hey, thanks for replying. Yep, this is what I find hardest these days, asking for feedback. If you happen to be in a life setting where you don't have direct access to informed opinion you must risk the usual down vote of coming out of the blue asking for opinion on internet forums.
regarding the article itself I think you should try to understand I did my best stay away from the horror of the shitty "new age" quantum bullshit interpretation of the measurement problem. it is NOT my intention or idea.
my central idea is that maybe life is a property of the universe not a phenomenon, and try to construct something out of it.
I wish you'd give the perspective a chance :), beyond the annoying paragraphs, and put up with my lack of coherence as a gentle gesture towards an amateur wrestling with an extremely complicated subject.
>life is a property of the universe not a phenomenon
That is a bizarre, quasi-religious assumption. What evidence do have in support of it? I understand that you're making an assumption and proceeding from there, but it seems to revolve around a misunderstanding of what "property" means. If life is a 'property' of the universe, everything else also is, and the word ceases to have any meaning.
Well, if by life the author means consciousness/awareness (not intelligence), I don't know that it is necessarily a religious assumption. Western orthodoxy assumes that consciousness arises out of complex arrangements of matter, yet it is different in kind and does not appear to be itself reducible to matter. Isn't it a simpler hypothesis to assume consciousness is the default state of the universe, and all material phenomenon are the result of conscious action? This problem is this hypothesis is that it removes us from our privileged position as masters of the universe.
The idea that I am just a small part in a giant conscious living system makes me feel good. The alternative - that we are islands of life that somehow different and separate from a dead, mechanistic universe - seems kind of unpleasant.
I agree he should use a different word than property, but it made me think of Schrodinger's epic lectures/book. Criticism is great but I don't want to dissuade a clearly intelligent guy from exploring new creative ideas.
>The only possible inference from these
two facts is, I think, that I –I in the widest
meaning of the word, that is to say, every
conscious mind that has ever said or felt 'I' -am
the person, if any, who controls the 'motion of
the atoms' according to the Laws of
Nature
> If life is a 'property' of the universe, everything else also is, and the word ceases to have any meaning.
Why would life be all encompassing? It is just a thing on its own, and quite small in its manifestation. The way I framed the assumption is that life (I know it's hard to dismantle the meaning inside the word and see it separate from us) is just as time woven in, working in the opposite direction of time.
As for the idea, it is exactly NOT religious I want it to be seen. A property is a characteristic and I don't know if life would be an essential or accidental property of our (this) universe.
Awareness, our subjective existence, subjects of religion and philosophy are completely separate subjects from life and the phenomenon of evolution it produces.
As for evidence, I would dare quote evolution and the spawning of it. But I can solely produce thought experiment type of evidence :) from my current settings.
For one, you need to better define life. Are you referring to life in the biological sense? You say that it is distinct from consciousness. Will bacteria qualify? What about viruses?
Back to your original article, I think several scientific notions of yours are misguided. I presume that by entropy you refer to information entropy, not thermodynamic entropy, and I think you have conflated these two different notions that are called entropy. Thermodynamic entropy is concerned with how easily energy can be transferred from one thermodynamic system to another, while information entropy is concerned with how many bits we require to select a string from a group of possible strings.
> The void has in theory the highest level of entropy. Matter randomly spawns into existence, then back into non existence. Can’t get any more chaotic than that.
On the contrary, a vacuum has very little information density; to describe a region of space to that is a vacuum to any degree of precision requires fewer words than to describe any space on earth to the same degree of precision, since the vacuum is very uniform. Your impression that the void is more chaotic than our everyday environments is a misreading of pop-sci physics books; the same chaos happens throughout, even in matter-dense regions of space.
I think that your article illustrates why many critical thinkers refrain from creating cosmologies; our present scientific understanding and tools are still so immature that we cannot accurately describe our own minds and bodies, let alone with any certainty the human societies; and that let alone the cosmos, let alone one person's attempt.
Though it seems to me that physics has a tradition of producing outspoken physicists with enough hubris to think otherwise.
(Note that my reply had a serious typo: it should have read: asking for feedback on HN is perfectly OK and you should NOT be downvoted for that. I left out the word "not". Thanks to grzm for pointing that out.)
>life is a property of the universe not a phenomenon
But that's not true (to the extent that I can wring any coherent meaning out of that sentence at all).
Life is very well understood: it is the reproduction of information in the face of random mutation and natural selection. The central concept is not complicated at all. The results of this process (because that's what life is: a process) can be very complicated, but the process itself is not.
regarding the article itself I think you should try to understand I did my best stay away from the horror of the shitty "new age" quantum bullshit interpretation of the measurement problem. it is NOT my intention or idea.
my central idea is that maybe life is a property of the universe not a phenomenon, and try to construct something out of it.
I wish you'd give the perspective a chance :), beyond the annoying paragraphs, and put up with my lack of coherence as a gentle gesture towards an amateur wrestling with an extremely complicated subject.
Thanks again!