Razib just did an E. O. Wilson retrospective podcast, it’s fantastic and worth listening to. As Tyler Cowen used to say, interesting throughout. One might identify Life as the second great level of emergence. The first is physics, to the extent it represents emergence at all rather than the ground floor.
Ahem, as a biologist, I think this is totally right. Great post!
You might find many interesting things coming from researchers in the International Society for Artificial Life, which shares your perspective on this. The proceedings of their recent conferences can be found here: https://direct.mit.edu/isal
An interesting branch of their work is the origins of life, both biological and other, and how this could be relevant for finding instances of life off-Earth.
I assume you're familiar with What Is Life and related literature, which uses local violation of the second law of thermodynamics to define life—a project picked up by Friston by way of Helmholtz (who formulated the second law). Of note, on your definition, "life" plausibly precedes the laws of physics, which plausibly evolved from random perturbations—cf. Peirce and his tychism.
Ahem, as a biologist, I think this is totally right. Great post!
You might find many interesting things coming from researchers in the International Society for Artificial Life, which shares your perspective on this. The proceedings of their recent conferences can be found here: https://direct.mit.edu/isal
An interesting branch of their work is the origins of life, both biological and other, and how this could be relevant for finding instances of life off-Earth.
Hi Eigen. Glad to see you're back to the blog.
fuckin knowitall
This is awesome!
I assume you're familiar with What Is Life and related literature, which uses local violation of the second law of thermodynamics to define life—a project picked up by Friston by way of Helmholtz (who formulated the second law). Of note, on your definition, "life" plausibly precedes the laws of physics, which plausibly evolved from random perturbations—cf. Peirce and his tychism.