#388 - What Is Life?

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Author: Making Sense with Sam Harris - Subscriber Content
Full_Title: #388 - What Is Life?
Category: podcasts
URL: https://share.snipd.com/episode/8579d27e-3c33-4105-bec6-65d32beb66af
Last Highlighted Date: 2024-10-23 03:10:38.063762+00:00

Highlights

- Standard definitions of life, focusing on self-sustaining chemical systems capable of Darwinian evolution, have limitations.
- Examples like individual organisms, memes, technology, and viruses challenge these definitions, raising questions about the fundamental nature of life. Transcript: Sara Imari Walker So I wouldn’t say that I agree with these kinds of definitions, but the one that you’ll usually see in astrobiology is that life is a self-sustaining chemical system capable of Darwinian Evolution. And at first pass, that seems pretty reasonable because you’re talking about life being chemical systems that can evolve. But as I talk about through like the first chapter of the book, you know, like if you focus on each word in this definition, they fall apart at some level. And there are really simple things like evolution only happens to populations. So are individuals alive or not? Is life chemical or not? You know, we can think about memes as evolving systems or is technology actually a part of life or not. Viruses are kind of a typical definition. They’re not self-sustaining or challenging. They typically challenge definitions. They’re not self-sustaining on their own. Are they alive when they’re in the cell and not alive when they’re out of the cell? And even self-reproduction is a bit problematic. So there’s always the examples of things like mules. But I like honeybees as a better example because it’s very clear that a colony of bees is a living thing, but you have individual members of the colony that can’t reproduce.
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So I maybe don’t agree that we actually even have narrow forms of intelligence. I think it’s very easy for us to recognize things we think of as intelligence because we see ourselves mirrored in our technology, but the technology has been selected to mirror us. So it’s very unclear to me how much the substrates themselves are embodying things that we might view as intelligence versus being kind of a false mimic to us.
- Tagged: #favorite #zk
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- Information plays a crucial role in defining the boundary between life and non-life.
- Information is a physical feature of reality, not just an abstract property, and must be considered in the study of living systems. Transcript: Sara Imari Walker So information to me is certainly related to the boundary between non-life and life. And early in my career, when I first started thinking about the original life and really thinking that theoretical physics was the right approach for addressing the transition from Non-life to life, my first sort of sets of conjectures about this were that life is where is the sort of boundary in the physical universe where information has to take on a causal role, You actually have to consider it as a physical feature of the
  - Time 0:16:04, Open in Readwise ^rw802092286

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