The nature and origin of life

This article about the ideas of Paul Davies appeared in The Guardian: 'I predict a great revolution': inside the struggle to define life - I suspect it might please one stephenw of this parish.

To understand what bothers Davies, consider a hypothetical device: a life meter. Wave it over a sterile rock and the dial stays at zero. Wave it over a purring cat and it swings over to 100. But what if you dunked it in the primordial soup, or held it over a dying person? At what point does complex chemistry become life, and when does life revert to mere matter? Between an atom and an amoeba lies something profound and perplexing.

[Laird]

Information realism and Paul Davies... stephenw must be in heaven.

Re the "life meter": increasingly, I've been wondering how easy it is to disentangle "life", "consciousness", "will", and "intelligence". I get that we can do it to some extent, but I'm wondering whether possibly the first implies the final three.

I have read Paul Davies, admittedly quite a number of years ago. While I find what he said interesting, it hasn't filled me with any sense that this is someone who will find the answers.

From the Guardian article,

Davies believes that life will turn out to bear telltale patterns of information processing that distinguish it from non-life. Few people would argue that a computer is alive no matter how the ones and zeroes zip around inside it. What Davies suspects is that life exploits, and arises from, particular patterns of information flow.

Aside from the hubris of favouring whatever is the current technology du jour, which is inevitably a short-sighted approach, there is the old 'one free miracle' of emergence there too.


Davies says,

But if we live in a universe in which the emergence of life is built into it in a fundamental way then we can feel more at home in the universe.

That seems to raise more questions than answers. Is he suggesting that the universe just happens to be one among the multiplicity of universes which happens to favour life, or is he meaning something else?

This article about the ideas of Paul Davies appeared in The Guardian: 'I predict a great revolution': inside the struggle to define life - I suspect it might please one stephenw of this parish.

“The basic hypothesis is this,” Davies says. “We have fundamental laws of information that bring life into being from an incoherent mish-mash of chemicals. The remarkable properties we associate with life are not going to come about by accident.”

The proposal takes some unpacking. Davies believes that the laws of nature as we know them today are insufficient to explain what life is and how it came about. We need to find new laws, he says, or at least new principles, which describe how information courses around living creatures. Those rules may not only nail down what life is, but actively favour its emergence.

I have several problems with this, starting with the implication that the new information laws somehow dictate that nonliving chemicals must just naturally come together to form the first living organisms. That is what it boils down to. I guess this suggestion would be something a little like the way all the information in the periodic table of elements including the atomic structures of all the elements has basically been incorporated into the laws of physics. Unfortunately for this hope for "spontaneous generation", very little in results have come out so far from generations of experiments trying just to create a few amino acids much less RNAs and DNA and something with the function of ribosomes.

Second is the "boggle factor" of the sheer magnitude of the complex specified information that would have to be somehow embedded in the new information laws or principles of nature that Davies is talking about. This information incorporated in these new laws would have to specify the detailed structure of the first organisms including the structure of DNA. 

The worst problem is that it seems that Davies isn't really solving the mystery after all, he is just "kicking the can down the road" so to speak. The origin of this massive amount of complex specified information needed to construct the first living organisms is just transferred to whatever it was that produced these information laws in the first place. This information still needed to come from somewhere - it still needs an origin story.

It is very hard to get an agent or agents completely out of the explanatory chain, as hard as materialists try. 

It occurs to me that this actually just revisits the same problem that materialists have always had in explaining the origin of the periodic table and all the intricate laws of physics that it embodies.

The worst problem is that it seems that Davies isn't really solving the mystery after all, he is just "kicking the can down the road" so to speak. The origin of this massive amount of complex specified information to construct the first living organisms is just transferred to whatever is was that produced these information laws in the first place. 

It is very hard to get an agent or agents out of the explanatory chain, as hard as materialists try. 

I tend to agree. On reading the article it still seemed to me to be saying that "it just happens to be that way". Something must organise the information which is used to direct the process - whatever the process - right?