Towards a Scientific Definition of Living vs inanimate matter

Radiation, chemical reactions, and flesh, nails, or hair (whether attached to a living person or not) still get categorized properly? Bodily fluids, including those related to reproduction? What about politicians?

Also, living organisms have or can have will or intent to avoid taking the least amount of action, but our bodies are still inevitably doing so... the aging process, etc. Or is this not relevant? I'd have said anything that is an 'organism' that's not dead or 'accumulates knowledge' or rather is capable of possessing it is sufficient enough. What of advanced AI?

Reply to Outlander Thanks for your good lines of questioning.
Quoting Outlander

Radiation, chemical reactions

Yes those necessarily can only follow the path of least action so are inanimate.

Quoting Outlander

nails, or hair (whether attached to a living person or not)

Yes those necessarily can only follow the path of least action so are inanimate, Even though they are produced as a byproduct of, and/or connected to a, living organism.

Quoting Outlander

flesh

Flesh does not follow the path of least action which would be to simply to disintegrate, And to maintain its structure and processes it requires continuous input of energy And it directs its kinetic energy to obtain more potential energy. Thus flesh is certainly a living being.

Quoting Outlander

Also, living organisms have or can have will or intent to avoid taking the least amount of action, but our bodies are still inevitably doing so... the aging process, etc.

Yes while I do understand that line of thinking I don't believe it applies here. For one thing, the aging process is a programmed cell death process. All living organisms initially have a period of net anabolic growth (no aging), except for accumulating Random metabolic induced structural damage that are continuously repaired until the DNA itself is too damaged. This is just the struggle of a living process against entropy. All the repair mechanisms in living organisms down to the DNA repair level are exactly the opposite of taking the path of least action (as my definition points out), which would path would otherwise be simply to allow the second law to let entropy destroy it.

Quoting Outlander

Or is this not relevant?

Please note that the my definition does not say that living beings defy the second law of thermal dynamics, just that they can create Personal/local regions that That at least for some period of time Have free will to shift entropy to the environment.

Quoting Outlander

I'd have said anything that is an 'organism' that's not dead or 'accumulates knowledge' or rather is capable of possessing it is sufficient enough

Your definition is circular because it uses the word "Not dead". Moreover, 'accumulate knowledge' Is likewise circular because knowledge is always defined in terms of some kind of meaning which requires a living organism to create the meaning and use it as knowledge. Another problem with your definition, I believe, is that it would predict that a virus is inanimate, not living, because it does not accumulate knowledge, where is my definition, as I pointed out, would conclude a virus is certainly a living being.

I look forward to more astute challenges and ideas!

Reply to Sir Philo Sophia
Reading through your discussion, it appears to me that the underlying question is what is the source of the spark of consciousness?

Quoting Outlander

What of advanced AI?

I forgot to answer this part of your replies. That is a very interesting point, which I was not considering so far. I may need to refine my definition to exclude such anomalies. However, my immediate thinking is that my current definition excludes current advanced AI systems because they do not direct their (or other's) kinetic energy to net increase their potential energy. A computer system that they operate within are purely second law Entropy degenerating Systems that purely burn energy, and do not self acquire or create any physical potential energy within their physical system. So, I think my current definition wording is sufficient to exclude current advanced AI systems. I'd be curious if anyone can make a good argument otherwise.

Note, my current line of thinking is that even if you had a Physical system as intelligent As a human, it Does not necessarily need to be alive to do so. So we should not confound the two, in my mind.

Quoting Jack Cummins

it appears to me that the underlying question is what is the source of the spark of consciousness?

Thanks for your comment; however, I have to respectfully disagree. Consciousness is a logically separate aspect and capability beyond what is the minimum required for life. For example, as I mentioned before, my definition concludes that a virus is certainly a living being. So, I think you would have to argue that a virus is certainly not alive Or shoot down The part of my definition that says it is, Without the use of consciousness as your argument. Because the virus has no consciousness in any reasonable or useful meaning of the word. And, don't go down the panpsychism Rabbit hole which would conclude that all inanimate matter is alive as well, hence the whole thing would a completely useless (non-Scientific, religion-like) Line of inquiry.

Reply to Sir Philo Sophia
Okay, I accept what you are saying and I do not consider myself as a scientist. Perhaps my question about the life spark is more relevant to some other discussion, if at all?

I am certainly not going to start a panpsychist argument, although I think on a metaphorical level this is the year of the war of viral forces against mankind. But I am probably trespassing into the area of science fiction and fantasy.

But I think that you only want scientific viewpoints so I will reserve my thoughts about consciousness to the threads which are more appropriate for such discussion.

So, a robot that can plug itself to a power socket and recharge its batteries, it would be a living thing? After all, it's increasing its potential energy by doing so.

Reply to TheMadFool
Excellent point! I have already considered this yet did not encoded in my definition. I will soon post the revised definition that excludes that possibility. The way that I exclude that As a living being, In general terms, is that the behavior must not be programmed Or directed by an external consciousness Or entity ( such as a human who figured the whole thing out and encoded, even if indirectly, the Goal and behavior).

I will think about this more deeply later, yet I am already pretty sure that The above addition would also exclude genetic algorithms that you could say would try to Pseudo-randomly learn that potential energy increasing Opportunity and behavior. I probably should build in a few more caveats in the definition to guard against other anomalous variance on that theme.

Thanks!

Quoting Sir Philo Sophia

Living organisms bear the unique hallmark ability of modifying themselves in a manner to redirect and/or create kinetic energy to systematically increase their potential energy greater than any kinetic energy expended in their metabolic process.

Are you familiar with the biological literature that takes this general entropy production route?

Swenson, Schneider and Kay, Lineweaver, Salthe and many more have hammered out the basics of how life and mind arise as dissipative structures with the intelligence to exploit entropic gradients.

For example....
http://www.sonoran-institute-for-epistemic-studies.org/images/NYASoriginal.pdf
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/0895717794901880
https://www.mso.anu.edu.au/~charley/papers/chapter%2016v3.pdf

And they built on the earlier well-known work of Prigogine, Schrodinger and Bertalanffy.

Two points that might conflict with your definition as stated is that life is negentropic only because that, in the end, achieves more entropification.

So it is not that life veers off from least action paths. Instead, it exists because it constructs new ones. It burrows through barriers that were preventing the inorganic from doing a better job on releasing its potential energy.

Bare dirts bounces the sun's radiant energy back into space. Rain forests insert themselves in that path and radiation that would have still been 70 degrees C is degraded into lower potential, 20 degree radiance. Life can exist because it pays for itself by offering better least action paths. The ability for intelligent and personal choices is something subservient to that larger entropic goal.

Then second, replication does kind of matter in a definition of life. The entropy degrading story is the metabolism. But the ability to repair - and hence replicate - the stable body of an organism is a further exceptional feature when it comes to life as a dissipative structure.

A tornado is a dissipative structure doing the Second Law's will. But it is fragile - conjured up by chance circumstance.

Life, on the other hand, has coding mechanisms to ensure its structural stability. It has DNA and other semiotic machinery to regulate its own being and ensure it sticks around doing the Second Law's bidding.

So this is a definitional property. The ability to maintain a constant structure in the face of the environment's usual destabilising uncertainty. Life must be constantly under repair.

Then replication is this capability shifted up a level from the individual structures composing a cell to a remaking of whole cells. And that then allows life to evolve as a genetic lottery. Life is now able to stabilise its entropic design against the environment in general.

So if first life was some kind of proton gradient, autocatalytic, dissipative cycle that emerged in the very particular environment of a warm, acidic, ocean floor thermal vent - a likely hypothesis - then to be able to colonise the wider world, it had to be able to develop both the self-repair that would allow it to persist in that environment. And in so doing - constructing that degree of local independence - it would then have paved the way for a cellular replication that would see it able to adapt and colonise any kind of environment.

So two amendments.

Life remains still tied to the least action principle. Overall, its intelligence is employed to break down the barriers to entropification where inorganic nature had hit some kind of stop, leaving an unspent store of potential energy.

And then a coding machinery to stabilise this path - this dissipative structure - is also definitional. Life is organismic because it has a blueprint of its structure and so a means to repair and replicate that structure.

Reply to apokrisis
Thanks for your very thoughtful feedback and input. I will read those scientific Papers later. However I did scan over their abstracts and conclusions and My initial quick take is that I do not believe it conflicts or improves the my approach. For one thing the principle of least action is not related to entropy as far as I know. Moreover, This statement by SWENSON Would seem to contradict with the principlle of least action:
" In particular, which path(s) out of all available paths will a system take to minimize potentials or maximize the entropy? The answer (the law of
maximum entropy production) is the path or assembly of paths that minimizes the
potential (maximizes the entropy) at the fastest rate given the constraints. "

Because the rate of kinetic energy, which is what creates entropy, In a natural system at any given point in its path will Not exceed The lowest action cost to convert the potential energy into kinetic over the whole path from start to finish. The path of least action does not create the maximum entropy. Moreover, it is the opposite, path of most action, that creates the most entropy, Because kinetic energy is released to fast for inertia to absorb thus Requiring more power thereby creating Much greater excess dissipated heat to the environment, which contradicts what they are saying and what nature actually does. Can you reconcile Or correct me that?

Quoting apokrisis

Life remains still tied to the least action principle.

I don't think you understand the path of least action because it occurs at every point in the path of action, it is not some net entropy concept. For example, if you are standing in place at any given moment On planet Earth your path of least action is to fall dead to the ground. This has nothing to do with creating maximum entropy or whatever they are talking about.

Again, please reconcile or correct me Where you Believe I am Thinking Wrong.

I Have been actually actively trying to reconcile Second law entropy with the path of least action, so I am very happy that you brought it up, might help me tighten up And expand my Hypothesis/Theories.

Thanks again!

Quoting apokrisis

So it is not that life veers off from least action paths. Instead, it exists because it constructs new ones. It burrows through barriers that were preventing the inorganic from doing a better job on releasing its potential energy.

I don't believe that is true because he path of least action in any environment is set by the physics And forces. Living beings cannot change the physics or forces they can only spend Greater kinetic energy At any given point then least action would dictate so as to establish a future gaining potential energy which could be by way of finding new paths or creating less costly ones to get to any given destination. Again I don't think you understand the path of least action in physics, or please explain to me were you believe I'm thinking wrong about it.

Quoting apokrisis

A tornado is a dissipative structure doing the Second Law's will. But it is fragile - conjured up by chance circumstance.

I don't think anyone is saying a tornado is alive?

Quoting apokrisis

And then a coding machinery to stabilise this path - this dissipative structure - is also definitional.

I'm not convinced that is a fundamental requirement for life. For example, a virus exist just fine without any coding machinery to stabilize its path or repair Changes from its original code. Just the opposite, it uses those "errors" to explore new ways to more effectively search for, And create new types of, hosts and replicate in any given environment.

Quoting apokrisis

Swenson, Schneider and Kay, Lineweaver, Salthe and many more have hammered out the basics of how life and mind arise as dissipative structures with the intelligence to exploit entropic gradients.

I don't think Exploiting and entropic gradients Is the key principle In defining life, because nature itself is all about neutralizing all in tropic gradients so there is no need for life in that sense that is just the second law, like osmosis, at work. No entropic gradient means no work can be done at all. The fact that living creatures like everything in the universe Must find and exploit entropic variance to exist does not help define them Apart from inanimate matter, IMHO. For example, You might say a crystal Is alive because it is exploiting entropic Gradients in its environment to create its negentropic, Highly organized lower entropy, structure and replicates itself. So, apparently, you, Swenson, Schneider and Kay Would say a crystal Growing And replicating itself is alive? in their context how would you say if crystal is not alive?

In my definition, a crystal Growing is certainly not alive.

Reply to TheMadFool
Okay, so I amended my definition to add the following two constraints:
"and perpetuating its unique, non-least-action existence, by self-directed reproduction of a similarly living kind as itself, and wherein the means or goal to Self-replicate or gain potential energy is not programmed or directed by an external consciousness or entity.."

You can see the insertions I made to the original post.

Note that I originally did not see the utility to include the ability to replicate themselves Because under my framework that is just another way to increase one's potential energy; However, I added explicit self replication and no external control limitations to exclude AI robots and Man-made machines in general. Further note, that I currently am not so interested In debating whether man-made machines can never be considered alive. So, for the sake of argument And simplicity here, let's assume that Man-made Machines can never be considered alive. That is not to say, At least according to my current thinking, that they cannot be sentient beings in my framework, however. I know that has Many contradictions, yet it would confound things too much to go down that rabbit hole at this early point, and I'm sure you or others are not going to argue that a robot plugging in power to recharge itself is A living being according to any reasonable definition. So, for now let's just exclude that as I've done in my amended definition.

I'm Look forward to more great scrutiny and discourse on this!

Swenson:In particular, which path(s) out of all available paths will a system take to minimize potentials or maximize the entropy? The answer (the law of
maximum entropy production) is the path or assembly of paths that minimizes the
potential (maximizes the entropy) at the fastest rate given the constraints.

So this says that the least action path does win. Biology puts a whole bunch of paths in active Darwinian competition. And an ecosytem then arises that finds the best average of all those working together.

A messy feeder leaves large crumbs but gobbles fast. A nimble feeder breaks everything very fine, but moves slow. An ecosystem thus combines both extremes of entropification. In a clear space, you first have the gobbling weeds and later the stately trees and their detritus recycling.

So the least action principle is an optimisation principle. Quantum theory employs it to explain how even particle events sample every possible route so as to establish the least action route - the Feynman path integral.

And Darwinian evolution is a way of exploring the space of possible paths. Stanley Salthe's canonical ecosystem life cycle - talking of the three stages of immaturity, maturity and senescence - is a good account of the balancing act involved.

Quoting Sir Philo Sophia

Again I don't think you understand the path of least action in physics

That's a bit rich. It is one of my particular subjects. :smile:

Quoting Sir Philo Sophia

I don't think anyone is saying a tornado is alive?

Stan Salthe does. Or at least he is willing to argue a dust devil is right on the cusp.

Quoting Sir Philo Sophia

For example, a virus exist just fine without any coding machinery to stabilize its path or repair

Huh? A virus just is a stray bit of code. It needs an organism to play host and run its routine, force a cell's metabolism to churn our little replicants.

The RNA code might be wrapped in sturdy sheathing. But that is also why biologists are dubious about calling a virus an actual organism. And from your point of view, when dormant, it is not entropifying. It is not actively organising the world so that there is some metabolic process accumulating potential energy and producing waste by-products.

Quoting Sir Philo Sophia

So, apparently, you, Swenson, Schneider and Kay Would say a crystal Growing And replicating itself is alive?

Read and find out.

But crystal growth is an inorganic dissipative structure. It lacks something that biology adds.

Biology is also dissipative structure in a fundamental sense. And that narrows the search for what is its definitional extra.

So my point is that biology as a whole had to rethink its foundations in the 1980s as the surprises of far-from-equilibrium thermodynamics were established in the physical sciences.

And that is what the references I gave did.

This may make your own contribution rather redundant. It has all been worked out with clarity already.

But if you are interested enough to ask the question, it should be welcomed that there is this communal answer to explore.

Quoting apokrisis

So this says that the least action path does win.

No it is not saying that. All that it is saying is that the second law requires all potential differences to be minimized and neutralized wherever Naturally possible. The path of least action is saying much more than that. It is specifying an exact way in which those entropic gradients are minimized. That is, Natural processes can only minimize entropic Gradients in the most efficient manner at every single point of time in the path ( i.e. locally And immediately as the wave functions of the particle(s) evolve). That is, at Each and every point In their path they have to do the most Kinetic energy efficient work possible by physics. Whereas living organisms have the option to do inefficient work At any point in a path when it gives It some future potential energy advantage, which is a Simple, plain English Rephrasing of my definition.

Get it now?

Quoting apokrisis

This may make your own contribution rather redundant. It has all been worked out with clarity already.

I don't think you understanding my point Which I made before and repeat above. Please specifically answer to my point above and where you think I am wrong about it.

Quoting apokrisis

And Darwinian evolution is a way of exploring the space of possible paths.

You cannot compare QED with Darwinian evolution. QED actually makes my point where everything in nature must take the path of least action including All quantum paths When they collapse into classical physics. Darwinian evolution is certainly not finding paths of least action, and does not help the discussion here because Darwinian evolution presumes you started with a living being, so it is circular to mention it here. The path of least action, As defined in physics, for any living system is simply to die. So all your commentary seems to be off point because you are Confounding that meaning of Least action paths With paths that living beings figure out that ultimately end up costing them less later on, whereas inanimates have to always take a more costly path. As I point out in my definition I'm calling the latter a "sentient path of least action", She is a global phenomenon where the natural physics path of least action is a local phenomenon. Another way to put it, is that I'm saying natural inanimate processes must always do locally optimized work, Whereas living beings can hop over Potential gradient barriers to Achieve globally optimized work. This has nothing to do with negentropy concepts. Get it now?

Please reread my definition and my above comments and reframe your arguments accordingly. So far, most all of your comments seem to be off point and wrongly interpreting things, thus not Being constructive Towards moving forward in this regard.

Quoting Sir Philo Sophia

Whereas living organisms have the option to do inefficient work

If coal is buried in the ground, that is a huge store of potential energy that inorganic nature is unable to unlock. But even a primitive first human steam engine - about 80% inefficient in terms of extracting work - can create the missing entropic path.

The problem with this inefficiency was that you would only want to use such a steam engine for pumping the water out of your coal mine. So even if it is in fact creating a lot of entropy - waste heat and clouds of smoke - only a very few such devices would ever be built.

But technology is in Darwinian competition. Soon along come steam turbines that are 50% efficient at generating work. That is less entropy it might seem. But now industry wants to use steam turbines everywhere. Coal consumption rockets exponentially. Steam battleships start raining explosives on each other. Total entropy greatly exceeds work extracted. The Second Law sits back and smiles happily at this world.

So if you read the literature, this is the kind of paradox that needed to be thrashed out. Biology is characterised by this seemingly opposed imperative of being both entropically efficient and entropically wasteful. In fact, they are both aspects of the one larger game life has learnt to play.

So there is no choice - because of Darwinian competition - but for organisms to drive towards the energy efficiency that maximises work. Your "free" potential energy stores that apparently remove the constraints of a least action principle.

Yet this happens within the larger story of efficiency promoting exponential growth of the most efficient organisms. Their populations swell to serve the overall purpose of maximising the possibilities for entropy production.

Quoting Sir Philo Sophia

Another way to put it, is that I'm saying natural inanimate processes must always do locally optimized work, Whereas living beings can hop over Potential gradient barriers Achieve globally optimized work. This has nothing to do with negentropy concepts. Get it now?

Sure. Biology takes dissipative structure to another level. A local system, armed with a memory, can lay its entropic plans over a considerable span of space and time.

And so memory (acquirable habit and intent) becomes a large part of what is definitional of an organism.

Quoting Sir Philo Sophia

Thus not Being constructive Towards moving forward in this regard.

Terribly sorry not to be furthering your own entropy-creating enterprise here. :lol:

Is it really such a shock that science has already worked all this out for itself?

Quoting apokrisis

Terribly sorry not to be furthering your own entropy-creating enterprise here. :lol:

Is it really such a shock that science has already worked all this out for itself?

I'll review and consider your rebuttals tomorrow. However, given you believe science has this all worked out then you should state here your or their concise Scientific Definition of Living vs inanimate matter, as I have proposed mine. pointing to white papers making arm waving arguments is not a concise Scientific Definition. If you are not able or willing to do that here then you are not Being constructive Towards moving forward in this regard, and most likely do not have/know of one.

Quoting Sir Philo Sophia

If you are not able or willing to do that here then you are not Being constructive Towards moving forward in this regard, and most likely do not have/know of one.

You are still being unconstructively hostile. I've given both ample references and corrected you on two crucial points.

I can point you on your path, but I can't walk if for you.

Quoting apokrisis

Swenson, Schneider and Kay, Lineweaver, Salthe and many more have hammered out the basics of how life and mind arise as dissipative structures with the intelligence to exploit entropic gradients.

The Swenson paper is good. Life is a convection cell, order in the service of disorder.

Quoting apokrisis

I can point you on your path, but I can't walk if for you.

understood. In other words, thanks for confirming that you do not have or know of a concise Scientific Definition of Living vs inanimate matter. So, maybe science has not clearly defined it? BTW, nothing 'hostile' about asking for that given you claim it has already been done.

Quoting Sir Philo Sophia

So, maybe science has not clearly defined it?

If the competition here is for the most concise definition, I would go with Howard Pattee's epistemic cut.

"Rate-independent symbols regulating rate-dependent dynamics"

I'll leave you to scratch your head on that with this as an aid - https://www.researchgate.net/publication/12009802_The_physics_of_symbols_Bridging_the_epistemic_cut

Quoting apokrisis

If the competition here is for the most concise definition,

no. the 'competition' (if you must) is for the most complete, accurate, and concise definition. So, if your proposed one does not hold up against all counter-examples it would not be complete or accurate, and, thus, being concise would be irrelevant.

Quoting apokrisis

"Rate-independent symbols regulating rate-dependent dynamics"

So, for example, what exactly does that say about whether a virus is alive or inanimate?

Quoting Sir Philo Sophia

So, for example, what exactly does that say about whether a virus is alive or inanimate?

It is alive when it is in the middle of hijacking some host cell's metabolic machinery. That fits the definition.

But is it then "inanimate" when it is dormant as a viral particle? That's not so clear.

If a viral particle were found as some molecular arrangement in the inanimate world, it would count as an extraordinarily negentropic event - a chance event beating the entropic odds by any number of lifetimes of a universe.

It would be too much of a statistical outlier on that score to fit easily into the category of the inanimate. It wouldn't be merely Pattee's "rate-dependent dynamics", as the time for such a molecular structure to assemble by chance would be far outside such a process.

We would be compelled to invoke rate-independent symbols as the only way that virus particle got constructed. And on earth, we are talking of perhaps as many such particles as there are stars in the sky.

So by implication, the dormant virus is still part of the animate world rather than the inanimate one. Chance couldn't produce it. But Darwinian mechanism could produce it easily.

Quoting apokrisis

I'll leave you to scratch your head on that with this as an aid -

Interesting paper, slowly getting through it.

I wonder if there is an analogy between rate-independent symbols and the universal constraints that enable the formation of matter? In other words, that this relationship between symbolic and material operates on a cosmic scale?

[quote=Howard Pattee] dynamical language abstracts away the subject side of the epistemic cut. The necessary separation of laws and initial conditions is an explicit principle in physics and has become the basis (and bias) of objectivity in all the sciences. The ideal of physics is to eliminate the subjective observer completely. It turned out that at the quantum level this is a fundamental impossibility, but that has not changed the ideal. [/quote]

:clap:

I read that Pattee white paper. First off, I tend not to agree with the framework or conclusions of Pattee. while it has some interesting concepts, I find it generally obvious on many levels and I don't find it to be a useful, most general framework. I will make counterpoints in response to your original post on that.

Quoting apokrisis

It is alive when it is in the middle of hijacking some host cell's metabolic machinery. That fits the definition.

I don't believe you are interpreting Pattee correctly. If you are a follower of his theories then you have to conclude that a virus is always Inanimate and dead. I cite some passages below to support that conclusion. The main passage is where he says the epistemic cut Happens only at protein folding. Sense of virus itself absolutely never engages in protein folding then according to Pattie it is never life. Moreover, Patty says that you have to consider the organism as a whole and that no part stand alone a considering if it is alive or not. Moreover, he says that the DNA is certainly not alive, Antivirus is nothing more than glorified DNA wrapped in her lipo-protein sheath. If you Believe otherwise based on Pattie then we await your detailed counter arguments along with Supporting citations.

If it is your personal belief that a virus is dead until it is hijacking the replication function of the cell I would say that your hypothesis has many problems and flaws as I'll point out some In a subsequent post.

Quoting apokrisis

If a viral particle were found as some molecular arrangement in the inanimate world, it would count as an extraordinarily negentropic event - a chance event beating the entropic odds by any number of lifetimes of a universe.

This type of argument is among the weakest and what is commonly employed by creationists to "prove" that the universe and life had to have been produced by God's intelligent design Because such "a chance event beating the entropic odds by any number of lifetimes of a universe". So, your Reasoning is in very poor company in that regard.

I generally have a disdain for any arguments that rely on statistics to come to any conclusion. You know, there are lies, damned lies, and then there are statistics... For example, using your line of reasoning you would have to conclude that the planet Earth is alive because for all The molecules that make up the earth and its atmosphere to be exactly configured the way they are and to move with the dynamics exactly the way they do would be "a chance event beating the entropic odds by any number of lifetimes of a universe". However not even your proposed definition of life would consider the earth as Alive, so nor should it consider a virus being alive based on such very weak statistical arguments.

Quoting apokrisis

So by implication, the dormant virus is still part of the animate world rather than the inanimate one. Chance couldn't produce it.

By way of additional example of how flawed your reasoning is on that, a virus that is exposed Outside of its host environment Quickly degrades and becomes unviable to infect living cells (Such is COVID19 "Dies" After being in the air for four hours), yet the molecular difference between its viable state of matter and its inviable state of matter is very small with respect to entropy differences. So, your line of statistical impossibility reasoning would still call the degraded inviable virus as living because it still "would count as an extraordinarily negentropic event - a chance event beating the entropic odds by any number of lifetimes of a universe". Hence, that line of reasoning is completely fallacious And not Constructive towards a scientific definition of living versus inanimate matter.

But Darwinian mechanism could produce it easily.

Viruses do not have any epistemic cut So according to Patty no Darwinian mechanism could involve them. Besides, I do not see any clear path of how they would've evolved from scratch. So, since you claim it is so easy to produce a virus under Darwinian mechanisms then What would you Propose is a plausible Darwinian mechanism that could have produced a virus from scratch? And, please do start from "first life was some kind of proton gradient, autocatalytic, dissipative cycle that emerged in the very particular environment of a warm, acidic, ocean floor thermal vent ". I, and the whole scientific community, eagerly await for your answer on that.

-------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Supporting citations from your Pettee Reference:
Since we know that a heritable genetic memory is an essential condition for life, my approach to the problem of determinism began by expressing the precise requirements for a constraint that satisfies the conditions for heritability. I can do no better than to restate my early argument (Pattee, 1969b):
...
The only useful description of memory or heredity in a physical system requires introducing the possibility of alternative pathways or trajectories for the system, along with a 'genetic' mechanism for causing the system to follow one or another of these possible alternatives depending on the state of the genetic mechanism. This implies that the genetic mechanism must be capable of describing or representing all of the alternative pathways even though only one pathway is actually followed in time. In other words, there must be more degrees of freedom available for the description of the total system than for following its actual motion. . . Such constraints are called non-holonomic."
In more common terminology, this type of constraint is a structure that we say controls a dynamics. To control a dynamical systems implies that there are control variables that are separate from the dynamical system variables, yet they must be described in conjunction with the dynamical variables. These control variables must provide additional degrees of freedom or flexibility for the system dynamics. At the same time, typical control systems do not remove degrees of freedom from the dynamical system, although they alter the rates or ranges of system variables. Many artificial machines depend on such control
....
This demonstrates that laws cannot describe the pragmatic function of measurement even if they can correctly and completely describe the detailed dynamics of the measuring constraints.
This same argument holds also for control functions which includes the genetic control of protein construction. If we call the controlled system, S, and the control constraints, C, then we can also look at the combined system (S + C) in which case the control function simply disappears into the dynamics. This epistemic irreducibility does not imply any ontological dualism. It arises whenever a distinction must be made between a subject and an object, or in semiotic terms, when a distinction must be made between a symbol and its referent or between syntax and pragmatics. Without this epistemic cut any use of the concepts of measurement of initial conditions and symbolic control of construction would be gratuitous.
"That is, we must always divide the world into two parts, the one being the observed system, the other the observer. In the former, we can follow up all physical processes (in principle at least) arbitrarily precisely. In the latter, this is meaningless. The boundary between the two is arbitrary to a very large extent. . . but this does not change the fact that in each method of description the boundary must be placed somewhere, if the method is not to proceed vacuously, i.e., if a comparison with experiment is to be possible." (von Neumann, 1955, p.419)
....
The concept of an epistemic cut must first arise at the genotype-phenotype control interface. Imagining such a subject-object distinction before life existed would be entirely gratuitous, and to limit control only to higher organisms would be arbitrary. The origin problem is still a mystery. What is the simplest epistemic event? One necessary condition is that a distinction is made by a subject that is not a distinction derivable from the object. In physical language this means a subject must create some form of distinction or classification between physical states that is not made by the laws themselves (i.e., measuring a particular initial condition, removing a degeneracy or breaking a symmetry). In the case of the cell, the sequences of the gene are not distinguished by physical laws since they are energetically degenerate.
....
In the case of the cell, the sequences of the gene are not distinguished by physical laws since they are energetically degenerate. Where does a new distinction first occur? It is where this memory degeneracy is partially removed, and that does not occur until the protein folding process. Transcription, translation, and copying processes treat all sequences the same and therefore make no new distinctions, but of course they are essential for constructing the linear constraints of the protein that partially account for the way it folds. The folded protein removes symbol vehicle degeneracy, but it still has many degenerate states (many conformations) that are necessary for it to function as a non-integrable constraint.

It is important to recognize that the details of construction and folding at this primeval epistemic cut make no sense except in the context of an entire self-replicating cell. A single folded protein has no function unless it is a component of a larger unit that maintains its individuality by means of a genetic memory. We speak of the genes controlling protein synthesis, but to accomplish this they must rely on previously synthesized and organized enzymes and RNAs. This additional self-referent condition for being the subject-part of an epistemic cut I have called semantic (or semiotic) closure (Pattee, 1982, 1995). This is the molecular chicken-egg closure that makes the origin of life problem so difficult.....

Quoting apokrisis

I would go with Howard Pattee's epistemic cut.
"Rate-independent symbols regulating rate-dependent dynamics"

I read that Pattee white paper. Thanks for citing it. I do like his thinking and analysis with regard to the genetic coding versus phenotype and functional execution. That is an area I have long been wanting to make some headway on but have had to focus My very limited time in other areas over the years.

However, with regard to living versus inanimate, First off, I do not to agree with the framework or conclusions of Pattee. while it has some interesting concepts, I find it generally obvious on many levels and I don't find it to be a useful, most general framework. It is simply a flavor of Semiotics, which I have always found to be myopic and to anthropomorphic to build a proper Deep fundamental theory around.

In my prior post I Mentioned two counterexamples of how Pattee & semiotics fail To classify a virus As living Matter. and, how a prion Eludes and confounds classification in their framework.

I will make More detailed counterpoints below.


If you are not aware of prions, learn the basics at:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prion#:~:text=Prion%20variants%20of%20the%20prion,as%20%22mad%20cow%20disease%22)
The word prion, coined in 1982 by Stanley B. Prusiner, is a portmanteau derived from protein and infection, hence prion,[19][20] and is short for "proteinaceous infectious particle",[9] in reference to its ability to self-propagate and transmit its conformation to other proteins

So prions Do the protein folding that Pattee says is the first epistemic cut and they can self replicate themselves so according to you and Patty they must be alive. Right? However, a prion lacks a Separate genotype (no symbols encoding in its Hyper complex functional shape) and phenotype in one. I think Pattee's definition of life which you are quoting would have to conclude that prions are dead. However, are the various degenerate folding's of the prion its symbolic structure as well?

Yet, in my proposed definition they might be alive if they ever avoid taking the path of least action and gain more net potential energy by doing so, which I suspect they do at least in some cases, and they self-replicate. My first instinct is to call prions alive within the Environmental context of Animal metabolism, much like some bacteria can only exist within a living host metabolism. Prions Seem to be more at the border of alive/Inanimate than even viruses in my estimation. So I figure they are a much better test of definitions.

There are many fundamental And serious problems with your proposed definition based on Pettee, Which I believe make it unsuitable as a broad definition of life and offers no Improvement or counterpoint to my definition, thus not a useful contribution to a better definition of life in my proposal. Here are some basic reasons:

• [1] Your definition Suffers from being to anthropomorphic and limited to the most common and maybe only example of life that we have, which is based on genotype versus phenotype evolution. This is not necessarily a generic principle of life and is most likely just a particular happenstance of one variation of it. A prion, As I point out above, is a hint at other alternatives that could exist in the universe. Moreover, it classifies a virus as Completely dead Matter, even though you personally believe the virus is alive during the hijacking stage of its existence. So even by your own Beliefs, your definition (Based on Patee) is wrong.[2] Your definition Requires knowing internal details of the matter (Such as whether it has a genotype Evolutionary Internal regulatory/replication mechanism), which are generally not knowable especially from afar or without very sophisticated technology. [3] even if we have very sophisticated technology and science Available, your definition Requires doing The near impossible feat of finding an epistemic cut in the matter to Define it as living. [4] Your definition completely Requires identifying symbols being present in the matter, which seems like a ridiculous and impractical requirement to me. See pettee "Life originated with symbolic memory, and symbols originated with life."

Where as my definition Does not suffer from any of the above problems, and indeed provides a clear solution to each. That is, For example:

• [1] My definition Suffers Is completely generic as to any type of life Forms, not limited To those based on genotype versus phenotype evolution. So, if true, is more likely to be a generic principle of life . For example, in my definition a virus Is clearly living Matter At all its stages of life including its dormant stage, and a prion May well be living matter as well.[2] My definition does not Requires knowing any internal details of the matter (No symbols, epistemic cut, etc.). It draws its conclusions based only the external dynamic behavior Of the matter as it behaves in its Various environments, which are generally knowable, without very sophisticated technology. [3] My definition Requires Only external observations of the matter As it behaves along It's various paths of action. So, For example, no need to Find the near impossible to find "epistemic cut".

So, For at least the above reasons, your Definition is not a practical definition for Properly classifying all matter in the universe and establishing a metric for the earliest stage where inanimate matter transitions to living matter.

By the way, I believe Pettee is wrong about this statement in his conclusion section: "Physics largely ignores the exceptional effects of individual (subjective) constraints and boundary conditions and focuses on the general dynamics of laws."

The Principle of least action (Which all of physics including quantum QED and My proposed definition are based on) Focus on the global action that matter/energy takes throughout its path through a field Largely irrespective of any local general dynamics of laws. All that needs to be known are the boundary conditions and the field which acts on the particle throughout its path between the start and finish points.

I should also point out, that it is very curious that you were initially touting an entropic definition of life as being the key defining principle ( e.g., negentropic), But when I asked you to make a concise definition you completely drop that and just focus on pettee's semiotics Genotype versus phenotype symbolic evolution mechanism. So, I take that to mean that you agree with me that entropic definitions are fundamentally flawed and unsuitable as a means to define life versus inanimate.

While I appreciate your attempts here at Offering other definitions, I do not find your Definition Related points and contributions in this regard to be helpful or better performing than my definition. I look forward to your feedback and may be an improved definition that does not suffer from all the problems I have pointed out. I will soon be giving you feedback on your entropic Based counterpoints after I read those papers. However, I'm still pretty sure they will suffer from serious problems along the lines as I pointed out in a prior post.

Thanks again!

-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Supporting citations from your Pettee Reference:

This apparent isolation of symbolic expression from physics is born of an epistemic necessity, but ontologically it is still an illusion. In other words, making a clear distinction is not the same as isolation from all relations. We clearly separate the genotype from the phenotype, but we certainly do not think of them as isolated or independent of each other. These necessary non-integrable equations of constraint that bridge the epistemic cut and thereby allow for memory, measurement, and control are on the same formal footing as the physical equations of motion. They are called non-integrable precisely because they cannot be solved or integrated independently of the law-based dynamics. Consequently, the idea that we could usefully study life without regard to the natural physical requirements that allow effective symbolic control is to miss the essential problem of life: how symbolic structures control dynamics.
…
Physics largely ignores the exceptional effects of individual (subjective) constraints and boundary conditions and focuses on the general dynamics of laws. This is because constraints are assumed to be reducible to laws (although we know they are not reducible across epistemic cuts) and also because the mathematics of complex constraints is often unmanageable. Philosophers have presented innumerable undecidable metaphysical models about the mind-brain cut, and physicists have presented more precise but still undecidable mathematical models about quantum measurement. But at the primeval level, where it all began, the genotype-phenotype cut is now taken for granted as ordinary chemistry.
...
Wigner concluded with a speculation about life that there may be a conflict between laws of heredity and quantum theory (see also Wigner, 1961).
6. I define a symbol in terms of its structure and function. First, a symbol can only exist in the context of a living organism or its artifacts. Life originated with symbolic memory, and symbols originated with life. I find it gratuitous to use the concept of symbol, even metaphorically, in physical systems where no function exists. Symbols do not exist in isolation but are part of a semiotic or linguistic system (Pattee, 1969a). Semiotic systems consist of (1) a discrete set of symbol structures (symbol vehicles) that can exist in a quiescent, rate-independent (non-dynamic) states, as in most memory storage, (2) a set of interpreting structures (non-integrable constraints, codes), and (3) an organism or system in which the symbols have a function (Pattee, 1986). There are innumerable symbol functions at many hierarchical levels, but control of construction came first.

Reply to Sir Philo Sophia My own definition of life is very similar to yours, so I think you're on the right track at least.

My definition hinges on the physics concept of a "machine", which is any physical system that transforms energy from one form to another, which is to say it does "work" in the language of physics.

I propose the definition of a property of such physical work, called "productivity", which is the property of reducing the entropy of the system upon which the work is done.

With that established, I then define "life" as "self-productive machinery": a physical system that uses a flow of energy to do productive work upon itself, which is to say, to reduce its own internal entropy (necessarily at the expense of increasing the overall entropy of the environment it is a part of).

The universal increase of entropy dictated by the second law of thermodynamics is the essence of death and decay, and life in short is anything that fights against that.

Quoting apokrisis

It is alive when it is in the middle of hijacking some host cell's metabolic machinery. That fits the definition.

That fits mine too. To my mind, the environment of a host cell is the condition in which a virus is able to live. Just as a human dumped in the vacuum of space would cease to live, so too would a virus dumped out of any host cell.

Certain man-made devices may also count as "alive" under my definition (provided they are in an appropriate environment, just like the virus: plugged into electricity, etc), and I'm fine with that. That doesn't give e.g. my computer, which uses the flow of electricity through it to process information in a way that reduces its own internal entropy, any special moral status just because it's "alive", any more than viruses or amoebae are important moral patients.

It's not just life, but sentience, that makes something a moral patient, on my account. Where "sentience" is the differentiation of experiences into "is" and "ought" models of the world, the differences between which then drive subsequent behavior, rather than behavior being a simple direct response to a simple direct stimulus. In such a way the system in question can have some (reflective) experience of things "not being how they ought to be", e.g. pain, when one model differs from the other.

Quoting Pfhorrest

With that established, I then define "life" as "self-productive machinery": a physical system that uses a flow of energy to do productive work upon itself, which is to say, to reduce its own internal entropy (necessarily at the expense of increasing the overall entropy of the environment it is a part of).

I do like your general direction as well, however, your particular definition Suffers from including Crystal growth As a living being, because Crystal growth uses a flow of energy to do productive work upon itself (Build its more ordered lower entropy structure) So it does reduce its own internal entropy And transfers the entropy difference as he to the environment.

My definition gets around the crystal growth problem by requiring a net gain of potential energy And that the work done must not always be the most Energy efficient Rate of work, which inanimate matter must always do.

So if you see my above discussion with regard to prions, according to my definition when the prion makes a copy of itself it has increased its potential energy in that it has amplified its action potential by having more of the same/Similar action possible than if it was only its own single self. I have to learn more about protein folding and prion behavior to say whether they always follow the path of least action or not. I suspect they don't, however. So, I suspect my definition would call them as living.

Quoting Pfhorrest

The universal increase of entropy dictated by the second law of thermodynamics is the essence of death and decay, and life in short is anything that fights against that.

I think that is problematic as well because gravity does fight against the second law of thermodynamics as it reduces entropy when matter clumps up together ( less micro-states are available for the matter to explore). So anything that uses such lines of definition I believe would not be viable. My general intuition, is that all entropy based definitions of life would be flawed. I'm still thinking through that and when I go through the Negtropic Articles And arguments that apokrisis Made, I will post some more Reasoned entropy based analysis with regard to living matter. However, I am much more comfortable with an energy and work Framework of defining life than a nebulous/abstract and information entropy related one.

I've always enjoyed reading your posts on other topics so I look forward to your further thoughts and/or critique on the subject.

Cheers!

Quoting Sir Philo Sophia

.. For example, using your line of reasoning you would have to conclude that the planet Earth is alive because for all The molecules that make up the earth and its atmosphere to be exactly configured the way they are and to move with the dynamics exactly the way they do would be "a chance event beating the entropic odds by any number of lifetimes of a universe". However not even your proposed definition of life would consider the earth as Alive, so nor should it consider a virus being alive based on such very weak statistical arguments.

Indeed, I am comfortable with any stab at a black and white definition of life having its interesting grey areas. We may differ on that score.

So a virus falls into that vague zone. And so does an ecosystem or a planetary biosphere. The Gaia hypothesis has something to it. Life did transform the earth by creating the oxygen rich atmosphere that then supported the greatly more entropic metabolism of aerobic respiration.

Right there is an example to life being able to evolve its way to even higher levels of dissipative structure. And the earth itself was brought into that regulated bio-loop.

Quoting Sir Philo Sophia

I generally have a disdain for any arguments that rely on statistics to come to any conclusion.

I take the opposite position. It is clear reality is an emergent statistical phenomenon. Hence why thermodynamics is the foundational science.

Quoting Sir Philo Sophia

Propose is a plausible Darwinian mechanism that could have produced a virus from scratch?

If genes are in competition, then a gene sequence that can hijack the means of its own reproduction is a statistically favoured outcome. The problem for life becomes instead to add enough regulatory machinery to keep this general tendency to go rogue in check.

Bacterial introns and junk DNA show how general this kind of Darwinian warfare is. Life had to evolve its defences, like spliceosomes , to keep a lid on gene sequences going rogue.

Quoting Sir Philo Sophia

And, please do start from "first life was some kind of proton gradient, autocatalytic, dissipative cycle that emerged in the very particular environment of a warm, acidic, ocean floor thermal vent ".

I'm not pushing a personal theory here but quoting "the scientific community".

See Nick Lane's summary - https://www.nature.com/scitable/topicpage/why-are-cells-powered-by-proton-gradients-14373960/

Quoting Sir Philo Sophia

However, a prion lacks a Separate genotype (no symbols encoding in its Hyper complex functional shape) and phenotype in one. I think Pattee's definition of life which you are quoting would have to conclude that prions are dead.

As I say, grey areas are not a problem here. Indeed - from a semiotic perspective - logical vagueness is basic to a developmental world view. The world can't start already divided. So the big question becomes how can its divisions - its epistemic cuts - arise? And for that, you need to be willing to embrace vagueness as the first ground of any distinctions.

Black and white become what you get by starting with grey and then separating that towards its opposing extremes of light an dark. The darkest grey becomes the black. The lightest becomes the white. A binary division is developed. But only in the sense that some symmetry breaking has been taken to its complementary limits.

You want to treat live vs death, animate vs inanimate, as dualistic categories. And so any greyness or vagueness has to be eliminated from "the holy definitions".

But my organic and semiotic perspective takes the opposite view. Definitions are pragmatic. Differences are only relative. Vagueness is how anything new could even originate as a process of symmetry breaking development.

So if life is defined by its organismic being - Robert Rosen's definition of life as a closed system of entailment - then that holism demands all a cell's parts are in functional co-operation. But within co-operation is buried the very antithesis of parts instead going rogue and being in competition.

Hence no surprise that life erupts in that direction too with its viruses, prions, introns and other bits of cellular machinery making their bid for freedom.

You should probably read Rosen's definition of life as well here. He and Pattee were colleagues so it is another angle on the general biosemiotic approach.

See - http://www.people.vcu.edu/~mikuleck/PPRISS3.html

Quoting Sir Philo Sophia

Prions Seem to be more at the border of alive/Inanimate than even viruses in my estimation. So I figure they are a much better test of definitions.

Or maybe they just say borders are grey on close inspection - vague and not crisp. Analog not digital.

Quoting Sir Philo Sophia

So, For at least the above reasons, your Definition is not a practical definition for Properly classifying all matter in the universe and establishing a metric for the earliest stage where inanimate matter transitions to living matter.

But it is you rather than me that is so hung up on concise definitions. Life and mind are too complex a phenomenon to be pinned down quite so easily.

Tornadoes and dust devils are also borderline dissipative structures if you are trying to force a biotic/abiotic division on nature. Belousov–Zhabotinsky (BZ) reactions are a classic example of inorganic systems being able to evolve better least action paths for themselves - convection cells that transfer heat with better efficiency.

So the dead/alive distinction is very easy to apply to nature when we talk about rocks vs wombats. And becomes a suitably grey matter when we talk about tornadoes vs prions.

The cites I have given on the issue address two issues.

My first post pointed you in the direction of those who have been demonstrating how the sciences of life and mind can be founded on the physics of far-from-equilibrium thermodynamics. All life in general is dissipative structure. And then different as a dissipative structure in having the evolutionary capacity to break down barriers against entropification - to construct least action paths that wouldn't otherwise have existed.

You've ignored that so far.

Now that the discussion has turned to Pattee and Rosen, we are getting into the semiotic mechanism - the epistemic cut - that enables a dissipative structure to gain a regulatory control over its own being in this way.

And so that now neatly roots biology in a psychological and even linguistic and logical perspective.

Biology is placed on its correct foundation in terms of the physics. And is also being shown to be founded in the very "other" of physics - that mental or Platonic realm which we think of as information and meaning.

You ask for definitions. I am concerned with fundamentals.

And being a systems thinker, a holist, that is why I would want to show how biology - as something particular - arises from this founding combo of brute materiality and teleological intent. Physics and symbols.

Quoting Sir Philo Sophia

The Principle of least action (Which all of physics including quantum QED and My proposed definition are based on) Focus on the global action that matter/energy takes throughout its path through a field

Exactly. The teleological and holistic view. The system is imbued with its basic all-constraining principle. Something - horrors - almost mindlike.

The only way to then demystify that telic principle is to follow Pattee, Rosen and other semioticians. The scientific account has to be expanded so it is anchored in the duality of physics and symbols, code and process, entropy and information.

Your definition fails to do that. And indeed, you explicitly reject the symbol side in saying replication is irrelevant. The reason for citing Pattee is that it succinctly does give equal weight to both sides of the semiotic equation.

Quoting Sir Philo Sophia

I look forward to your feedback and may be an improved definition that does not suffer from all the problems I have pointed out. I will soon be giving you feedback on your entropic Based counterpoints after I read those papers. However, I'm still pretty sure they will suffer from serious problems along the lines as I pointed out in a prior post.

I'm sure nothing will disturb the tranquility of your prejudices here.

But I look forward to discovering how many more random spellings of Pattee you will be able to generate. I think we are up to six now!

Quoting Pfhorrest

With that established, I then define "life" as "self-productive machinery":

Ah. But the question when it comes to life is how can a machine self-reproduce. That is the essence of Pattee's epistemic cut issue. It is the central problem that a definition of life must address.

See Pattee's account of von Neumann's famous challenge to quantum theorists....the infinite homuncular regress that arises as we try to avoid accounting for why a machine would have the intent to make the machine that it does.

The most convincing general argument for this irreducible complementarity of dynamical laws and measurement function comes again from von Neumann (1955, p. 352). He calls the system being measured, S, and the measuring device, M, that must provide the initial conditions for the dynamic laws of S. Since the non-integrable constraint, M, is also a physical system obeying the same laws as S, we may try a unified description by considering the combined physical system (S + M). But then we will need a new measuring device, M', to provide the initial conditions for the larger system (S + M). This leads to an infinite regress; but the main point is that even though any constraint like a measuring device, M, can in principle be described by more detailed universal laws, the fact is that if you choose to do so you will lose the function of M as a measuring device. This demonstrates that laws cannot describe the pragmatic function of measurement even if they can correctly and completely describe the detailed dynamics of the measuring constraints.

This same argument holds also for control functions which includes the genetic control of protein construction. If we call the controlled system, S, and the control constraints, C, then we can also look at the combined system (S + C) in which case the control function simply disappears into the dynamics. This epistemic irreducibility does not imply any ontological dualism. It arises whenever a distinction must be made between a subject and an object, or in semiotic terms, when a distinction must be made between a symbol and its referent or between syntax and pragmatics. Without this epistemic cut any use of the concepts of measurement of initial conditions and symbolic control of construction would be gratuitous.

"That is, we must always divide the world into two parts, the one being the observed system, the other the observer. In the former, we can follow up all physical processes (in principle at least) arbitrarily precisely. In the latter, this is meaningless. The boundary between the two is arbitrary to a very large extent. . . but this does not change the fact that in each method of description the boundary must be placed somewhere, if the method is not to proceed vacuously, i.e., if a comparison with experiment is to be possible." (von Neumann, 1955, p.419)

https://homes.luddy.indiana.edu/rocha/publications/pattee/pattee.html

Quoting Sir Philo Sophia

I do like your general direction as well, however, your particular definition Suffers from including Crystal growth As a living being, because Crystal growth uses a flow of energy to do productive work upon itself (Build its more ordered lower entropy structure) So it does reduce its own internal entropy And transfers the entropy difference as he to the environment.

I thought that crystals were excluded from my definition because a crystal is not in itself a machine. Crystals are lower-entropy than other arrangements of their constituent molecules, and they are produced when energy flows out of the system they are a part of (when temperature decreases). But they are just a product of that lower energy favoring a lower-entropy configuration, they are not exploiting the change in energy to do work (as they must to be considered machines), which work in turn reduces their entropy.

Quoting Sir Philo Sophia

I think that is problematic as well because gravity does fight against the second law of thermodynamics as it reduces entropy when matter clumps up together ( less micro-states are available for the matter to explore).

That is pretty much the same as my take on crystals above: the collapse of things under gravity can locally reduce entropy, and even power machines that can then reduce their own internal entropy, but that collapse itself is not life by my definition.

Quoting Sir Philo Sophia

However, I am much more comfortable with an energy and work Framework of defining life than a nebulous/abstract and information entropy related one.

I am also focusing on work as a primary factor of my definition; that's why I thought your definition was so similar to mine. The principle of least action is very closely related to entropy, such that veering away from the course least actions is basically the same thing as resisting the increase of entropy.

Quoting Sir Philo Sophia

I've always enjoyed reading your posts on other topics so I look forward to your further thoughts and/or critique on the subject.

Thank you very much, it's so nice to hear some positive feedback here, where it seems almost all of the responses are negative.

Quoting apokrisis

With that established, I then define "life" as "self-productive machinery": — Pfhorrest

Ah. But the question when it comes to life is how can a machine self-reproduce.

Please note that I didn't just mean machinery that produces other machinery like itself, but rather, machinery that does "productive" work, in the sense that I defined it in that post, upon itself.

I like that von Neumann quote, though.

Quoting Sir Philo Sophia

I think that is problematic as well because gravity does fight against the second law of thermodynamics as it reduces entropy when matter clumps up together ( less micro-states are available for the matter to explore). So anything that uses such lines of definition I believe would not be viable. My general intuition, is that all entropy based definitions of life would be flawed. I'm still thinking through that and when I go through the Negtropic Articles And arguments that apokrisis Made,

I agree that entropy accounting can be a little shonky on this score. As we dig into the details of the usual view - entropy always increases – we can see that the big picture view of cosmology says something different.

Entropy looks to increase because the Big Bang says the Universe forever expands and cools. And yet that expansion is is also gravitationally negentropic. It is building up a matching amount of energy potential.

Charlie Lineweaver is an excellent cite on the complexities of this. His publications page: https://www.mso.anu.edu.au/~charley/publications.html

If the Big Bang had stayed just a simple bath of cosmic background radiation - if its expansion and cooling had been adiabiatic rather than fractured by a succession of matter-producing symmetry breakings - then no entropy would have been added or lost.

But instead, mass did condense out to create lumps of energy density that then required dissipative structures to re-disperse back to cosmic radiation. So negentropy was produced by baryogenesis - those nebula gas clouds of hydrogen, heliium and lithium. Then entropy was liberated by the gas clouds first contracting into gravitational balls, then - happy accident - bursting into the radiant flames of fusion.

Lineweaver covers this in multiple papers, showing the evolution of the Universe as a series of steps - the symmetry-breakings that cause it to fall out of thermal equilibrium and so find itself forced to use dissipative structure to get back on track. Eg: https://arxiv.org/pdf/astro-ph/0305214.pdf

By the way, this is its own complication on any least action account of cosmic evolution of course.

Quoting Pfhorrest

With that established, I then define "life" as "self-productive machinery": a physical system that uses a flow of energy to do productive work upon itself

Quoting Pfhorrest

Please note that I didn't just mean machinery that produces other machinery like itself, but rather, machinery that does "productive" work, in the sense that I defined it in that post, upon itself.

You did say that life was "self-productive machinery" and so I mentioned the telling objection to that being a sufficient statement.

The "self" has to be dealt with here if we are going to be able to make this division between work and entropy clear as "work" does speak to there being indeed a selfish interest in play.

A machine is defined precisely by its ability – as some system of material constraints - to separate work cleanly from a flow of entropification. A combustion engine explodes petrol vapour. Heat and gases are sent out of the system as waste, while pistons, cranks and wheels are turned to serve the system that made the machine.

So in the semiotic view, mechanism is what stands between the symbols and the physics as the connection. The machine is a switch dipped in the entropic flow of the universe like a water wheel in a stream. It divides nature neatly so that there is now the work being directed inwards to the organism, and the waste being spent outwards to some environmental sink.

And the shock from biophysics over the past 20 years is how literally life depends on its molecular level machinery.

Quoting Sir Philo Sophia

I should also point out, that it is very curious that you were initially touting an entropic definition of life as being the key defining principle ( e.g., negentropic), But when I asked you to make a concise definition you completely drop that and just focus on pettee's semiotics

While on that subject, Stanley Salthe has written a bunch of my favourite papers on this point. If I am parroting anyone on the matter, it is his infodynamics.

See for instance his The Natural History of Entropy....

The story begins, appropriately enough, with the Big Bang (Layzer 1975; Chaisson
2001). The key idea is that the universal expansion has been accelerating so fast that the universe has been unable to remain in equilibrium internally (Frautschi 1982; Landsberg 1984; Layzer 1975) and it appears that it may be continuing to accelerate at present (Ostriker and Steinhardt 2001). This expansion beyond the range of possibility for global equilibration gave rise to the precipitation of matter, which might be viewed as delayed energy.

Clumps of matter represent potential energy gradients of one kind or another. Because of the Second Law, these energy gradients are intrinsically unstable and the world acts spontaneously to demolish them in the service of equilibration (Schneider and Kay 1994). And the faster the degradation, the more entropy (as opposed to useful work, which embodies some of the energy in other clumps) is produced per unit time. Gradients would originally form just from gravitation and fluctuation-driven winds and waves. Some of them, just by chance, would come to be configured in such a way as to be able catalyze the degradation of other, more metastable clumps.

But, as I said, catalyzing energy degradation requires particular relations between gradients and consumers. This fact brings information into our picture. The information is required to create energy availability in a degrading gradient —availability for work. Gradient destruction in the service of work is necessarily an informed process (Wicken 1987). For a consumer to line up with a gradient so as to set up exergy extraction, it needs to have a certain orientation and form with respect to that gradient. What is a consumer? It is a gradient feeding upon another one. But it is necessarily an informed gradient. The origin of definitive semiosis (the biosemiosis of Hoffmeyer 1993) lies in these relations, as noted already by von Uexküll in 1926 (Salthe 2001). So, what is information?

etc....

Quoting apokrisis

Swenson, Schneider and Kay, Lineweaver, Salthe and many more have hammered out the basics of how life and mind arise as dissipative structures with the intelligence to exploit entropic gradients.

You are being way too accepting and mentally comfortable with loose concepts on this subject. For example, Schneider does not point to or help with any definition of life. As stated, the closest thing Schneider says to a definition seems to be this part:
" We suggest that, in nonequilibriumsituations, systems will take advantage of allavailable means to resist the gradientsresponsible for the nonequilibrium condition.Furthermore, the stronger the applied gradient,the greater the effect that the equilibriumattractor will have on the system. Emergenceof coherent self-organizing structures are theexpected response of systems as they attempt toresist and dissipate the external gradients thatare moving them away from equilibrium."

However, that is so vague and not specific to living systems so it is practically useless. For example, nearly all the dynamic processes in the whole Earth are "coherent self-organizing structures in response to resist and dissipate the external gradients that are moving them away from equilibrium". That is what ocean currents, Hurricanes, tornados, Jet streams, etc., all are doing. So, it is all useless for an scientific definition of living matter to cite or talk about these dissipative structures.

Clearly, this is why you did not try to employ any of that feel-good philosophical jargon in your definition, which I "twisted your arm" to produce.

So, you citing these things as clear and complete definitions means that your understanding of the scientific method is clearly very limited, or you true motivation here is not scientific, but to serve your own philosophical/religious views.

Quoting apokrisis

You want to treat live vs death, animate vs inanimate, as dualistic categories. And so any greyness or vagueness has to be eliminated from "the holy definitions".

But my organic and semiotic perspective takes the opposite view. Definitions are pragmatic. Differences are only relative. Vagueness is how anything new could even originate as a process of symmetry breaking development.

did you not notice that the title of the discussion is "Scientific Definition of Living vs inanimate matter"

are you not aware that Scientific Definitions generally are never to be vague, and have the utmost goal to be black or white, and only include gray when there is a lack of theory or understanding of how to tighten the definition better. So, any vagueness or gray zones are a failing, yet still can help scientific progress as a "best working theory".

In this regard, I am only interested in forming the best Scientific Definition, which you, and Semiotics at large, have the opposite interest, goal, and world view.

Accordingly, I will be responsive to and appreciate if you could constructively critique my proposed Scientific Definition, instead of proposing I abandon my goal and go with your feel-good, arm-waving, vague ideas about philosophical hallmarks of life.

So far, this is the only constructively critique my proposed Scientific Definition you have yet made:
Quoting apokrisis

Lineweaver covers this in multiple papers, showing the evolution of the Universe as a series of steps - the symmetry-breakings that cause it to fall out of thermal equilibrium and so find itself forced to use dissipative structure to get back on track. Eg: https://arxiv.org/pdf/astro-ph/0305214.pdf

By the way, this is its own complication on any least action account of cosmic evolution of course.

I am not trying to account for cosmic evolution, so this comment is off point. Again, I will be very eager and responsive to and appreciate if you could constructively critique my proposed Scientific Definition, esp. where/if my largely basing it on the physics Principle of least action.

Quoting apokrisis

Tornadoes and dust devils are also borderline dissipative structures if you are trying to force a biotic/abiotic division on nature. ...
So the dead/alive distinction is very easy to apply to nature when we talk about rocks vs wombats. And becomes a suitably grey matter when we talk about tornadoes vs prions.

The cites I have given on the issue address two issues.

no, tornadoes are not alive, and my definition clearly excludes it, and yours says they are 'maybe alive'. as I point out, I found the whole coherent self-organizing dissipative structures to be largely useless nonsense towards making a tight Scientific Definition. Again, that is what countless natural processes do with astounding complexity building: ocean currents, Hurricanes, dust devils, tornados, Jet streams, etc., . So, again, it is all useless for an scientific definition of living matter to cite or talk about these structures.

Belousov–Zhabotinsky (BZ) reactions are a classic example of inorganic systems being able to evolve better least action paths for themselves - convection cells that transfer heat with better efficiency.

my definition does not say anything about the matter evolving a better least action paths for themselves. Please read it closely, it says:
"enact kinetic energy to avoid the path of least action in at least one environment and situation, wherein the enacted kinetic energy of the organism tends to increase the organisms total potential energy over time thereby reducing its net entropy and perpetuating its unique, non-least-action existence, by self-directed reproduction of a similarly living kind as itself, and wherein the means or goal to Self-replicate or gain potential energy is not programmed or directed by an external consciousness or entity.

So, however interesting BZ reactions are, they do not ever increase its total potential energy and does not perpetuate its existence by self-directed reproduction, and thus my Scientific Definition would exclude the BZ as being living matter.
For example, BZ reactions require a human continuously add consumed reagents to keep the wave oscillation going. So, I don't understand why you even mention it here. Again, I am only interested here in a Scientific Definition and counter examples that create problems for my proposed Scientific Definition. I await your keen input on that, which has yet to manifest, so maybe that means I've got a great "black and white" Scientific Definition here???

And becomes a suitably grey matter when we talk about ... prions

Note that prions have been shown to reproduce by non-genetic means (see below Wiki), and we can assume they do Darwinian evolution b/c their conformal shapes, as with all protein structures, do not replicate exactly and are very degenerate in their functional action. Thus, I say the prion clearly shoots down any Scientific Definition of living matter based on Petty or Semiotics- no gray zone there!
BTW, I gave you another mispelling of Pettee since it gives you some good feelings, as my mispellings are likely a Freudian slip on how little I regard his/Semiotics ideas with regard to useful Scientific endeavors.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prion#:~:text=Prion%20variants%20of%20the%20prion,as%20%22mad%20cow%20disease%22)
Until 2015 all known mammalian prion diseases were considered to be caused by the prion protein, PrP; in 2015 multiple system atrophy was found to be transmissible and was hypothesized to be caused by a new prion, the misfolded form of a protein called alpha-synuclein.[9] The endogenous, properly folded form of the prion protein is denoted PrPC (for Common or Cellular), whereas the disease-linked, misfolded form is denoted PrPSc (for Scrapie), after one of the diseases first linked to prions and neurodegeneration.[29][72] The precise structure of the prion is not known, though they can be formed spontaneously by combining PrPC, homopolymeric polyadenylic acid, and lipids in a protein misfolding cyclic amplification (PMCA) reaction even in the absence of pre-existing infectious prions[73]. This result is further evidence that prion replication does not require genetic information.[74]

Quoting apokrisis

The "self" has to be dealt with here if we are going to be able to make this division between work and entropy clear as "work" does speak to there being indeed a selfish interest in play.

Okay, that makes more sense of the von Neumann quote which otherwise didn’t seem connected to what you were saying, which I thought was about reproduction.

In the sense that I mean in my definition, the “self” that is alive just is whatever system it is that is benefitting (entropically) from the “water wheel in the stream” (great metaphor), so long as that water wheel is in turn a part of the system in question.

The definition of life can itself be seen as a guide for where to draw the boundary of a “self”: too small and the water wheel is only powering something outside that boundary, so the boundary is not around something SELF-productive (only something productive upon something outside itself); but too large and the entropic waste products of that process are contained within the boundary too, and so the system as a whole is not productive at all, self- or otherwise.

Quoting Pfhorrest

Okay, that makes more sense of the von Neumann quote which otherwise didn’t seem connected to what you were saying, which I thought was about reproduction.

It is about reproduction - Von Neumann's influential work on self-replicating automata or universal constructors.

But you have to have a blueprint of yourself to repair and maintain yourself as well as make clones of yourself.

Quoting Pfhorrest

The definition of life can itself be seen as a guide for where to draw the boundary of a “self”

But the issue in question is how does life manage to draw its own boundaries. That is what makes symbols - semiosis - necessary.

Schrödinger made this point famously in his "What is Life?" monograph ... along with fingering the complementary part paid by negentropy.

Quoting Sir Philo Sophia

Clearly, this is why you did not try to employ any of that feel-good philosophical jargon in your definition, which I "twisted your arm" to produce.

I think you just can't follow the argument. So let's break it down.

You want to employ the least action principle to define the world of inanimate physical processes. And yet from the very first bit of your definition you introduced the error of mixing entropy and potential energy - "...resulting in a tendency of monotonic increased entropy and decreased potential energy over time."

The classical Newtonian view of the least action principle is expressed by the Hamiltonian - the symmetry that obtains in an energetically closed system where potential energy and kinetic energy form a constant yo-yo balance. The swinging pendulum story. The falling weight gains kinetic energy as it falls and that then turns into a gain in potential energy as it instead rises against the backdrop gravitational field.

That's great for one level of physics. But then physics figured out dissipative structure or far from equilibrium thermodynamics. A least action principle can still apply. But how we are modelling an open energy system where there is a flow from a source to a sink. And dissipative structure arises in-between as self-organising physical structure that can move the flow with the greatest efficiency.

That is what Schneider refers to....

Emergence of coherent self-organizing structures are the expected response of systems as they attempt to resist and dissipate the external gradients that are moving them away from equilibrium

... the way a heated plate of oil breaks into an organised structure of hexagonal convection cells.

So this is about two levels of physics - closed and then open systems. And how a general variational principle - a symmetry maths for calculating shortest paths - can be applied to both.

The whole dissipative structure story was its own big revolution of thought in the 1960s to 1980s. And naturally, the sciences of life and mind could suddenly see how this second brand of physics slotted right in as a new material foundation. It changed the game.

And so we then have the theoretical biologists who did incorporate this new physics. And began to apply the least action principle again as just the obvious way to arrive at the simplest descriptions of life as a natural system. It is equilibrium maths. You established a flat baseline - a constraint of global symmetry - and then you have two opposed values, a here and a there, as your complementary quantities scaling the departures from this baseline.

If energy is actually conserved in a closed Newtonian system, and we only seem to see the positive motion of the kinetic energy. Then when than motion vanishes as it seems to with a pendulum on the upswing, we can still keep track of the now hidden energy by calling it an accumulating potential.

Likewise, in an open system, if a dissipative structures suddenly crystallises out of nowhere and generates a lot of negentropy, we can balance that by saying there is a matching increase in entropy being produce and exported across the boundary of the system.

Biologists could then develop that accounting system so that the energy/material flows could continue to be measured with some appropriate variational maths once the extra ingredient of symbols - the whole semiotic schtick - was added to the mix.

A lot of different such models have been developed. I was pointing you towards that literature. It might be confusing, but it is all about precise definitions .... of making measurements within the appropriate theoretical framework.

Now of course, if a semiotic level of dissipative structure exists and is bound by a least action principle, that is a big problem for your definition.

Or maybe not if you realise that it is certainly not the dumb and blind Hamiltonian of Newtonian systems, nor even the dumb and blind dissipative balancing act of the self-organising structures that appear in "far from equilibrium" inanimate systems. It now has to be a new variational principle that provides the right kind of measure for a living system with a memory, a goal, some kind of mind.

Something like Ulanowicz's ascendency, for instance.

So your own definition was half-baked in being based on the idea of measuring life in terms of its ability to ignore the basic constraints of physics. You said - using vague terms like intelligence and sentience - that life can do its own thing, driven by some desire to accumulate potential energy.

That is basically a mystical claim. Or at best, a descriptional definition. Look at life and it seems to somehow defy the laws of physics! It is anti-gravitational in that it can climb stairs. And even build stairs to climb.

Practicing scientists can see what really makes a working definition. You need some closure principle to create a baseline for measurement - a universal symmetry statement such as the Hamiltonian. And then you need the two opposing forms of action that are the yo-yo symmetry-breaking departures from this baseline.

That is the simplest kind of theory you can produce. The gold standard. You can now actually go out and measure the world.

But of course, as I said, the dissipative structure revolution simply served to ground biology in the right kind of physics. Biology was also engaged in the heady business of grounding itself in the other half of the semiotic equation. It was turning to information processing concepts so as to pin down the "mind" side of living systems in measurable fashion.

Salthe's infodynamics is an example of how this works.

And generally, the whole field was energised by Shannon's demonstration that information is the other face of entropy. Physics itself was stumbling into a new information theoretic era where the Planckscale - the unified physics scale - has this "Hamiltonian" metric where entropy uncertainty and information certainty are a symmetry double act like kinetic energy and potential energy.

So there is a big game in play. And the scientists actually know its rules. They know how to construct measurable theories. They understand the actual significance of the least action principle as a way to anchor that. And there is this "double foundations" thing going on where physics itself is starting to ground itself in entropy~information - the spontaneity of fundamental chance and the continuity of fundamental constraint.

Quoting Sir Philo Sophia

BTW, I gave you another mispelling of Pettee since it gives you some good feelings, as my mispellings are likely a Freudian slip on how little I regard his/Semiotics ideas with regard to useful Scientific endeavors.

I think it says a lot about your approach to scholarship for sure. :mask:

Something to bear in mind is that the analysis of living organisms as self-organising structures, etc, is very much an objective analysis, not an existential analysis. In other words, it is an analysis that seeks to understand organisms as phenomena, and is not concerned with the question of the nature of existence from the perspective of a subject.

//ps// Lineweaver’s web page is a treasure trove. //

Reply to Sir Philo Sophia I'm not sure about how much of your theory I understand but in my humble opinion, there seems to be complication with "the principle of least action".

Firstly, I'm totally with you in how inanimate matter behaves in accordance with the principle of least action. The only example I know of is sphericity as a preferred shape, the reason being, hopefully for my sake, the lowest potential energy attainable for a given mass and volume. Feel free to correct me.

Secondly, consider life as composed of two parts: 1. humans and 2. non-humans. Against this backdrop take a close look at how life behaves. Your theory that life breaks and bends "the principle of least action" is accurate - even for me, someone with little training in science and math, I can make out how our behavior (some but not all) is not, from any angle, the shortest distance between two points so to speak.

Thirdly, what about the fact that (one of) humanity's primary goal, especially with the aid of science, is to be as efficient as possible and efficiency is a notion that seems related but in a backwards kind of way to "the principle of least action" - the aim being to expend the least amount of potential energy required for a desired end. This seems to fit like a glove with your theory that life violates or puts a stress on "the principle of least action" interpreted as reducing potential energy to a minimum.

Fourthly, non-human animals, since they can't think like humans, generally expend more potential energy for a given objective than not i.e. non-human animals seem to be more aligned to "the principle of least action" and that because if more energy is spent than required for a particular purpose, the net potential energy of a non-human life-forms will bottom out faster i.e. a minimum potential energy state will be attained faster than for humans.

Fifthly, given the above facts, your theory would need to account for why non-human organisms are more attuned to "the principle of least action" than humans. Your theory is, after all, saying all life contradicts "the principle of least action" but, if I'm correct, non-human organisms, because of their wasteful energy-expending-behavior, would achieve minimum potential energy states at a faster pace than humans and that's another way of saying non-human life-forms are aligned to "the principle of least action", if not relative to inanimate matter, relative to humans.

Sixthly, the only difference between humans and non-human life-forms is our brains which seems to be hell bent on devising novel and ever creative ways of preserving potential energy. Taking this a bit further, the greater the potential energy of a system, the greater the possibility of that system being the handiwork of intelligence. The highest potential energy state of the universe was, I'm guessing, the Big Bang singularity. Ergo, it must've been the work of a supreme intelligence. God???

Seventhly, I'm a bit confused here so bear with me. "The principle of least action" says that "...finding the path of motion in space that has the least value". Now, observe how potential energy is calculated for an object (X) with mass m. The potential energy of an object with mass m, PE1 = m * g * h where g = acceleration due to gravity and h = vertical (straight line) distance of m from the surface of the earth. "The principle of least action" states that X will, given there are various paths available, travel to the floor (PE1 = 0, minimizing PE1) by the shortest route (vertically, straight line) but notice that this whole notion depends on PE1 reaching a minimum (zero on the floor) and remember PE1 was calculated using h [vertical (straight line) distance].

Consider another scenario for the moment, one in which PE (potential energy) calculation is done using non-linear distance (curved paths). In the case of X, suppose its PE is calculated by a curved path distance, let's call this PE2. Compare PE1 and PE2 and PE2 > PE1 [assuming energy is proportional to distance (here h and d)]. If X now takes the shortest route (h) to the floor, the reduction in X's PE will be the smallest (h is the shortest possible distance between X and the floor) and that means X will be left with the maximum amount of PE possible and not the minimum PE possible for the change in position that X undergoes. In other words, "...path of motion in space that has the least value" has maximized instead of minimized the potential energy.

I guess what I'm saying is that minimizing potential energy as a function of "...the path of motion in space that has the least value" is baked into the idea of potential energy, calculated as it is on "...the path of motion in space that has the least value". It's like filling up your car's gas tank precisely based on the distance between your town and an unspecified destination and then being amazed (the principle of least action) at how at the journey's end your gas tank is empty.

Quoting Sir Philo Sophia

In other words, thanks for confirming that you do not have or know of a concise Scientific Definition of Living vs inanimate matter. So, maybe science has not clearly defined it?

Do you really think that people who study life have never given any thought as to what life is? Never ventured a definition? Your OP cites one definition from a dictionary - was that the extent of your research? As a scholar, you owe it first of all to yourself, not to mention your readers, to do your due diligence, rather than demanding that others do your homework for you.

A couple of simple Google Scholar searches would have given you plenty of literature on the topic, including specific proposals, reviews of past efforts, as well as general thoughts on why and how we should (or perhaps shouldn't) go about defining life - which is a question that, as a philosopher, you should probably ask yourself first.

As one example, an entire issue of the Origins of Life and Evolution of Biospheres journal was devoted just to this question. Or if you like podcasts, I can recommend Sean Carroll's talk with astrobiologist Stuart Bartlett, where they touch on these issues and discuss Bartlett's own proposal. The paper is also available: Defining Lyfe in the Universe: From Three Privileged Functions to Four Pillars ("Lyfe" is not a typo :)).

If you look at the literature, you will quickly notice a pattern: the scientists who are most interested in the definition of life are mostly astrobiologists like Barlett, and origin of life researchers - which makes sense, of course (this is to the point of why we might need a definition of life). From the origins of life perspective, you may find this recent review of particular interest: Origins of Life: A Problem for Physics (2017) by Sara Imari Walker (she was also a guest on Sean Carroll's podcast). Among its 190 references the review includes some of the names that @apokrisis has already recommended to you (but not all - which shows just how much scholarship there is on this topic).


Now as to your own proposal, I find it very puzzling, because it is actually a hypothesis masquerading as a definition: a hypothesis that living organisms have a unique ability to transcend the principle of least action. The principle of least (or stationary) action is considered to be one of the, if not the most fundamental laws of nature:

Max Planck:Among the more or less general laws which manifest the achievements of physical science in the course of recent centuries, the Principle of Least Action is probably the one, which, as regards form and content, may claim to come nearest to that final ideal goal of theoretical research.

If you were to discover that anything in our universe was not subject to this principle, you would have overturned the last two and a half centuries of physics (and not just physics). The only explanation that I can see for your matter-of-fact attitude towards your "definition" is that you are harboring some severe misconceptions about PLA, as evidenced by comments such as this:

Quoting Sir Philo Sophia

The path of least action, As defined in physics, for any living system is simply to die.

Far from dooming living systems, the PLA, alongside the 2nd law of thermodynamics may be key to understanding self-organization in our universe, of which living systems are, by some metrics, the most extreme example known to us. See for instance Chaisson, The cosmic environment for the growth of complexity (1998), Georgiev and Georgiev, The least action and the metric of an organized system (2002), Annila, The 2nd law of thermodynamics delineates dispersal of energy (2010), as well as Apo's recommendations.

And here's another:

[quote=Marcello Barbieri]Molecular biology is based on two great discoveries: the first is that genes carry hereditary information in the form of linear sequences of nucleotides; the second is that in protein synthesis a sequence of nucleotides is translated into a sequence of amino acids, a process that amounts to a transfer of information from genes to proteins. These discoveries have shown that the information of genes and proteins is the specific linear order of their sequences. This is a clear definition of information and there is no doubt that it reflects an experimental reality. What is not clear, however, is the ontological status of information, and the result is that today we have two conflicting paradigms in biology. One is the ‘chemical paradigm’, the idea that ‘life is chemistry’, or, more precisely, that ‘life is an extremely complex form of chemistry’. The other is the ‘information paradigm’, the view that chemistry is not enough, that ‘life is chemistry plus information’.[/quote]

What is "information"?

This is a question I often ask in relation to the claim that life can only be understood through understanding "information" as being fundamental to it.

A key phrase that is germane to the OP:

The divide between life and matter is real because matter is made of spontaneous objects whereas life is made of manufactured objects.

The distinction being that 'spontaneous objects' can be accounted for in purely physicalist terms, whereas living organisms require the manufacturing of proteins which requires coding.

Quoting Pfhorrest

I thought that crystals were excluded from my definition because a crystal is not in itself a machine.

OK, but my definition goals are far more ambitious than yours! Note that mine covers all matter what-so-ever: "Scientific Definition of Living vs inanimate matter.... any grouping of matter or energy which "

Quoting Pfhorrest

The principle of least action is very closely related to entropy, such that veering away from the course least actions is basically the same thing as resisting the increase of entropy.

I do not think so. Just the opposite, veering away from the course least actions costs more wasted energy which means the matter will generate more heat (i.e., entropy), which eventually must be transferred to the environment of the motion.

See my comment below to apokrisis re likely fatal problem with all entropy based/focused definitions.

Quoting apokrisis

Indeed, I am comfortable with any stab at a black and white definition of life having its interesting grey areas. We may differ on that score.

Quoting apokrisis

The only way to then demystify that telic principle is to follow Pattee, Rosen and other semioticians. The scientific account has to be expanded so it is anchored in the duality of physics and symbols, code and process, entropy and information.

OK, but I showed how your proposed black and white definition of life does not work for what even you personally consider as living matter (i.e., when the virus is hijacking its host to copy itself). So, clearly, you are ideologically creating fake gray zones to fit your Semiotics belief of the world; thus, your comfort with a (much) worse B/W definition. I already showed you how the virus has no epistemic cut (i.e., Pattee is wrong), so you now have much cognitive dissonance to workout within your own mind.... You, unfortunately, have the problem that when you only have a (Semiotic) hammer at hand, every problem is a (symbolic) nail. And I've been watching Semiotics hammering away at the same problem (to little/no avail) since at least the early 90s. :wink:

Quoting apokrisis

I think you just can't follow the argument. So let's break it down.

You, and the references/articles you cited, never made those arguments, so I cannot get what you never gave. Glad you are finally articulating yourself, and finally attacking my definition directly, which is what I was asking for in my original post and (begging for?) throughout my comments with you. Thanks!

Quoting apokrisis

You want to employ the least action principle to define the world of inanimate physical processes. And yet from the very first bit of your definition you introduced the error of mixing entropy and potential energy - "...resulting in a tendency of monotonic increased entropy and decreased potential energy over time."

This is a great point to bring into critical question. Here is my reasoning for that wording: if you only follow the path of least action then you are guaranteed to lose potential energy over time (at least do to real-world energy losses; e.g., even a moon in orbit is slowly losing its potential energy as its kinetic energy (KE) is continually, in part, dissipated to heat or transferred to interacting matter), and both are a monotonic process. As for living matter, we all agree that their potential energy (PE) must not decrease over time, else they would not be able to do any work (to stay alive) b/c they would not have any excess PE available to convert into excess KE, which is needed to avoid the most KE efficient path of least action. Right? So, your only question is really about "...resulting in a tendency of monotonic increased entropy... over time"; however, even you have admitted that only living matter can, and must, continually repair itself against the 2nd law requirement that the net entropy of matter in a system is always increasing, which I tend to agree with. So, the flip-side of your admission on that is that you must agree that inanimate matter must have a "...a tendency of monotonic increased entropy... over time", as required by the 2nd law. Thus, I do not see any error as you purport. Please point out where I'm wrong,
and/or restate/clarify your concern in my above context.

Quoting apokrisis

Then when than motion vanishes as it seems to with a pendulum on the upswing, we can still keep track of the now hidden energy by calling it an accumulating potential.

it is not just an accounting gimmick as you think it. PE is real and physical reality b/c E=mc^2 tells us exactly how much the objects mass has increased when it gains the PE.

Quoting apokrisis

Now of course, if a semiotic level of dissipative structure exists and is bound by a least action principle, that is a big problem for your definition.

Not true, b/c, as I argue and point out above and before, my definition calls for and requires that living matter must have dissipative structure (be it Semiotic, or whatever) that produce more KE (thus transferring/dissipating more entropy to their environment) than would otherwise occur under PLA, and I require that PE increases, which also means that there is a net decrease in entropy in locking up the energy as potential (not in KE motion). Keep in mind, and do point out where you think I'm wrong, that saying higher KE is just another way of saying higher entropy b/c it means the matter in faster motion is exploring more microstates per unit time, thus the system has higher entropy.


Quoting apokrisis

Or maybe not if you realise that it is certainly not the dumb and blind Hamiltonian of Newtonian systems, nor even the dumb and blind dissipative balancing act of the self-organising structures that appear in "far from equilibrium" inanimate systems. It now has to be a new variational principle that provides the right kind of measure for a living system with a memory, a goal, some kind of mind.

See my argument below about why I do not believe "the right kind of measure for a living system " will be based on entropy.

Quoting apokrisis

Practicing scientists can see what really makes a working definition. You need some closure principle to create a baseline for measurement - a universal symmetry statement such as the Hamiltonian. And then you need the two opposing forms of action that are the yo-yo symmetry-breaking departures from this baseline.

I am a scientist, and I think you are misunderstanding "definition" here to be a causal theory, law or formula. Please keep clear in mind that my proposed definition of living mater is not meant to measure the degree or causal dynamics of a living system, only that a living system is present. So, your counterpoint here is moot, as the goal here is not to create a baseline for measurement. Instead, as I'm sure you know, the first job of scientific inquiry is to accurately define terms, at least to the binary (B/W) level to define the minimum observable properties of the class, and how to categorize something as belonging to that class or not. In that way, my definition has closure, in that if the matter/system has the properties/dynamics which I call for then it belongs to that class of living.

Quoting apokrisis

That is the simplest kind of theory you can produce. The gold standard. You can now actually go out and measure the world.

again, not (yet) proposing a theory here. again, before theories come broad definitions which set the metes and bounds and framework from which theories may be motivated and formulated. So, I think you are way jumping the gun, and should please focus on the merits, or not, of my B/W classification definitions.

Quoting apokrisis

And generally, the whole field was energised by Shannon's demonstration that information is the other face of entropy. Physics itself was stumbling into a new information theoretic era where the Planckscale - the unified physics scale - has this "Hamiltonian" metric where entropy uncertainty and information certainty are a symmetry double act like kinetic energy and potential energy.

what do you mean by "entropy uncertainty "? The entropy in quantum mechanics (Von Neumann entropy) is zero during the pure quantum state. So, it seems to make no sense to talk about quantum "entropy uncertainty ". Are you talking about a non-pure state having a density matrix and non-zero Von Neumann entropy? However, that still would not be uncertain entropy. Please clarify.

I should point out that even for pure quantum state systems with no entropy they still have to collapse according to the classical PLA path (per QED).

Quoting apokrisis

They understand the actual significance of the least action principle as a way to anchor that. And there is this "double foundations" thing going on where physics itself is starting to ground itself in entropy~information - the spontaneity of fundamental chance and the continuity of fundamental constraint.

I do not expect that any complete and accurate broad B/W definition to classify a living system will be based on entropy. Generally, IMHO, the problem with all entropy based definitions of life is that it is possible for matter to gain potential energy during PLA dynamics without changing or increasing environmental entropy. Thus, matter can have the ability to gain future action potential w/ no change of entropy, and because all living system must gain future action potential to have the ability to create the excess KE to afford to deviate from PLA. So, if your measure is entropy change then such matter could selectively take a deviant path from nature's PLA, yet your entropy based definition would never detect it is actually alive. A virus is a great example of what I mean. Throughout the virus' whole existence "life" at no point is it increasing the entropy of the environment, even while morphing itself to attack and evade all the host's defenses, even while guiding and morphing itself to break through the cell wall, even while it guides and morphs itself to get into the nucleus (etc.), even while it is hijacking the replication machinery (thus all hidden from entropy based definition ), and not until it actually starts making copies of itself does it even potentially show up on the entropy based definition radar, but even then it is arguable that making copies of itself does not increase entropy because there are deletion of (molecular) bits, just rearrangement of existing ones that make its kind vs the host's kind (thus neutral entropy).

Hence, I choose to avoid entropy like the plague! Instead, my PLA and PE based definitions would detect the virus as being living matter the moment it takes a different path than, for an imperfect example, a similarly sized dust particle would when entering the host.

I look forward to anything that finds/establish real problems with my PLA and PE based definitions, as I'm not easily going to switch to entropy and definitely not switching to symbols in any case.

TIA!

Quoting TheMadFool

Fifthly, given the above facts, your theory would need to account for why non-human organisms are more attuned to "the principle of least action" than humans. Your theory is, after all, saying all life contradicts "the principle of least action" but, if I'm correct, non-human organisms, because of their wasteful energy-expending-behavior, would achieve minimum potential energy states at a faster pace than humans and that's another way of saying non-human life-forms are aligned to "the principle of least action", if not relative to inanimate matter, relative to humans.

good instinct. This definition I'm posting here is a small part of a broader, all encompassing theory I am formulating. My, current, broader theory would answer you here by saying that the more intelligent the matter/system is, it necessarily, on average, must deviate greater from PLA when acting on the greater intelligence, b/c, in my definition of intelligence (to come in a future post along with many other definitions) greater intelligence is just another way of saying to be able to simulate more likely outcomes further out in time and space, which would guide local actions to be proportionately more costly to achieve ever greater future PE gains. Think of intelligence as being able to see past a distant hill to a a hi PE reword goal that PLA completely blocks you from getting to, but intelligence figures out how to get there greatly deviating from PLA at very high current cost (the further out that goal is over ever higher hills, i.e., the greater the intelligence, the ever greater the cost), whereas more limited in scope creatures will follow PLA much more often, thus will do much more efficient local work more often, at the cost of attaining much less PE gains vs net KE expenditure, over time.

another factor to consider is that research has found that all that is needed for life to want to exist is that they can barely exist (no need to thrive). So, nature may tend toward lower intelligence unless competition is so high, and/or local resources are so low that it pays to get smarter to go completely against the PLA river like the salmon...

I hope this satisfactory addresses your question/concerns.

thanks for your great comments and ideas!

Reply to SophistiCat given that you are in such great command of current state-of-the-art scholarship on the subject, as you claim to be aware of, then why don't you reply with what you find to be the best scientific definition of what minimal properties constitutes living matter vs inanimate?

If you cannot offer one, your own or what you believe in the most from literature, then I choose to ignore your rants about me not posting literatures best vs Webster's. You should read all the comments on this discussion and you will see that apokrisis cited what he believes to be best state-of-the-art scholarship on the subject, and, while many good points were made, I found and argued how my definition performs better. and, I find apokrisis to be extremely well read, informed, and intelligent on the subject. So, let's see if you can do better... I'm all ears...


I'll address your critiques next.

Quoting SophistiCat

Far from dooming living systems, the PLA, alongside the 2nd law of thermodynamics may be key

that is an ignorant comment. You clearly do not get any of it, because I'm saying exactly the opposite! You need to better read my OP and subsequent comments before you yap off at the mouth with such nonsense dribble...

Quoting Wayfarer

The distinction being that 'spontaneous objects' can be accounted for in purely physicalist terms, whereas living organisms require the manufacturing of proteins which requires coding.

interesting idea; however, see my comments above re how my proposed definition says a virus is living matter. That said, in principle, as far as I understand, a virus requires no coding to manufacture any complex functional proteins. They may just have a simple lipoprotein sheath and some surface shapes for lock&key entry. Moreover, a virus uses a living cell's machinery to make itself anyhow, so that would make you think a virus is pure information. Yet, it is, in my estimation, physical functional information in the form of a molecular program state-machine. So, not sure how you would make an information-based definition. any proposals? and, what worse, how would you know it when you only see it from external behavior?

I should mention that, in my definition, all information (incl. coding manufacturing) is comprised within the PE aspect of the definition. So, maybe I've got that covered good enough???

Quoting Sir Philo Sophia

as far as I understand, a virus requires no coding to manufacture any complex functional proteins.

Well outside my knowledge of biology, but an encyclopaedia entry notes that ‘The simplest viruses contain only enough RNA or DNA to encode four proteins. The most complex can encode 100?–?200 proteins.’

In any case Marcelo Barbieri’s essay is very interesting in its own right, and also relevant to the OP, although perhaps only tangentially related.

Quoting Sir Philo Sophia

OK, but my definition goals are far more ambitious than yours! Note that mine covers all matter what-so-ever: "Scientific Definition of Living vs inanimate matter.... any grouping of matter or energy which "

Are you differentiating “animate vs inanimate” from “living vs nonliving”? I took them to be synonyms for our purposes, in which case a definition of life also divides all matter and energy into those systems that meet that definition (living or animate) and those that do not (nonliving or inanimate).

Quoting Sir Philo Sophia

veering away from the course least actions costs more wasted energy which means the matter will generate more heat (i.e., entropy), which eventually must be transferred to the environment of the motion.

That’s just another way of saying that to veer away from the course of least action requires an energy source and a waste energy sink, i.e. an energy gradient to exploit, which are also exactly the conditions in which locally reducing entropy is possible.

The universe as a whole always takes the course of least action and always increases in entropy, as those are almost synonyms; but having an exploitable energy gradient makes it locally possible for a limited system to run counter to that trend.

Quoting Pfhorrest

Are you differentiating “animate vs inanimate” from “living vs nonliving”? I took them to be synonyms for our purposes, in which case a definition of life also divides all matter and energy into those systems that meet that definition (living or animate) and those that do not (nonliving or inanimate).

yes, synonymous and covers energy which is carried by the matter.

Quoting Pfhorrest

i.e. an energy gradient to exploit, which are also exactly the conditions in which locally reducing entropy is possible.

in many cases this is a plausible model that is contemplated; however, the hypothesis behind my proposed definition is much broader than that and does not necessarily always require a local entropy gradient to exploit when the living mater has already accumulated excess PE (possibly by initially exploiting a local energy gradient). Once it has excess PE then it can "redirect or enact kinetic energy to avoid the path of least action" as recited in my OP definition. This is why I like the PE focused model b/c entropy gradients are not always needed along and given stretch of the organisms path (e.g., just has to burn excess PE until it finds more PE it can accumulate or find entropy gradient to exploit to get PE).

Quoting Pfhorrest

but having an exploitable energy gradient makes it locally possible for a limited system to run counter to that trend

as mentioned above, I think it is more complex that that one (maybe most common at lowest life forms). So, I'll offer my analysis and basic mechanics of how my definition/hypothesis might apply to the virus matter. It is what I wrote on the fly (first thoughts), so it is raw, and likely has many kinds of errors, yet should convey the gist of what I generally mean. Including typo/gramo errors by my dictations software. I have not taken the type to proof read it:

That is, if we consider a virus organism as an example, it appears to be an inanimate grouping of molecules until it is in the presence of an environment which activates its complex molecular action to be attracted to and mate with living cells that are hijacked to make copies of itself, whereby the virus is leveraging the potential energy gained by the living cell to carry out all the kinetic energy mechanisms necessary to move and replicate the virus. Once a copy or version of the virus is made the virus as a unique entity has effectively increased its potential energy at the expense of the living organisms reduction of its potential energy. In this way, the virus has a complex context dependent molecular potential energy program which is capable of redirecting natural path of least action forces present in certain environments towards path and destination which makes its molecular program with another organism’s molecular program replication machinery that is powered by the other organisms potential energy. Because the virus has no means to consume energy producing matter (i.e., cannot eat something to increase its potential energy so that it can produce its own goal-directed kinetic energy) it must instead systematically and smartly redirect environmental least action forces through a sequential molecular program that manipulates and redirects those forces like a gliding plane with no engines that glides to and safely lands on its target by simply dynamically adjusting its control services to create its own path of least action towards meeting its target destination which completely diverges from the path of least action which nature (i.e. gravity) would have forced the agent to take had the agent not had any such control surfaces or context dependent controlling program. In this way, according to the foregoing definition, the virus particle is indeed alive and the minimal form of life that can exist because anything less would not be able to acquire and redirect potential energy from its environment to increase its own potential energy. I posit that a virus using a cell’s machinery and PE as a tool to make copies of itself is an increase in the virus’ PE because all the viral copies share a common meaning a purpose of the original virus organism thus it has amplified itself and its kinetic action potential to affect its environment according to effective implied purpose of the common molecular program, much like any social/pack animals increase their PE by cooperating with each other in common purpose and behavioral (re)action.

Quoting Sir Philo Sophia

yes, synonymous and covers energy which is carried by the matter.

Okay good, so we agree on that front.

Quoting Sir Philo Sophia

does not necessarily always require a local entropy gradient to exploit when the living mater has already accumulated excess PE

Having a store of potential energy is the same thing as there being an energy gradient to exploit. For example if your store of potential energy is a hot or high-pressure volume of gas, that you can use to do work by releasing it into the environment, it is the temperature or pressure differential between the volume and the environment that enables the release of that potential energy; if the environment was just as hot and high-pressure as the inside of the volume of gas, it would not be usable potential energy, relative to that environment.

Conversely, if you had a cold or low-pressure volume of gas, relative to the surrounding environment, that local absence of energy would make the energy of the environment "potential" relative to the volume: you could use an internal cold sink to force the environment to do work for you.

Similarly, lifting water above the surrounding ground is what lets you get work out of it when it flows back down; if the ground was all the same level as the water, the elevation of the water would be useless. Unless, of course, you then dug out the ground below the level of the water, in which case there would then be a difference, and you could let the water flow down into the hole you dug, and use that to do work.

The absence of such a differential is the same thing as the presence of entropy, so "increasing its store of potential energy" is the same thing as "reducing its local entropy".

Quoting Sir Philo Sophia

given that you are in such great command of current state-of-the-art scholarship on the subject, as you claim to be aware of, then why don't you reply with what you find to be the best scientific definition of what minimal properties constitutes living matter vs inanimate?

If you cannot offer one, your own or what you believe in the most from literature, then I choose to ignore your rants about me not posting literatures best vs Webster's.

You missed my point. This wasn't about showing how much more I know on the subject. Although I happened to know a little more than Webster's definition, the point was to show you that voluminous literature on the subject exists and is readily available, so you don't need to start from scratch. I even gave you some specific pointers. But that was because I mistakenly assumed that you may be interested in learning and discussing ideas.

Quoting Sir Philo Sophia

So, let's see if you can do better...

Ah, no, thanks. You are not worth my time.

Quoting Pfhorrest

Having a store of potential energy is the same thing as there being an energy gradient to exploit.

I don't think so. There is no energy gradient towards the potential energy of matter. For example, where is the energy gradient towards the potential energy stored by an apple?

I think you are mixing up entropy gradients, which everyone talks about as needed to do work, and energy gradients. The two are largely unrelated.

Quoting Pfhorrest

For example if your store of potential energy is a hot or high-pressure volume of gas, that you can use to do work by releasing it into the environment, it is the temperature or pressure differential between the volume and the environment that enables the release of that potential energy; if the environment was just as hot and high-pressure as the inside of the volume of gas, it would not be usable potential energy, relative to that environment.

again, you confound your entropy gradients and energy gradients, which has you getting stuck into a single line of reasoning. Entropy math and principles only applies to statistical mechanics ensembles of particles operating near equilibrium, like gasses, not few body mechanical systems like a rock about to fall of the edge of a cliff.

Quoting Pfhorrest

Similarly, lifting water above the surrounding ground is what lets you get work out of it when it flows back down; if the ground was all the same level as the water, the elevation of the water would be useless. Unless, of course, you then dug out the ground below the level of the water, in which case there would then be a difference, and you could let the water flow down into the hole you dug, and use that to do work.

per my above, entropy does not apply to few body mechanical systems like this example, as the water molecules are all bounded in a container that limits their microstates and are in equilibrium, so cannot do work; hence, adding KE to lift them up a potential gradient did not change their entropy, nor did it change any entropy of the closed system. All you are doing there is converting KE into PE, minus dissipative/frictional losses dissipated as heat.

Quoting Pfhorrest

The absence of such a differential is the same thing as the presence of entropy, so "increasing its store of potential energy" is the same thing as "reducing its local entropy".

I don't see this a true, per my above. Your consideration of my above apple stored potential energy example will hopefully clarify that. There is no energy gradient to exploit for work to power you towards the apple, and you cannot exploit any potential energy stored by an apple b/c it is stored as potential chemical energy so requires you poses chemical means to release and use it for your own work. Same idea as nuclear potential energy locked up into all matter, you generally need nuclear forces acting means to release and use it for your own work, as in a nuclear bomb chain reaction. Otherwise, that matter w/ stored PE is not useful for work. This is where living beings get there advantage to exploit far more energy than the universe otherwise allows PLA access to, and the more intelligence the living being has the more effective it will be at finding and accessing stored, and locked up, PE, which requires paying much higher upfront KE costs to avoid PLA to get the massive locked up, PE gain. Now, local entropy gradients do help bootstrap that process when the living being has little/no intelligence or means/access to locally stored PE; however, entropy, or even energy, gradients is by far not the most important part of the life story, IMHO.


Quoting Pfhorrest

My definition hinges on the physics concept of a "machine", which is any physical system that transforms energy from one form to another, which is to say it does "work" in the language of physics.

I propose the definition of a property of such physical work, called "productivity", which is the property of reducing the entropy of the system upon which the work is done.

BTW, I should point out another major problem with your proposed definition is that it defines the whole universe as living. That is, the physical rules of the universe by default produces stars and planetary systems, which your definition would define as living b/c they were produced by the universal "machine". A star is a machine that "that transforms energy from one form to another, which is to say it does "work" " in producing radiation and new types of atoms. Likewise, a planet "uses a flow of energy to do productive work upon itself, which is to say, to reduce its own internal entropy (necessarily at the expense of increasing the overall entropy of the environment it is a part of. Mars was doing this for millions of years before its dynamic core ran out of energy and the planet "died". Earth is still doing this today, and even if all life never existed still would do it b/c the Earth has a huge and active dynamic core of energy and the planet must use and dissipate that energy to build new and ever more complex chaotic & dynamic structures to dissipate that entropy/energy, and this keeps the Earth far away from thermal equilibrium with the space it 'lives' within. That is what mountain formation, ocean currents, weathering, Hurricanes, tornados, Jet streams, planetary magnetic shields, etc., all are doing. So, stars + planets systems have all the functions/behavior of a living cell systems under your and apokrisis' definition approach. Maybe you can refine your definition approach to avoid this undesirable problems? That said, I believe my PLA/PE approach is the most fundamental and should avoid all known problems.

cheers!

Quoting SophistiCat

Ah, no, thanks. You are not worth my time.

likewise. To get more constructive outcomes, hopefully, you learn how to be more constructive in offering useful critiques. bye bye...

Quoting Pfhorrest

Having a store of potential energy is the same thing as there being an energy gradient to exploit. For example if your store of potential energy is a hot or high-pressure volume of gas, that you can use to do work by releasing it into the environment, it is the temperature or pressure differential between the volume and the environment that enables the release of that potential energy

I should also point out another argument I have against calling work potential of any statistical mechanics ensembles of particles as "potential energy", as I pointed out above PE is real and physical reality b/c E=mc^2 tells us exactly how much the objects mass has increased when it gains the PE. So, I would argue that if the mass of the particles did not decrease then they lost no energy, incl. no PE, as their entropy naturally increases toward maximum (thermal equilibrium) per 2nd law.

There is nothing about 2nd law entropy that implies that the net energy (e.g., the macro-state of temperature) of the particle ensemble system has to change for the entropy of particle ensemble system to increase or not change. Thus, any entropic gradient can always be reduced to zero (thermal equilibrium) without changing the net energy of the system and, indeed, without doing any work on matter outside of the particle ensemble system. Hence, there is no change of potential energy involved.
It is properly called 'free energy' or 'negenergy', or "work potential", but not "potential energy". To get any useful work out of any entropic gradient you have to redirect and capture the net KE of the particle ensemble system as they move towards max entropy, and redirect it towards useful work instead of just the work/heat of randomly spreading the particle ensemble to explore all their available microstates.

Quoting Sir Philo Sophia

So, I would argue that if the mass of the particles did not decrease then they lost no energy, incl. no PE, as their entropy naturally increases toward maximum (thermal equilibrium) per 2nd law.

A hot volume of gas does actually weigh more than a cold one per E=mc^2. Mass is not just in elementary particles but in the interactions between them; in fact most of the mass if ordinary matter lies in the chemical bonds between atoms, electrostatic bonds between electrons and nuclei, and nuclear bonds between nucleons and between the quarks inside them. The remainder comes from interaction with rhe Higgs field.

Quoting Pfhorrest

A hot volume of gas does actually weigh more than a cold one per E=mc^2.

sure, but that completely does not address what I said about:
"There is nothing about 2nd law entropy that implies that the net energy (e.g., the macro-state of temperature) of the particle ensemble system has to change for the entropy of particle ensemble system to increase or not change. Thus, any entropic gradient can always be reduced to zero (thermal equilibrium) without changing the net energy of the system and, indeed, without doing any work on matter outside of the particle ensemble system."

So, your response seems to be off point.

See here for details on entropy and work done in Isothermal processes:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Isothermal_process#Entropy_changes

notice how T of the gas (thus it's mass) is constant but work was done and entropy changed. Thus, PE of the gas particle ensemble is not defined by or dependent on its work done or its entropy. In fact, any work done by the gas only requires adding heat to the gas to keep its T constant, and we know that added heat only goes to maintain the KE of the gas molecules, b/c only gas molecular KE motion defines temperature, not any PE. So, that is another way to argue that no change of PE is involved.

Please reframe your example "store of potential energy in a hot or high-pressure volume of gas, that you can use to do work by releasing it into the environment" to make sense in the above context.

Quoting Sir Philo Sophia

Please reframe your example "store of potential energy in a hot or high-pressure volume of gas, that you can use to do work by releasing it into the environment" to make sense in the above context.

Your counterexample is including the inside of the volume and its surrounding environment as the system under consideration. In that case, energy remains constant (modulo the inevitable leakage at the edges of the environment), and the entropy of that entire system (volume and its surrounding environment together) increases.

My original example was considering the volume of gas, and probably some additional equipment, apart from its environment. Pumping gas into, or heating up the gas in, the volume, relative to the surrounding environment, increases the potential energy there, like your theory says is part of the definition of life. It also pulls it out of equilibrium with its surrounding environment, i.e. decreasing its local entropy, as my theory says is part of the definition of life.

Forming chemical bonds (making sugar out of CO2 and water using photosynthesis, for example) also both increases local entropy and stores potential energy.

I basically agree with your theory, as I said in my first post in this thread. But the reason I like it so much is that it reminds me so much of my own.

And under my own theory, things that don't technically increase the potential energy of the living system, but just reduce its local entropy, still count. If you had two volumes of gas at equal pressure, and used energy from photosynthesis to pump gas from one volume to the other, you wouldn't be increasing the potential energy in the system overall*, but you would be decreasing entropy, and when you let it return to equilibrium you can use that to do work.

You could also, as I said earlier, use a flow of energy (like photosynthesis, again) to pump gas out of a fixed volume, decreasing the amount of energy in the system, but because it's now out of equilibrium with its environment, that still creates a stored energy gradient that can be used to do work, as gas from the environment rushes back into the volume.

*(I'm actually not sure that that really wouldn't increase the total energy and hence mass of the system, because I'm pretty sure that a spring under tension technically has higher mass because of the energy it's storing).

I picked compressing gas as my example because it just seemed like a convenient non-chemical way to store energy, but think about springs instead if you want, if the entropy of the gas itself rather than the system it's a part of is distracting you. A spring under tension is out of equilibrium, it's not in the state it would naturally "want" to be in, so it takes work to put it into that state, and you can get work out of it by letting it out of that state. That's why I also mentioned water energy storage. What's important there is that water is out of equilibrium, it has a lower-energy state it will try to get to, which we can use to make it do work. Entropy isn't only about ensembles of microscopic particles. Big chunks of things moving around can change the entropy of the system they're a part of too. Anything being out of equilibrium in any way is a lower-entropy state.

Quoting Pfhorrest

entropy of that entire system (volume and its surrounding environment together) increases.

isn't that another way of saying that the mass of the system stayed the same, thus no PE change but there was an entropy change, so PE not always tied to entropy, which is what I'm getting at?

Quoting Pfhorrest

My original example was considering the volume of gas, and probably some additional equipment, apart from its environment. Pumping gas into, or heating up the gas in, the volume, relative to the surrounding environment, increases the potential energy there

I can much more follow your spring example than gas. So, I'll reply to that one in more detail. However, can you please explain to me exactly where you are proposing that external heat energy transferred from outside is stored in an ideal gas? As I point out, I only see the gas' KE increasing w/ no way to store PE, and even if it could (e.g., molecules attract somehow) I figure any PE would increase would decrease the gas' entropy. So, please tell me exactly how the gas gains PE w/ injected heat energy. thx.

Quoting Pfhorrest

Forming chemical bonds (making sugar out of CO2 and water using photosynthesis, for example) also both increases local entropy and stores potential energy.

sure, but there are just as many ways to increase PE while decreasing entropy; e.g., storing free electrons into a chem-battery should reduce total entropy (except for resistive losses). So, the key I'm saying is that entropy gradients alone does cover all cases where living matter can avoid PLA over time.

Quoting Pfhorrest

And under my own theory, things that don't technically increase the potential energy of the living system, but just reduce its local entropy, still count.

If you read my comments above to apokrisis you'll I implicitly agree with that, esp. for local avoidance of PLA. However, globally, I'm saying excess PE is what enables getting past canyons where there are no entropy gradients to exploit for work. It is really an obvious point when you think about it. When you get up and walk from here to there you are not primarily exploiting any entropy gradients you are burning chem-bonds PE and converting to KE b/c no entropy gradients to exploit. Now, if you want to jump off a cliff to get KE w/o burning any of your PE, you can do that too!

BTW, I'm currently defining many other Sentience related terms. My latest is "action" and "free will". In wordsmithing 'action' I realized that I had to include entropy option as well, so you might like it better, as I think you are right on that part. I copied that part of my 'action' definition (in progress) to amend my OP. So, see this new part in my OP:

In other words, the self-enacted kinetic energy of inanimate matter must always result in the inanimate matter taking the least energetically costly action path towards giving up, from that within its possession, the most potential energy or negentropy possible without giving up any additional kinetic energy beyond that which the Principle of least action would dictate. When the subject of action is animate (i.e., living) matter, the self-enacted energy is kinetic energy which, within some finite time, must result in the animate matter making at least one energetically inefficient action that results in gaining at least some more internal potential energy and/or negentropy than it started with, thereby preserving the most potential energy or negentropy possible against that which the Principle of least action would otherwise dictate.


Quoting Pfhorrest

but because it's now out of equilibrium with its environment, that still creates a stored energy gradient that can be used to do work, as gas from the environment rushes back into the volume.

Ah, so what you mean by gas PE is really a pressure gradient between 2 selectively connected reservoirs w/ on pumped to high pressure from another to low pressure. is that it? no other PE possible w/ gas, right? However, is that really defined as PE b/c all the hi gas pressure you are calling PE is all from the molecules KE. In physic PE c an have no motion, so that is why I never can understand what you mean by gas having PE to do thermodynamics work.

Quoting Pfhorrest

it has a lower-energy state it will try to get to, which we can use to make it do work.

that is not how entropy is defined. Entropy is degree of non-random spreading throughout all possible micro-states. nothing to do w/ moving to "a lower-energy state". moving to "a lower-energy state" is the domain of PE under PLA and minimum PE principle. Please clarify why I'm wrong on this.

great discussion... thanks!

Quoting Sir Philo Sophia

isn't that another way of saying that the mass of the system stayed the same, thus no PE change but there was an entropy change, so PE not always tied to entropy, which is what I'm getting at?

You can have a change in entropy without a change in PE, but you can’t have a change in PE without a change in entropy.

Or more to the point here, if you’re going to store up some energy inside a system for later use, that will always cause a decrease in local entropy, because you have to pull things out of equilibrium to do that. But you can also pull things out of equilibrium, in a way that can be used to do later work, without storing up energy: just reorganizing it, or even removing it, can accomplish the same thing.

Quoting Sir Philo Sophia

both increases local entropy and stores potential energy.
— Pfhorrest

sure, but there are just as many ways to increase PE while decreasing entropy

That was a typo on my part, I meant “decreases” where I wrote “increases”.

Quoting Sir Philo Sophia

I'm saying excess PE is what enables getting past canyons where there are no entropy gradients to exploit for work.

I get that, and I mostly agree with it, but I am pointing out that you can “store energy” for use like that in a way that doesn’t actually require increasing your internal energy. Say you’re a car powered by compressed air. Rather than having to take in more air from the environment and compress it (increasing your energy), you could instead pump air from inside one chamber of yourself into another, creating a vacuum and a compression tank, making no change in energy. Or you could instead just pump air out of yourself to create a vacuum, reducing your energy. In any case, when you allow things to return to equilibrium you can exploit that flow of air to turn your wheels and get up over this next hill.

Quoting Sir Philo Sophia

However, is that really defined as PE b/c all the hi gas pressure you are calling PE is all from the molecules KE. In physic PE c an have no motion, so that is why I never can understand what you mean by gas having PE to do thermodynamics work.

It really depends on what level of abstraction you’re dealing with. At the deepest level everything is in constant motion at c and it is only the many momentary pauses to interact with other fields that creates the appearance of rest mass. This same phenomenon is how chemical bonds store energy, by confining the motion of their constituent particles.

In any case, if you look at a fluid on the level of a fluid rather than as an ensemble of particles, compression is an increase in potential energy, just like compressing a spring is. You can look at a lower level and see it as an increase in kinetic energy instead, but you can always do that for any potential energy.

Quoting Sir Philo Sophia

Entropy is degree of non-random spreading throughout all possible micro-states. nothing to do w/ moving to "a lower-energy state".

Maximum entropy is where energy is spread out as randomly as possible. Any deviation from that will mean that there is some energy somewhere that is at a higher concentration than somewhere else. Moving from that lower entropy state to a higher entropy state thus always involves some high energy concentration spreading out into a lower energy state, by dissipating its energy to places that had been lower energy than it before.

So wherever you have something at a higher energy state than it possibly could be, with some potential for its energy to be dissipated somewhere else that’s presently at lower energy, you have a low-entropy condition.

Reply to Pfhorrest
thanks for explaining! I find that I understand and agree with all your points. That said, I'm going to stick w/ my CYA (hedging) approach and just claim both are required in the "and/or" to cover all situations. My instinct here is that you cannot define it in terms of pure entropy changes b/c what equations do we have to quantify the work potential of an entropy gradient of water lifted up off the ground by so many feet? However, we have clear and easy PE equations to exactly calculate that. So, you may be right in the theoretical abstract, and semantics, but in practice do we have entropy equations to calculate all kinds of work potential in terms of entropy diffs only? Please point me to such equations!

that said, may boil down to semantics since we seem to agree on the substance of my proposed definition framework b/c you def. talks about 'energy gradients' if I recall right. So, the way you've explained 'energy gradients' above would cover both diffs in PE and diffs in Entropy. right?

what about the rest of my definition requirements?

thx.

Hi Sir Philo,

There's a serious problem with seeking a correct definition like this. In order to know if you have found the correct definition, you need to know already what the correct definition is.

Quoting Pfhorrest

So wherever you have something at a higher energy state than it possibly could be, with some potential for its energy to be dissipated somewhere else that’s presently at lower energy, you have a low-entropy condition.

can you think of the best example of a living organism which stores/uses internal PE in the way you are saying re controlled pressure gradients using internal imbalances of KE to do work for them? The only kind I can think of is an air bladder in marine fish, which control the bladder air volume to do more efficient locomotion work in changing/keeping their water depth in the ocean/lakes. Is that the kind of internal KE/entropy gradient used by living organisms to do real work w/o technically storing PE?

I think you are right, so I just added ", any internal energy gradients, " to my OP def. to cover that kind of PE.

thx again.

Reply to Sir Philo Sophia I can’t think of any real-world examples of biological organisms doing that. That was just a hypothetical on my part.

Glad to see you responding to feedback so positively! That’s a refreshing change for this forum.

Quoting Pfhorrest

Glad to see you responding to feedback so positively! That’s a refreshing change for this forum.

Meritocracy! I'm almost 100% results oriented kind of person. I play to win (true results). So, I do my best to check any ideologies I may have at the door. I suspect that most people w/ purported strong Philosophies come mostly w/ strong ideologies...

BTW, tomorrow I'll be making a post in Mind Philo cat. re "Scientific Def of 'Action'...", following a similar format and building upon concepts in my OP here. I look forward to your continued very keen insights and constructive critiques, even when we will (usually) inevitably diverge at some point on approaches/theories.

cheers!

Quoting Pfhorrest

In any case, if you look at a fluid on the level of a fluid rather than as an ensemble of particles, compression is an increase in potential energy, just like compressing a spring is. You can look at a lower level and see it as an increase in kinetic energy instead, but you can always do that for any potential energy.

BTW, Wiki defines PE the way I learned and understand it, which does not include your reinterpretation. In a spring, you have no KE, all the PE forces come from elastic stretching of the molecular bond of the solid. A gas has no analogy to that. You need particle statistical ensemble math to estimate the outward force all the KE of the particles will push back with as you try to compress it, and as you compress the gas it will cool so it looses KE and pressure drops too. That is how air conditioners cool air. So, I don't think you got that thinking right. In any case, that is an example of why I'll stick with my PE or Negentropy def.

See:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Potential_energy
In physics, potential energy is the energy held by an object because of its position relative to other objects, stresses within itself, its electric charge, or other factors.[1][2]
...
Since the work of potential forces acting on a body that moves from a start to an end position is determined only by these two positions, and does not depend on the trajectory of the body, there is a function known as potential that can be evaluated at the two positions to determine this work.
...
Potential energy is the energy by virtue of an object's position relative to other objects.[5] Potential energy is often associated with restoring forces such as a spring or the force of gravity. The action of stretching a spring or lifting a mass is performed by an external force that works against the force field of the potential. This work is stored in the force field, which is said to be stored as potential energy. If the external force is removed the force field acts on the body to perform the work as it moves the body back to the initial position, reducing the stretch of the spring or causing a body to fall.

Reply to Sir Philo Sophia I do hope you'll consider what I said about definitions before you waste any more time and effort. If you're trying to correctly define "action", you will need to know in advance what the correct definition is.

Reply to Daemon Hi. I'm not interested in a philosophical debate on your idea that no definition can ever be made before you "know in advance what the correct definition is." I suggest you create a discussion on that topic in the Philo of science b/c the whole scientific method is premised on starting w/ a Hypothesis, which is defacto a glorified and uncertain, initially maybe false, definition. I am a scientist, so I'm fine with that process. everyone else will always be stuck to the confines of what they "know". Good luck with that!

In your initial post you said:

Under my below definitions, for example, a virus is alive. So, if you do not regard a virus as a living being then you have to point out exactly where/how my definition is flawed, and argue why a virus is inanimate matter.

So in order to come up with a definition which is not flawed, one would need to know already whether a virus is alive or not; one would need to know the true definition of life. You're asking your readers to come up with a better definition than yours, but that would require them to know in advance what the correct definition of life is, or to put it another way, it would require them to know in advance whether crystals or viruses are alive.

You try to suggest that you are pursuing the scientific method, but that would require your hypothesis to be falsifiable. Your hypothesis is "A virus fits the correct definition of 'alive'". But this can only be confirmed or falsified if we already know the correct definition.

This is a philosophy forum.

Quoting Daemon

Your hypothesis is "A virus fits the correct definition of 'alive'". But this can only be confirmed or falsified if we already know the correct definition.

no. these are called best working definitions, which have verifiable consequences when combined with broader theories and observations.

Quoting Daemon

This is a philosophy forum.

yes, and that is where counter-examples or logical flaws are made, esp. in the nature and implications of the definition if it were assumed to be true. Apparently, you are not a good philosopher, and/or have little knowledge on the subject. thanks for trying. best wishes....