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Dr. Slack

Wed Jul 01 2009, 08:44PM

Registered Member #72 Joined: Thu Feb 09 2006, 08:29AM
Location: UK St. Albans
Posts: 1659

Why is it that the tree is capable of consuming energy and making itself more organised?

I'm not so sure that the "tree" is the thing you ought to be focussing on. Starting from a very non-equilibrium situation and energy flowing from one end to the other, that is the thermo-whatever reactions in the sun, light hitting the earth, heating it, splitting molecules, they recombine, radiate heat off into the cold distance, a tree and its processes is just another, albeit extremely complicated pathway that this energy takes on the way to heating deep space.

If you give a complicated enough system some degrees of freedom, and drive it with energy, that energy will flow down the paths with least activation energy. So if you want to combine CO2 and H20, you can do it at high temperature in a chemical reactor, or at room temperature with biological catalysts, and the room temerpature route will consume the reactants, and build a tree. Don't get too hung up about how the life system got this complicated (evolution) or started (just because we haven't identified THE way doesn't mean that organics in comets and after thunderstorms are not a plausible way of something getting started).

In much the same way, sediment-bearing water flowing slowly over a delta, forms, re-inforces, cuts channels, which can get quite complicated, rather more complicated than N grains of fine silt in water + a gravity potential difference would hint at. It's a much simpler system than life, but it's energy-driven, self-modifying, and more complicated than the sum of the inputs. It can undergo step changes, consider the formation of the physical geographer's poster-feature, the oxbow lake. It also relies on a "goldilocks" amount of energy being available, and eveloution requires it to be available for a very long time. Life/channels in the delta would stop if the energy input ceased, and change form radically or become much much simpler if the energy input increased above a certain threshhold.

This is basically the thermodynamic version of "What is the meaning of life", so I don't really expect an answer

No it isn't. There is no meaning to life, it's not even as meaningful as "life is nature's way of moving water around". Life is what happens when energy flows through a system complicated enough to have self-reinfrcing low activation energy pathways, for a long time

Renesis

Wed Jul 01 2009, 10:51PM

Registered Member #2028 Joined: Mon Mar 16 2009, 08:13PM
Location: Norway
Posts: 319

We may argue back and fourth about wether traveling forwards in time is possible or not, but i doubt that traveling backwards in time is possible. Because if it is, then were are all the time tourists?

Or does this mean that the world will end before we invent the time machine, or that the task is too difficult for any living being ever to achieve?

Let's say youre spaceship were traveling at the speed of light, and your onboard chronometer tells you that you have been traveling for exactly one year. One year + the speed of light = one lightyear. But if what ElectricalEngg writes about time dilation is true, then you would have in fact traveled 22,9 lightyears, no?

So if you then traveled 22,9 lightyears in one year, werent you actually traveling at 22,9 times the speed of light?

Will you be sentenced to jail for breaking the laws of physics?

Paradoxes give me a headache, oow

Carbon_Rod

Thu Jul 02 2009, 01:50AM

Registered Member #65 Joined: Thu Feb 09 2006, 06:43AM
Location:
Posts: 1155

If you think your head hurts now...

then try to conclude an argument with the M-Theory crowd.
Tempus omnia revelat

Reviewing this video about reason is suggested:

Z28Fistergod

Thu Jul 02 2009, 01:59AM

Registered Member #2040 Joined: Fri Mar 20 2009, 10:13PM
Location: Fairfax VA
Posts: 180

Renesis wrote ...

We may argue back and fourth about wether traveling forwards in time is possible or not, but i doubt that traveling backwards in time is possible. Because if it is, then were are all the time tourists?

Will you be sentenced to jail for breaking the laws of physics?

Paradoxes give me a headache, oow

I haven't seen anyone more qualified talk about the multiverse theory yet, so I guess I'll light the fire. The multiverse theory says that every time there is an event with more than one possible outcome, the universe will split and both outcomes will take place. One universe will take path A and another path B. So if I make a time machine and go back in time, once I arrive in the past I have created a brand new branch of the universe. At this point I can kill a young version of myself and not suffer any consequences because I'm not in the same branch of the universe where I grew up. So this avoids suicide paradox, and the casuality issue.

If you were to travel at the speed of light for any length of time, even for a fraction of a second, theoretically an infinite amount of time would have passed in your original and terminal reference frame. Of course this is impossible because it would require an infinite amount of energy and you would have an infinite mass.

HV Enthusiast

Thu Jul 02 2009, 02:09AM

Registered Member #15 Joined: Thu Feb 02 2006, 01:11PM
Location:
Posts: 3068

And Dark Matter is our time's Luminous ether.

Steve Conner

Thu Jul 02 2009, 01:03PM

Registered Member #30 Joined: Fri Feb 03 2006, 10:52AM
Location: Glasgow, Scotland
Posts: 6706

Dr. Slack wrote ...

Don't get too hung up about how the life system got this complicated... or started

So what you're basically saying is, ignore all the interesting stuff and think about math instead?

Dr. Slack

Fri Jul 03 2009, 07:55AM

Registered Member #72 Joined: Thu Feb 09 2006, 08:29AM
Location: UK St. Albans
Posts: 1659

So what you're basically saying is, ignore all the interesting stuff and think about math instead?

No, not at all.

Figure out how the tree works. All that interesting stuff is very interesting, a big enough playground to keep one occupied for a lifetime. But you won't find the purpose of life there, or answers to why. Answers to "how" are coming up all the time, or at least "how might ...". That's why I'm not too bothered about how it started or evolved, I'm sure there are enough degrees of freedom for something to have worked without having to invoke some mechanism outside physics. Keep on trying to answer the how questions guys, even if the jigsaw appears to be missing some pieces. I suspect some pieces may well be lost permanently, but looking for them is a great game.

Someone (Gigavolt?) mentioned that the purpose of life was to reproduce, and gave amongst the evidence our tendency to fall apart after peak reproducing age (at 54 I'm becoming increasingly familiar with this process

, damn, there goes another axis of rotation). While it's true that life does reproduce, and a species whose members don't dies out real fast, this is only *what* they do, not *why* they do it. At least reproduction argues a why for life with all the force that not having all the fossils in a complete unbroken record from single cell to homo sapiens argues for a creator, I don't buy either argument.

For me, the really interesting emergent behaviour from a complex system is what's going on in "me" as I type this. How does a network of wet logic create the impression of conciousness. But I still have faith (which I believe as strongly and with as little evidence as others believe in their myths and deities) that it doesn't matter and isn't purposeful. Some while ago, a bunch of big apes were stressed by limited food supply (this is a "how might ...", I am probably wrong in many ways), one lot evolved stronger jaws by being able to chomp tougher food (H. robustus), the other lot evolved bigger brains by perhaps being able to hunt more effectively or maybe to modify their local environment to be safer or more productive. We know which adaption won out. How well we'll do with the current challange to our survival as presently organised is anybody's guess!

Steve Conner

Fri Jul 03 2009, 10:24AM

Registered Member #30 Joined: Fri Feb 03 2006, 10:52AM
Location: Glasgow, Scotland
Posts: 6706

Dr. Slack wrote ...

How does a network of wet logic create the impression of conciousness

What on earth does "the impression of consciousness" mean? If you want to be as reductionist as this, the concept of "impression" makes no more sense than the concept of consciousness. I personally have been hanging out too much with Michael Polanyi and Roger Penrose, and I believe there is something fundamentally non-algorithmic about consciousness, that we can't analyze or even perceive, because our science can only deal with algorithmic things.

Anyway, Ima move this thread to the chatting board.

Carbon_Rod

Sat Jul 04 2009, 08:07AM

Registered Member #65 Joined: Thu Feb 09 2006, 06:43AM
Location:
Posts: 1155

Unlikely to be the first or last human to fail the Turing test =P

The argument against whether time even exists as something outside of the observer's perspective negates most assertions about characterization.

However, if the universe conserves causality as stringently as energy than only the existing steady state of recursive paradoxes are likely possible...

And SchrÃ¶dinger's cat must therefore remain both dead and alive....

Note the LHC will not likely create quantum zombies?
;D

Steve Conner

Sat Jul 04 2009, 01:37PM

Registered Member #30 Joined: Fri Feb 03 2006, 10:52AM
Location: Glasgow, Scotland
Posts: 6706

In the hvcomm chatroom, we used to play "Reverse Turing test" where someone would pretend to be a bot and you had to try and figure out whether they were human or not.

This caused me to wander off on a freaky line of thought, which I'll offer for debate. If causality is conserved, then surely time travel into the future is impossible, because it means seeing events that haven't happened yet. This amounts to the same thing as information (next week's lottery results and so on) flowing backwards in time, allowing effects (the numbers you write on the lottery ticket after returning from your trip) to precede their causes.

If this were true, the only way to travel into the future would be to build a complete simulation of (the region of interest) of the universe, that ran faster than the usual 1 second per second. Any possible time machine would have to work in this way. We already do this with weather forecasting, but what I propose would amount to "reality forecasting": building an accurate model of the future that could be experienced through virtual reality machines.

This of course brings up the question of free will: whether the universe is emergent or just Laplacean. If it really is emergent, or non-algorithmic or whatever, then maybe the universe is the only computer big enough to "run" itself. Douglas Adams actually anticipated this when he joked in the Hitch-hiker's Guide that the Earth was a computing device built by aliens to solve the question of the meaning of life.

I don't know if he meant this seriously, but I found it a very satisfying answer. To me it means that the "meaning" of life consists of the configuration of all the matter in the universe, and can't be understood by any one person because it's too big. It also means that the future can't be accessed, simply because we haven't created it yet.

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