But anyway .. what _is_ life?
In 1944 Schrodinger wrote
The arrangements of the atoms in the most vital parts of an organism
and the interplay of these arrangements differ in a fundamental way
from all those arrangements of atoms which physicists and chemists
have hitherto made the object of their experimental and theoretical
research. Yet the difference which I have just termed fundamental is
of such a kind that it might easily appear slight to anyone except a
physicist who is thoroughly imbued with the knowledge that the laws of
physics and chemistry are statistical throughout. For it is in
relation to the statistical point of view that the structure of the
vital parts of living organisms differs so entirely from that of any
piece of matter that we physicists and chemists have ever handled
physically in our laboratories or mentally at our writing desks.
Four years later Shannon used a statistical point of view in defining
what it means for systems to share information and communicate. Since
then humans have become better at making systems communicate.
Furthermore, the information-sharing capacity of human-engineered systems
(their channel capacity, in the language of information theory) increases
exponentially over time. The expanded information-sharing capacity of
engineered systems has allowed such systems to demonstrate many of the
behaviors and capacities that once differentiated what Schrodinger termed
the ``vital parts of living organisms'' from other pieces of matter. In
short, the line between the "animate" and the "inanimate" has blurred. It
grows increasingly difficult to formulate the sense in which living
organisms differ from pieces of matter that are human-engineered.
Maybe what Nick has suggested is true: that what we mean by aliveness and
should actually capture in defining life is that alive things feel and
have intentions, etc. But of course there's no empirical criteria to
distinguish feeling (conscious) things from inanimate things. That
seems to be a can of worms without a cover.
--
Kate Mullen |
[hidden email]
Physics Applied Computer Science Group | Tel. + 31-(0)20-59 87870
Dept. of Physics and Astronomy | Fax + 31-(0)20-44 47992
Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam |
http://www.nat.vu.nl/~kate/
Locked
