TLDR: What is life?
Life
According to Blaize, life is a self-modifying, computational state of matter that arises through evolutionary selection for the ability to persist through time by
Revise small text after reading the book.
Life is function which needs reproduction which is computation.
There’s no vital spirit that breathes fire into inanimate things. But how do we explain the difference between living and non-living matter?
Life is functional. Different parts of your body perform different functions. If you break them, they break you. Life has goals. Now you can make the argument that everything is alive to some degree. And e.g. levin does. I suppose Blaize does too. And how you implement / execute functions does not matter.Embodied computation: Rather than having a tape and a head that are made out of something fundamentally different than the information that is written on the tape, the tape and the head are part of what’s being written, e.g. cellular automata.
In order to reproduce, i.e. persist i.e. exist, you need a tape that tells you how to construct yourself, and you need a universal constructor that walks along the tape and executes whatever is written there. You also need a tape-copier (which has to be on the tape), and the instructions for building the universal constructor.
John von Neumann concluded all these things thinking about how life works, and he was spot on, before we discovered that in biological systems, DNA is that tape, the ribosome is the universal constructor, and DNA polymerase is the tape-copier.
He also showed that the universal constructor is an embodied universal computer.
→ In order to have life you need to reproduce. You can’t reproduce without computation → No life without computation.
Life was born in a hostile environment, is implemented on an unreliable substrate, and needs to reproduce in an environment where no situation is quite like anything that came before → Life was intelligent from the start.
Computation is energentically expensive, creating negative entropy by drawing on a source of free energy.
Life is a special phase of matter with structure at every scale.
Link to originalWhat’s Life?
As systems grow complex, they form abstraction layers - atoms form molecules, molecules form cells, cells form organs. Each layer interprets the one below, like software running on hardware running on physics.
In biological systems, each layer can adapt, unlike the rigid stacks of computers.
Life becomes more computationally complex over time and across scales through symbiogenesis.
Evolution has an arrow through time, progressive complexification through phase transitions, part of the old is always preserved in the new.
Difference between living and dead systems
References
About categories: Living Things Are Not Machines (Also, They Totally Are)
Blaise Agüera y Arcas | What is Intelligence?
Energy constrained metabolization → oscilation between population and wages.
External metabolism → heaps of extra free energy → population skyrockets + rising standard of living.