and a forest is a community of life-forms. Inorganic matter contains within it in implicit form the potential for life.
posted by No Robots at 9:00 AM on August 23, 2021 [4 favorites]

Life's what you make it

isn't it?
posted by philip-random at 9:15 AM on August 23, 2021

i may have absorbed some small nuggets of information from this, but it's clearly put together by a higher intelligence: What Is Life? Lynn Margulis & Dorian Sagan.
posted by j_curiouser at 9:24 AM on August 23, 2021

and I didn't speak up, because I wasn't a corporation.

The sovereign citizen treatise is thataway.
posted by tclark at 10:20 AM on August 23, 2021

In a better world, this would result in things like forests being given additional protection and consideration.

In our world, we'll probably end up with the invisible hand of the market being added to the endangered species list.
posted by oulipian at 10:24 AM on August 23, 2021 [9 favorites]

In a better world, this would result in things like forests being given additional protection and consideration.

In our world, we'll probably end up with the invisible hand of the market being added to the endangered species list.
posted by oulipian at 10:24 AM on August 23 [3 favorites −] Favorite added! [!]

See: The USA and the 14th Amendment creating a corporate state and Citizens United


But the OP idea makes a lot of sense. I took a graduate class on "the origin of life" decades ago that included the rhetoric and history of the 'noosphere' concept as a biosphere analogue. The ambiguities and limitations of both concepts are so similar and often mentioned in the same intellectual histories, so why not?

the trouble with this definition, as two people above have stated and implied, is that a given human culture is generally terrible at perceiving and communicating patterns outside of its current culture.

A given human culture is going to identify itself as "all of humanity" which is always wrong, and yet, always happening, because culture is what produces the concepts. "ecosystems" themselves, and the evidence for their existing are the product of a particular culture, indigenous cultures often have simliar concept*traditions that rest on radically different 'evidence'

Anthropocentrism: More than Just a Misunderstood Problem Helen Kopnina, Haydn Washington, Bron Taylor & John J Piccolo Journal of Agricultural and Environmental Ethics volume 31, pages109–127 (2018)
https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10806-018-9711-1

This is a problem of particular relevance in 2021, as the challenges of implementing, say, the "One Health" philosophy are the challenges to fighting COVID 19 and future SARSes generated by industrial agriculture, which is a very particular mode of a very particular kind of human culture, but one which loves to universalize itself at every opportunity

One Health as a moral dilemma: Towards a socially responsible zoonotic disease control
Joost van Herten, Bernice Bovenkerk, Marcel Verweij
First published: 02 November 2018
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/30390380/
posted by eustatic at 11:21 AM on August 23, 2021 [2 favorites]

Those concepts are abstract artifacts of OUR consciousness, and how we've perceived, classified and organized the stuff around us.

And? Do we have access to concepts that aren't abstract artifacts of our consciousness?
posted by Saxon Kane at 11:41 AM on August 23, 2021

Person A: "We came up with a formal definition of life. It involves energy and information."
Person B: "That sounds solid."
Person A: "Applying this definitions means the economy and the internet are literally alive."

At this point B will either respond "Wow, that's amazing" or "Guess that's not a very good definition after all."

I'm more a person B. It certainly seems a semantic discussion rather than a primarily scientific one--there's not a disagreement over reality, only over terminology. All the more so because observing life is a good metaphor for memes, societies, cultures, etc. has an old and honorable pedigree.

Regardless of your view on this question, when it comes to "life as energy" I will recommend Nick Lane's books as first rate science writing on this topic. The internet world we live in means life-as-information, with DNA at the heart, as the code waiting to be executed, has been a dominant analogy for the last few decades. Lane puts energy and metabolism at the core of life.
posted by mark k at 12:27 PM on August 23, 2021

> And? Do we have access to concepts that aren't abstract artifacts of our consciousness?

I think we are capable of finding out and understanding things that aren't so subjective: mass, energy, e=mc2, DNA... these aren't subjective or an artifact of our perception. Likewise with life - the definition should deal more with real properties, not so much a collection of our projections and abstractions.
posted by Artful Codger at 2:26 PM on August 23, 2021

We covered a similar conceptual zoom-out in my Philosophy of Mind course in college, notably with the "China Brain" thought experiment, in which every citizen in China acts in concert, each acting as a neuron in a brain would, with the question being whether the system as a whole would be considered to be "conscious." (It's worth nothing that there are many orders more neurons in the brain than there are Chinese citizens, and that my professor was Ned Block, the person most prominently on the "no it's not conscious" side of this question.)
posted by Navelgazer at 2:31 PM on August 23, 2021

This idea of broadening the definition of life to include intangibles like culture resembles the expansion in our understanding of what constitutes cultural heritage, from being concerned primarily with material artefacts to include intangibles like artistic expressions, rituals, and even entire landscapes. This seems to better capture the sense that everything we value derives its value from being embedded within pre-existing relationship networks. A single person speaking English is meaningless, but a handful of them creates English. A single water molecule has no meaning, but a couple of handfuls create rivers, lakes, oases.

Perhaps the process of life is to establish, maintain & explore such networks of meaning, with fitness a function of how meaningful those networks are in terms of how well they capture or reflect some underlying energetic constraint (their information content). An idealist might even say that it's the networks that are fundamental; that tangible matter and energy are just a substrate to express rhizomatic filaments of meaning.

Of course it doesn't solve the problem. With idealism there's nothing to measure; with materialism no-one does the measuring. I've come to think our understanding is like a ship on the sea of knowledge, buffeted by waves, now towards the one, then towards the other.
posted by dmh at 4:03 PM on August 23, 2021 [1 favorite]

With idealism there's nothing to measure; with materialism no-one does the measuring.

Idealism and materialism are pseudo-monist. True monism operates on the basis of the unity of mind and matter, not on the subsumption of one by the other.
posted by No Robots at 4:23 PM on August 23, 2021

a sophisticated machine that gives the appearance of having a self but with nothing actually going on

My Terminator series headcanon is that only Skynet is sentient, not the individual machines, so when Arnold cracks jokes or awkwardly emotes it’s purely a calculated response, programmed to invoke humans to bond with it, with no more awareness behind it than a toaster. Really changes the tone of some of the scenes.
posted by dephlogisticated at 4:47 PM on August 23, 2021 [1 favorite]

...and it concludes with part 3 of The Matrix, where The One becomes one with The Other One. QED, problem solved.
posted by sneebler at 7:28 PM on August 23, 2021

My Terminator series headcanon is that only Skynet is sentient, not the individual machines, so when Arnold cracks jokes or awkwardly emotes it’s purely a calculated response, programmed to invoke humans to bond with it, with no more awareness behind it than a toaster.

That makes a lot more sense than making cyborgs with the ability to learn to love -- seems like a pretty big weakness, even if it's unlikely to ever happen.
posted by asnider at 10:21 AM on August 24, 2021

"We came up with a formal definition of life. It involves energy and information."

Sounds like folks are taking the example of mathematics working from postulates as a way to (cough) prove what is intelligence. Math does not really (from my slight reading) start with ZFC (or other) and work forward. Math persons get an idea, hash it out, use it, then essentially work backwards to double check from a proof from a postulate. Starting from Euclid there are infinite theorems, a few useful. Starting from a formal definition of life there are again infinite possible info transfers, fewer that can decide to reply to this comment, but perhaps the Internet will finally make a spontaneous reply here. Waiting.
posted by sammyo at 5:55 AM on August 25, 2021

making cyborgs with the ability to learn to love

Life, ahh... finds a way.
posted by Saxon Kane at 1:12 PM on August 25, 2021

There is an argument along these lines that an office building is a kind of organism.

Most “somatic” office buildings don’t reproduce. But some special “germ cell” office buildings contain architecture and construction firms, which exchange information in order to create new office buildings from materials in their environment.

Office buildings don’t really breed true, the way that biological organisms tend to, but “horizontal gene transfer” is a major factor in their reproduction.

Also, an office building can switch from being a reproductive type to a somatic type, or vice-versa, if the firm that uses it goes bankrupt or loses its lease. But there are plenty of biological organisms that can swap genders or grow replacement gonads or whatnot.

This is currently a “second beer” argument, not a “book pitch” argument.
posted by fantabulous timewaster at 5:38 PM on August 28, 2021