On Wed, Feb 7, 2018 at 3:40 PM, Lawrence Crowell <goldenfieldquaterni...@gmail.com> wrote: > On Wednesday, February 7, 2018 at 6:52:27 AM UTC-6, telmo_menezes wrote: >> >> On Sat, Feb 3, 2018 at 11:43 PM, Lawrence Crowell >> <goldenfield...@gmail.com> wrote: >> > It is interesting in some ways. However, it involves speculations on >> > things >> > we have no knowledge of. >> > >> > The idea involves these filters. The one "behind us" involves the >> > barrier to >> > intelligent life similar to us. There are few examples of brainy animals >> > similar to us. Cetaceans have large brains and clearly their songs >> > contain >> > complex information important to them. It is not clear that this is >> > equivalent to complex thought such as mathematics. The other filter >> > involves >> > post-ET development where such life is limited by either >> > self-extermination >> > or the limits of light speed and the unapproachable scale of putative >> > interstellar flight. >> > >> > I suspect planets with complex life above that of prokaryotic-like life >> > are >> > few in number per galaxy. It is hard to know how even prokaryotic-like >> > life >> > starts. The ribosome is a complex of RNA with polypeptides, and this >> > thing >> > is fairly universal. As yet we are not sure how this came about. So it >> > could >> > be that the life bearing planets are already extremely rare. This would >> > make >> > planets with complex life most likely very rare, and then up the ladder >> > the >> > occurrence of intelligent life exceedingly rare. >> > >> > The occurrence of life might be a case of what is called hard emergence. >> > Soft emergence is something like the emergence of chemistry from the >> > quantum >> > mechanics of atoms. Strong emergence is the occurrence of entirely >> > different >> > principles, where this is not an established scientific concept. This is >> > of >> > course a completely unknown territory. How life emerged is one of the >> > great >> > scientific questions. >> >> Are you sure this hard/soft distinction is meaningful? Life is what >> happens when imperfect self-replicators enter the stage. It is true >> that this appears to be a very unlikely event, and that how it >> happened is an open scientific question, but what do you mean by >> "different principles"? >> >> Telmo. > > > Hard emergence is where a set of principles spontaneously occur without any > formal or causal connection with other principles.
For me "formal", "causal" and "emergence" are human mental constructs, that help us create cognitively tractable models. They are epistemic tools. I would argue that the rules of nature in our universe always allowed for carbon-based life. It might be mysterious how certain states of apparent irreducible complexity were reached (search as the first self-replicators), but I don't see how new principles where generated. > We are familiar with the > absorption of Goldstone bosons by gauge bosons that give them a longitudinal > mode and hence a mass. This would be a case of soft emergence. Of course the > boundary between hard and soft emergence is hard to know. The ribosome is a > pretty invariant structure in biology, and it is horribly complex. This in > some embarrassing way sounds similar to the irreducible complexity argument > of the creationist camp. As a result there may be a sort of intellectual > impasse here, and potentially some clearer understanding of what is meant by > hard emergence might play a role. For me, that is not so mysterious. Once self-replication starts, certain successful things are replicated forever, even if then embedded in increasingly complex structures. It appears that many choices are arbitrary, the important thing is that they remain inter-operable (e.g. the fact that most life on earth is based on left-handed amino acids). Telmo. > LC > > -- > You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups > "Everything List" group. > To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an > email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. > To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. > Visit this group at https://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. > For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout. -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Everything List" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. Visit this group at https://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
