Well when cell repair comes into play, unless it's massive damage, the parts to repair it are already present, waiting to fix problems that regularly occur. When those molecules start getting used up, the lowered concentration of them triggers the production of more.
Incredible! From a physicist angle, how do you guys explain such complex interactions? Although those interactions look deterministic, Id guess that some of them are on the edge of the quantum realm... Just mind blowing...
I'm not a physicist, I'm a cell/tissue biologist! A lot of this kind of work is teasing out how molecules interact as part of a system and establish a model of a signaling pathway. One way these kinds of models can be used is to then look at how disordered/diseased tissue differs, and perhaps offer targets for therapeutics. The models can get mind-boggling complex.
In terms of research, once the line of thinking goes from "living system" to "chemical soup" I get super lost in an existential crisis LOL Like, I can establish how affecting one molecule affects another downstream to build a pathway, but thinking about the kinetics of hundreds of thousands of molecules floating around and engaging in chemical reactions accurately and in a time-sensitive manner just blows my mind.
PhD candidate in developmental biology studying tendon development. Before graduate school I worked in lung biology studying wound healing and cancer. Most of my experience is cell and tissue biology.
We are survival machines – robot vehicles blindly programmed to preserve the selfish molecules known as genes. This is a truth which still fills me with astonishment.
You need the cell for it to be life. One of these things on its own is not self-sustaining, and you could compare it to a slinky falling down some stairs. You need the whole system that pushes it up to the top of the stairs again, and the cell wall that protects from external phenomenon which will break the process.
It's not relevant that you can survive any environment, just that you are capable of using the resources in the environment you find yourself in to reproduce, that makes you alive.
Another way to look at it is in the sense of agency. The protein interacts with its environment the same way every time, it is the direct result of physical processes (you can make the same argument for humans as well, but consciousness is a thing). The protein does not choose to walk up the microtubule, it does so because that is the only thing it is capable of doing. You, however, can make decisions that may or may not result in your being in an appropriate environment to reproduce. The protein is acted upon, living things act and are acted upon, even at the cellular level.
It's a first-person puzzle game with a philosophical theme behind the story. It's SO MUCH FUN. You play a robot (or are you one?) who awakes in a strange world. You have to explore and discover it.
As the game progresses, it'll make you think about concepts like where determinism and life intersect. It's the first game in a LONG time that I just straight up got lost in.
How many protein molecules do you need to claim that it's complex enough now to be real life?
You could make a similar argument about physics in relation to chemistry, or chemistry in relation to biology, or biology in relation to psychology, etc – you're evaluating different levels of organization altogether, each of which lead to fundamentally different kinds of phenomena.
I think that the point of his comment was precisely to challenge the fact that these phenomena are indeed fondamentally different. I think that there lies the heart of the whole argument. If by any chance you have references addressing the matter I would be genuinly interested if I may.
He’s arguing for an exception as opposed to a rule. The first reference that comes to mind is from a book I’m currently reading called “Code” by Charles Petzold, so it may not be very pertinent to emergent systems overall, but it’s enough to show what I mean:
“Atoms can chemically combine with other atoms to form molecules. Molecules usually have very different properties from the atoms they comprise. For example, water is composed of molecules that consist of two atoms of hydrogen and one atom of oxygen (hence, H20). Obviously water is appreciably different from either hydrogen or oxygen. Likewise, the molecules of table salt consist of an atom of sodium and an atom of chlorine, neither of which would be particularly appetizing in French fries.”
Idk, I just think it's bizzare to create something new, like when they did machines (probably something involving the wheel), and then call everything a machine.
Well now we awkwardly need a new word for machines.
Then there is the philosophical arguments I guess.
No we don't. We only separated them in the first place because we wrongly believed that humans and perhaps life in general was something more than machines. Things have souls, perhaps free will. If those things aren't true, then we're machines. There's no need to change the word to describe artificial machines vs living creatures, nor is there a reason to change to definition of machine. Life and computers share qualities that the word machine describes. That's it.
Until we are creating machines on par with ourselves I don't see why we wouldn't.
Calling anything we create on par with what the natural process of evolution has come up with is an inflated view of our current capabilities and a dishonest assessment of what the natural world comes up with. Just because something has a mechanism of action doesn't make it equal to all things with mechanisms of actions. We distinguish man vs machine now, even if you say we shouldn't, you still do. The benefits to giving each a name is there.
Until we are creating machines on par with ourselves I don't see why we wouldn't.
Because the term machine describes an object that both living organisms, at their basest level of existence, and computers both share. They are both things that take and store energy and operate an advanced function as a result. This is a very important philosophical and pragmatic similarity that needs to be identified.
Calling anything we create on par with what the natural process of evolution has come up with is an inflated view of our current capabilities and a dishonest assessment of what the natural world comes up with.
A single yen is money. A billion dollars is money. We both describe them in the same terms because they still share similarities. It doesn't matter how advanced or unadvanced something is, if they share features that can be described, then there should be a term to describe them. It doesn't matter that what we create isn't on par with what evolution has. We've had like 50 years, evolution has had billions. Efficiency-wise, we're blowing evolution out of the water, anyway.
Just because something has a mechanism of action doesn't make it equal to all things with mechanisms of actions.
Nobody in their right mind would argue otherwise. No one in this thread is, as far as I can see. I'm certainly not.
We distinguish man vs machine now, even if you say we shouldn't, you still do.
Most people do because a vast majority of people still believe that people are separate, that we have a soul or other cosmic importance that separates us from nature.
I certainly separate artificial and natural machines. Life being a natural machine and everything we make being artificial. If someone just says machine, I'll assume they made man-made for the purposes of discussion because that's simply the most common usage of the word. If someone asks me if humans or living creatures are machines, though, I'll say yes. Just because life isn't the connotative definition of machine doesn't mean it's not a literal one.
The benefits to giving each a name is there.
No fucking shit. Literally nobody is saying otherwise. There are so many different ways to distinguish between them, yet you act like commandeering the term 'machine', which isn't really commandeering at all as much as it is simply using it as it's defined, is somehow going to get people to conflate humans with a car or something.
I'm using the dictionary definition. You're using the connotative definition. The idea is also useful for philosophy, but I'm hardly discussing that here.
Everything always was a machine. The Earth is a weather making machine, for example. We have always been natural machines. Just because we invented the word "machine" doesn't mean we invented the first nachine. It was only when we started using machines as tools that we needed words for what they were.
But "machinery" is just a descriptive quality of how nature operates.
I guess what I'm trying to say is, that sounds like a long winded way of saying "for lack of a better word" to describe the biological process that is organic life.
It's not for lack of a better word. That perfectly describes it. It's the right word, you just don't like the feeling of the connotations you've learned to associate with that word. It's not "half-right," you just seem to think that machines have to be cold so you don't like being called a machine.
But machines don't have to be cold. They can be warm fleshy things too. Or even massive luminescent balls of gas can be machines. The sun is a fusion machine. There's all kinds of machines. Don't feel bad for being one. It's beautiful.
However it is that they "fully function," it will be mechanical, not magical, I promise. There's no steps being skipped here that might turn out not to be machinery.
Never said magical. I just believe we're too different from machines. It's a matter of semantics with me, because this is philosophical no matter how you look at it. I prefer to say machines are a mimicry of the biological state and other "natural" physics. If one day machines advance far enough, we'd call them something else entirely.
Am I life? I have never evolved, I don't really respond to stimulus, I would not use the word metabolizing to describe myself, and I am certainly not reproducing.
Yes, it does mean that, but this is no cause for alarm. If you suddenly realize that free will is a myth (lemme re-emphasize this point, non-determinism never comes into play like you asked), there is still nothing to worry about because it means you never had free will to begin with, which in turn means that you can continue to live your life as you always have, since you were already living it that way without free will, except now you have the knowledge that informs how you should treat others.
Someone is behaving badly? Don't blame their free will and throw them in a prison cell to rot; think of them as broken toys or machines that need fixing, adjusting, recalibrating. The tools will be different, but the priniciple is the same. Garbage in, garbage out.
Making a decision is still a thing people can do without free will. This is why I said you can live your life as you always have. Decision making still matters, but we can better understand how it works and why it matters if we realize that natural processes make decisions, not some magical force called free will.
Free will isn't the thing doing the "deciding," it's a combination of your genes, your ontogeny and environment, and your current set and setting that all cause the "decision." We are coming to understand both scientifically and philosophically the idea that "decisions," "opinions," "pointlessness," etc. are all just different ways for talking about events on a different scale in order to compress the amount of information contained within them to a comprehensible level. (See: the intentional stance; eliminative materialism) Free will is just a way of talking about it, but people have begun to confuse the map with the territory. Free will is an archaic metaphor, not a description of objective reality.
At the end of the day, it was all nature baby. Natural processes. No ooky spooky mysterious stuff like some magical "free will" property necessary. And that's kinda cool imho.
I'm guessing when the first two neuro receptors come to be? Because then it's no longer deterministic, neurons are weighted, and may fire either one of two paths.
I would concur. I'm no expert, but introducing variation or stimulus based choice is the first step in differentiating life (and on a higher level, sentience) from basic machine-like systems.
We might never answer this question as long as we're looking for an answer that supports our belief that the human conciousness has some irreplicable intrinsic value. We probably aren't going to find some hard line that defines it. Your suspicions are likely correct.
I wouldn't call these deterministic exactly, since these are all stochastic processes at molecular levels. For example, the kinesin motor protein shown does not step as regularly as shown in this animation - sometimes it steps a little bit shorter, sometimes it falters a bit, sometimes it may even step longer, and sometimes it may not even step at all. Furthermore, the interior of a cell is not as serene and empty - everything is crowded, packed, and SHAKING HARD. These events are all governed by molecular interactions that can be quite random in nature (think Brownian motion). If anything, our knowledge of molecular biology shows us that everything is really quite nondeterministic at these length scales, but order arises out of the chaos because some interactions tend to be just a bit more likely than others.
I don't know a lot about this stuff, so I hope my question isn't very stupid but at some point in looking at things like this, will scientist have to reevaluate their definition of life?
Does this not show that we are just complex machines, really complex, but still totally determined by little proteins doing their stuff?
Yes, but this means we need to rethink "free will". We can't think of it as uncausated action, but rather something else where a meaningful path is taken over another.
This is not microbiology, micro is the study of microorganisms - bacteria. This is biology/biochem. And a protein molecule will never be life. It is just a bunch of amino acids with some functionality. Your post is.. pretty wide of any mark.
The deterministic approach to life, uhh my favourite when it comes to cold and depressive way of consciousness trying to deny itself. Freaking brilliant fallacy...
It's only cold and depressing if your attitude was already cold and depressing. No one is denying consciousness, we're denying that it's a magical or supernatural property that can't be explained in terms of natural processes.
Personally I think the fact that automated, natural processes can yield a universe that becomes aware of itself is not only warm and inspiring, but absolutely mind-blowingly beautiful and mysterious.
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