Slashdot Mirror
First Digital Simulation of an Entire Life Form
An anonymous reader writes "LiveScience is reporting on what appears to be the first digital simulation of an entire life form. Researchers created more than a million digital atoms to reverse engineer the satellite tobacco mosaic virus, a relatively simple organism. But is it really a life form? From the article: 'Viruses are tiny bundles of protein and genetic material that straddle the line between life and non-life. Many scientists prefer to call them "particles" because even though they contain RNA or DNA like other lifeforms, they can only replicate inside other living cells.'"
If they can simulate something else than a virus (because I don't think viruses are intelligent) could they by this way obtain intelligence by simulating an intelligent animal?
You just got troll'd!
"You can either use the word "life" in a sentence or not but you can't use a fraction of the word ("li" or "fe" don't mean fractional life - or anything at all for that matter)."
:)
Oh, without capital letters, they mean nothing -- but I know quite a few chemists who'd dispute that Li and Fe are meaningless.
To get on-topic, I think that humans constantly categorize and assign labels to things as either a member of a group or outside it, which IS binary.
That creature is a fish|not a fish. That creature is a mammal; or it lays eggs and has a bill, so it is a bird (ummm, bad example, on second thought). That rock is igneous; or it is not. That tree is deciduous|not deciduous.
What is the point of defining something if the definition does not allow us to use it to categorize? Things like this virus, and viruses in general, raise the debate over what is life|not life. And that debate can stimulate greater knowledge, and greater understanding, by challenging our assumptions and our definitions... so I'm all for making distinctions when we can.
"Trolls they were, but filled with the evil will of their master: a fell race..." -- J.R.R. Tolkien on Olog-hai
I personally just put viruses firmly in the "gray area between living and not living" because those are arbitrary distinctions: nature always finds a way to find exceptions to the niches that man creates. Not to say that our classifications are pointless, we just have to realize that there are always going to be things in that gray area. This can be shown more dramatically in other biological definitions as well: when is a fetus "alive?" What is the exact point where two diverging groups are no longer the same species? All questions that have legal ramifications which essentially require a precise definition in order to make decisions as impartial as possible, but some things will straddle the line no matter how precise you try to make your definitions.
I'll never make that mistake again, reading the experts' opinions. - Feynman
Perhaps the better solution to this dillema is to realize the debate can not be settled because "life" is not a thing. It is a label. Humans invented the label and since it is an artificial construction its scope is equally artificial.
There is no such thing as "life" we invented a classification without defining it and therefore we have a debate. The only reason we even find it to be important is that we are still trying to come up with excuses to think of ourselves as something more than a random cluster of protein soup.
That's possibly the most intelligent post I've read on Slashdot. I salute you!
"water" is also a noun. Water, is however a label for something real. "Life" is a label for a concept that does not exist, we made up the concept itself and not merely the label. It is not even a classification like a mammal, there is a valid definition of mammal, there has never been an agreed upon definition of life.
There is a very substantial difference there.
"Life" is a label for a concept that does not exist, we made up the concept itself and not merely the label.
Wow. You should set that as your sig so people know what kind of an intellect they're dealing with.
Literalism isn't a form of humor, it's you being irritating.
"Life" and "non-life" are useful, but ultimately meaningless ontological distinctions that really have no purpose at the sub-microscopic level. Any sensible person can see that ultimately there is no difference between what we deem living and what we call non-living, as the quick and the dead are still naught but particles in relationship to one another. The notion of self-identical objects larger than the fundamental particles is useful, but when dealing on such a tiny scale it's best to forget about such pointless ontological nonsense.
Life obviously exist since we're having this debate - I doubt we could have it if we weren't alive.
You're confusing concepts with their labels.
He's not saying there's no such thing as life, which is easily falsified. He's saying the concept "life" is arbitrary, and that the boundaries of that concept are arbitrary: there are seven specific conditions you need to meet to be officially alive. Why those particular 7? What if we changed the list to 6 or 8?
Having dreamt up a classification called "alive" it's easy to demonstrate there are things that meet it. But don't fall into the trap of thinking that the classification exists outside our collective heads. Because we dreamt it up it.
Let's say we change the definition of "life", adding requirement number 8 "wings". Things that are "alive" have "wings". Therefore, you and I are not "alive" because we no longer meet the definition. BUT (this is where you got confused) we carry on exactly as we were, still reading Slashdot, still eating, moving around, excreting, etc, because we're only talking about labels, and not reality.
See Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance if you're struggling. It took me ages to get it.
-- Nick "Hallo this is Beel Gates, und I pronounce weendows as