The Truth Physics Can No Longer Ignore

jschveibinz•about 1 hour ago

The implication that biology defies physics is just incorrect on many levels. There is no "truth" to ignore. The claim that life requires information that is otherwise not defined by physical laws is a misinterpretation of what defines information. A tree "bending toward the sun" is an emergent property of underlying physical laws--not a creation or demand for information.

dtagames•28 minutes ago

This article was written to refute that exact, and incorrect, belief.

For most of human history, it was obvious that life was of a higher order than matter, since the latter cannot be coalesced into the former.

An ignorant kind of scientism, narrow in focus, spent the last hundred years trying to rub out that basic truth and replace it with a system run by scientists, none of whom can make life but many of whom are very good at taking it away.

A_D_E_P_T•about 2 hours ago

People don't like it, but the "weirdness" of life, as it relates to physics, just completely evaporates if the universe is superdeterministic.

And that's actually overkill. Plain vanilla determinism would do it. As would a universal-wavefunction/no-collapse conception of quantum mechanics. (i.e. the universe has its own wave function.)

Point is, what the author decries does not require New Physics. It should suffice to re-evaluate different interpretations of existing physics. These matters are, after all, by no means settled.

bionhoward•about 2 hours ago

the minimum description length principle encourages us to describe living entities at higher levels of abstraction (as motivated rational agents rather than collections of atoms jiggling)

The universe is absolutely hierarchical and neglecting it just because we don’t strictly need hierarchy to define things seems silly

fellowniusmonk•about 1 hour ago

I may be misunderstanding things, but strictly speaking I don't think we need particle hierarchy for:

"motivated rational agents rather than collections of atoms jiggling"

We need complex networked interactions, zones of dense interconnectivity.

jdkee•about 3 hours ago

https://archive.is/wkzUa#selection-613.0-613.38

The Truth Physics Can No Longer Ignore

⚡ Community Insights

Discussion (5 Comments)Read Original on HackerNews