Universal Perfection

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/*DNAunion*/ One of my points, which I need to support, is that this universe is fine tuned for life whether or not trillions of trillions of other universes exist. Having a vast ensemble of universes is a potential explanation for the fine tuning we observe: it doesnt remove the fact of fine tuning.

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Rei: The problem with that is that you have absolutely no evidence that other rulesets producing life is not rare. You're arguing from statistics, where your sample size is equal to 1 - *and*, that 1 sample is in favor of life. It's a ridiculous argument.

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/*DNAunion*/ LOL!!! You know what’s way more ridiculous — ARGUING FROM A SAMPLE SIZE OF 0! And that’s what you are doing!! ROTFLMAO!!

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Rei: If I was testing the probabilities of rockets blowing up on launch, someone handed me a single rocket that they had built, and it launched, would I conclude that this was the only type of rocket that can fly and not blow up on launch?

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/*DNAunion*/ A flawed analogy as it does not parallel the discussion.Is carbon and oxygen required for life? Unlike your analogy suggests, I am not handing you just a single cat and saying, Yep. Nor am I handing you just a litter of cats and saying, Yep. In fact, I am not handing you just a whole population of cats and saying, Yep. Let’s go farther...I am not handing you just a species of cat and saying, Yep. Nope, I am handing trillions of organisms that belong to a multitude of groups as diverse as humans, vines, cacti, snakes, seastars, fruit flies, yeast, and bacteria, and saying, All of these living organisms — and all others known — require carbon and oxygen.[This message has been edited by DNAunion, 11-02-2003]

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Crashfrog: I think you're acting like life on Earth is all the life that exists.

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/*DNAunion*/ You woulnd't if you carefully read all of my posts in this thread.

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Crashfrog: Sure, it's all the life that we know exists, but we don't know that it doesn't exist anywhere else, and we don't know how it exists, and the laws of physics suggest that [life] could exist based on other chemistries.

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/*DNAunion*/ Please give details.

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Crashfrog: ... simply because all the life we know of is based on a certain chemistry - which by the way should be obvious, given that all life forms are decended from the same organism

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/*DNAunion*/ Actually, it's not obvious at all, considering the assumptions "she" uses.If another form of life is likely, then why haven't we found that other form of life here on Earth? Why have we found only the form of life that requires carbon and oxygen? See, it's not obvious: there needs to be an explanation. And "it's life we have to imagine, and it would be in a hypothetical universe with bizarre laws" is hardly a convincing explanation.[This message has been edited by DNAunion, 11-02-2003]

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/*DNAunion*/ I already have [checked out the game of life]. It is an unimpressive computer game that uses a two-dimensional array to represent the positions of organisms with some rules for the creation and deletion of organisms based on neighboring cells in the matrix; once the correct rules were found and a correct starting setup used, some figures would amazingly reappear throughout a run of the program. The organisms dont self-replicate: they are poofed into existence with a single line of code. Its not even the organisms that amazingly reappear, but shapes. Finally, theres not even any self-replication of shapes: in fact, theres no self-replication in the system at all.

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Rei: There are no "correct rules".

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/*DNAunion*/ That appears to be an assertion that I was wrong in my statements: once the correct rules were found and a correct starting setup used, some figures would amazingly reappear throughout a run of the program. If so, you are wrong and I am right, as Conway himself states.

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The hardest step turned out to be finding a suitable two-dimensional system to study. Although such systems operate on an infinite plane, studying them involves observing some limited finite section of the plane. Conway's research group used Go boards to develop Life, and in order to be able to study a system it was necessary that populations did not tend to explode and race off the board. This meant they had to impose some sort of death rule on the system. And of course a system would have to have sufficiently interesting behaviour in order to have any chance of being a universal system, so it was equally important that populations did not usually die out; hence, the birth rule.

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"We played with all sorts of rules, studying their effects, and seeing what happened" Conway says. "Either things tended to explode in population tremendously, or else they tended to die off. So it became this question, how can you adjust the relative strengths of the birth and death rules so [that for a typical population] there is a fair probability that they won't die off, and that it doesn't grow linearly either." The real difficulty in finding a suitable system was finding the right relative strengths of these rules in order for the system to be both interesting enough to study and stable enough to live with.

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Over two years of tea and coffee breaks Conway and a group of graduate students and colleagues experimented with the life and death rules. And when they arrived at the set of rules that became Life, they quickly stopped tinkering. (bold emphasis added, Games, Life and the Game of Life | plus.maths.org)

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/*DNAunion*/ Let's see where else you were wrong.

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Rei: I'm guessing that you just looked up Conway's Game of Life before writing your last post.

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/*DNAunion*/ You’re wrong. I checked the game of life out several years ago (I was going off the top of my head with my original comments: I’ve lost my personal notes on this).[This message has been edited by DNAunion, 11-02-2003]

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/*DNAunion*/ Okay, so what other items in the Universe possess the properties of carbon and oxygen that allow for life?

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Rei: /*Pretentious Code Brackets*/ Any computational system can ...

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/*DNAunion*/ So are you claiming that an abacus is alive?!?!?!? What about our PCs?!?!?!?I'd guess that your statement relies heavily upon CAN, as is CAN IN PRINCIPAL.

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Rei: The key concerning carbon here is the ability to form complex chemicals of different forms. ... In fact, silicon too can form long chains, just not as readily as carbon.

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/*DNAunion*/ Silicon has several properties that restrict it from serving as a basis for life.1) Unlike carbon, silicon does not readily form double or triple bonds.2) Unlike carbon, silicon does not readily form long, stable chains.3) Unlike carbon, silicon does not readily form stable rings.4) Unlike carbon, silicon adorned only with hydrogen atoms will spontaneously burst into flames if exposed to oxygen.5) Unlike carbon, silicon tends to combine mostly with oxygen; furthermore, these compounds are not molecules (unlike the main compounds formed from carbon).6) Unlike carbon, silicon (in its most common form) tends to bind with metallic cations to form inorganic minerals.But of course, this shows one problem with your line of argument. Silicon, you claim, has properties of carbon that allow for life, and life is not restricted to carbon. So where are your examples of silicon life? Why haven't we found any on Earth? After all, silicon is the second most abundant element in the Earth's crust.

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/*DNAUnion*/ You woulnd't if you carefully read all of my posts in this thread.

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crashfrog: I'm sorry you'll have to point out where you've talked about life on other planets. As far as I've read you've talked about all the life we can observe, and as far as I know, all that life is on Earth. Can you point out where you've said anything about life on other planets?

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/*DNAunion*/ That’s not what I have to point out. Read these previous statements from me in this thread, paying special attention to the part I’ve bolded this time.

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/*DNAunion*/ Okay, so what other items in the Universe possess the properties of carbon and oxygen that allow for life? None. So all empirical evidence we have shows that both carbon and oxygen are required for life.

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Once again, your argument is not based on empirical evidence, but on imagination/speculation.

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PS: I am not claiming "I am right and you are wrong": we don't know which position is actually true. However, based on repeatable, testable, empirical observations to date, my position is supported while yours is not.

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/*DNAunion*/ In the past, I have frequently used arguments that assume there is life out there unlike our own. But I understand that when I do so, I leave the realm of the empirically based and move into the realm of unsupported speculation.

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/*DNAunion*/ If another form of life is likely, then why haven't we found that other form of life here on Earth? Why have we found only the form of life that requires carbon and oxygen? See, it's not obvious: there needs to be an explanation. And "it's life we have to imagine, and it would be in a hypothetical universe with bizarre laws" is hardly a convincing explanation.

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Crashfrog: Seriously? You're seriously asking this? Like, you seriously don't know?

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/*DNAunion*/ No silly. Like, I am pointing out problems with your argument. As you will see, your following counter fails.

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Crashfrog: I would have thought it would be obvious. The reason we don't see life based on those chemisties on Earth is because oxygen-carbon chemistry won. There's no way life based on those chemistries could gain a foothold on an Earth filled with carbon life. The carbon-oxygen biome is not compatible with that kind of life.

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Basically you can't mix chemistries. If we find life based on different chemistry, it'll be the only chemistry on that planet.

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/*DNAunion*/ Wrong. The general position you are attempting to express (which dates back to Darwin, at least) deals with why only one form of life AS WE KNOW IT exists on Earth. Once you get a carbon-based life form well established any new carbon-based upstarts would be quickly consumed because they would be food for the established life, or they would become extinct because they couldn’t compete with the well established, already well adapted, life forms for the shared organic resources.But, both you and Rei have put silicon chemistry forward as a potential life form. So why couldn’t a silicon based life form live side by side here on Earth with one based on carbon? Since they use different elements to maintain themselves and to reproduce — carbon vs. silicon - there would be no competition between the life forms for their core element: no competition implies no winner.So you still need to explain further why we haven’t found some alternate form of life here on Earth, since, as some claim, it could be based on silicon and otherwise differ from LAWKI.It’s fun to see people try to support their unsupported speculationsisn’t it :-)[This message has been edited by DNAunion, 11-03-2003]

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[someone]: Please desist.

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/*DNAunion*/ No.[This message has been edited by DNAunion, 11-03-2003]

/*DNAunion*/ Thumbs up to NosyNed and the administrator.Let’s see how the reasonable moderator at another site ruled about this very thing a few months ago when others at that site whined.

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DNAunion: That some of you guys are "confused" or "annoyed" by my simply labeling statements with their owner is, quite frankly, not my problem. I will continue to post the way I want to: it is neither illegal, immoral, unethical, disingenuous, insulting, derogatory, inflammatory, etc., and breaks no board rules.

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sans-hubris [moderator]: I completely agree with you on this DNA. As weird as [your method] seems to me, I'm not going to condemn you for posting that way. You're not causing any harm or being offensive (in fact you've posted a number of insightful comments.) Post how you want, as long as you abide by the board's rules." (http://coderforums.com/showthread.php?s=&threadid=1893)

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/*DNAunion*/ Pretty much along the lines of what this forum's administrator stated.Before I read the above post by the administrator, I checked this forum’s rules (http:///WebPages/ForumRules.html) and saw that there is NOTHING in them that says one can’t explicitly label statements, including their own, with their owners (and it would be ridiculous to make such a rule). So at this forum too I am breaking no rules by labeling statements the way I do.However, those who have sidetracked this thread’s discussion by arguing against my perfectly legal documentation style (such as Mr Frank) ARE going against a forum rule, rule #1:

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1. Please stay on topic for a thread. Open a new thread for new topics.

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/*DNAunion*/ So let's hope this sidetracking issue is dropped and we get back to the real discussion.[This message has been edited by DNAunion, 11-03-2003]

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/*DNAunion*/ Since [according to your guys’ speculation these hypothetical organisms would] use different elements to maintain themselves and to reproduce — carbon vs. silicon - there would be no competition between the life forms for their core element: no competition implies no winner.

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Crashfrog: Duh. You said it yourself, in a post to Rei. (Possibly in another thread, now that I think about it.) You mentioned that silicon-hydrogen molecules would be disasterous in the presence of oxygen.

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/*DNAunion*/ Wait a tick...who says that life MUST have molecules saturated with hydrogen??? Surely not you guys!?You guys have been saying that life doesn’t need carbon, even though carbon is the fundamental element of the chemistry of all life forms known, and can otherwise differ from life-as-we-know-it, so it’s rather out of line with your guys’ overall stance to now claim that life can’t exist without the main element being saturated with hydrogen. As one example, why can’t your guys’ hypothetical life-as-we-don’t-know-it be based on silicon, oxygen, and chlorine? Or some other set of elements?One problem with your guys’ position is that is rests upon the assumption that a life form totally unlike life-as-we-know-it can exist, yet we see no evidence whatsoever of any alternate form of life here on Earth (or in any samples we’ve retrieved or received from other bodies in our solar system). If there are (at least) two fundamentally and distinctly different life forms, then there should be no competition between them and one should not drive the other to extinction, and therefore, we should find evidence of that other life form (either here on Earth, or in meteorites, etc.). But we don’t.ABSENCE OF EVIDENCE IS EVIDENCE OF ABSENCE. Of course the evidence may point to the wrong conclusion, but at least I have two (related) pieces of evidence supporting my current position:1) All of the millions of various organisms examined to date are based on the same general chemistry (biochemistry involving nucleic acids, proteins, etc.). This supports (but obviously does not "prove") the position that all life is based on biochemistry as we know it.2) No examples of life not based on the kind of general chemistry referenced in (1) have been found. This supports (but obviously does not "prove") the position that life can’t be based on any chemistry except for biochemistry as we know it.

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Crashfrog: Carbon biomes release oxygen, as we observe. The oxygen, therefore, rules out the possibility of silicon based life.

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/*DNAunion*/ Why? Silicon combines quite well with oxygen, so silicon and oxygen work well together. You just won’t have too much luck forming long silicon chains that are saturated with hydrogen; but hey, who says life MUST have long saturated chains???? Surely not you guys!?

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Crashfrog: Carbon-based life isn't compatible with silicon-based life, ergo we only see one or the other.

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/*DNAunion*/ Sorry, but you have not demonstrated your premise (Carbon-based life isn’t compatible with silicon-based life): therefore, your conclusion (ergo we only see one or the other) does not follow and shouldn’t be trusted.

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Crashfrog: Silicon based life could exist,

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/*DNAunion*/ An unsupported assertion.

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Crashfrog: .. it just couldn't exist where carbon life already had a foothold.

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/*DNAunion*/ A position you only THINK you’ve demonstrated.[This message has been edited by DNAunion, 11-03-2003]

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Rei: You know, I personally don't care what Conway himself had to say about the issue.

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/*DNAunion*/ Well of course you don’t, because what Conway — the inventor of the game of life — said matches what I said.

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Rei: I seriously recommend that you try plugging in random rulesets from generalized automata before you make this claim.

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/*DNAunion*/ I already supported the few claims I made about the game of life — the one example that you offered. The way I see it, I'm done.You must be reading more into my statements than is actually there, or, you must be trying to drag this discussion off onto a tangent that I simply am not all that interested in.

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Rei: Is that the only commentary you had? I raised half a dozen points in my post, and you barely replied.

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/*DNAunion*/ I addressed what I cared to. You are dragging the discussion off onto a tangent and there is no requirement for me to follow along on a leash.You are moving from the physical universal and its actual life and the real chemistry involved, to the cyberworld of hypothetical organisms that are poofed into existence by programmers based on rules they construct and where in principle claims are made based on hypothetical infinite resources.By the way, have you taken time to consider all of the ramifications of your game of life and other cellular automata? What all do they model? These organisms live in their own little universe that has its own laws that govern the workings. Who created the universe those organisms live in? Who established the laws of nature in that universes? A religious person (not me) could easily claim that cellular automata model a God — an all-powerful, extra-dimensional being that exists outside of the universe, who is invisible and undetectable, and who fined tuned the universe to allow for life to arise and persist by setting up very specific initial conditions and also by laying down specific laws that govern the day-to-day workings of the universe, and who then breathed life into that universe. A double-edged sword, I guess.[This message has been edited by DNAunion, 11-03-2003]

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Crashfrog: Ok, it begins to get a little clearer -

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/*DNAunion*/ PS: I am not claiming "I am right and you are wrong": we don't know which position is actually true.
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- you're just setting up a false dichotomy.

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/*DNAunion*/ Apparently it’s not crystal clear to you yet: there is no false dichotomy.Simply put, either:1) Life can only be based on the kind of biochemistry we know ofor2) Life can be based on a kind of chemistry other than that referenced in (1)That is a true dichotomy. The question is, which is correct? The truth is, we don’t know (which my statement you quoted indicates). All we can do is provide evidence and logic to come to a tentative conclusion.You guys are asserting (2) is correct, without having any real evidence (i.e., it’s all unsupported speculation). I am saying that all direct observations to date support (1), but am doing so without claiming that (1) is surely correct (again, which my statement you quoted indicates).

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Crashfrog: I fail to see why these positions can't both be correct.

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/*DNAunion*/ The two positions you stated COULD BE, POSSIBLY. But the actual two positions can’t both be true.

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Crashfrog: If all possibilities lead to some form of life, in any imaginable sense, then you can hardly say we're "fine-tuned" for life, can you?

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/*DNAunion*/ And if all birds can fly, and penguins are birds, then you can hardly say that penguins can’t fly, can you? Conclusions not based on true premises cannot be trusted.

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Crashfrog: It sounds to me like we're both doing a fair bit of speculation. The difference is Rei's speculation (not trying to eliminate myself from the discussion here, but rather to avoid taking credit for Rei's work in this discussion) could be confirmed by potential observations in other areas of the universe.

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/*DNAunion*/ Yes, the position that life-not-as-we-know-it exist is IN PRINCIPLE verifiable: it can’t be done yet, and may never be able to be done...but IN PRINCIPLE, it could be.

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Crashfrog: Your speculation of fine-tuning, however, can never be confirmed or denied unless we can peek into other universes.

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/*DNAunion*/ Based on the supported (but not proven) assumption that life is restricted to LAWKI, the Universe is fine-tuned for life. For example, make the strong force a few percent stronger or weaker and the Universe is no longer compatible with life. Same goes for similar changes in the strengths of the weak force, the gravitational force, or the electromagnetic force. Even though the four forces range over approximately 40 orders of magnitude, a small (< 5%?) change in any one of them means no life.Perhaps you could restate your commentt so I know exactly what you mean.[This message has been edited by DNAunion, 11-03-2003]

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Rei: /*Pretentious Code Brackets*/

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Rei: /*Pretentious Code Brackets*/

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Rei: /*Pretentious Code Brackets*/

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Rei: /*Pretentious Code Brackets*/

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Rei: /*Pretentious Code Brackets*/

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Rei: /*Pretentious Code Brackets*/

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/*DNAunion*/ Rei, would mind explaining to us how code brackets themselves can be pretentious?

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/*DNAunion*/ Simply put, either:
1) Life can only be based on the kind of biochemistry we know of

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or

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2) Life can be based on a kind of chemistry other than that referenced in (1)

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Crashfrog: Yes, that's the true dichotomy.

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/*DNAunion*/ Yes, and that's the one I've been using all along.So why did you disingenuously charge me with creating a false dichotomy? Oh, I see, just an attempt by you to score some rhetoric points.

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Crashfrog: The problem is, the fact that we observe that all the life on one little planet in a corner of the big, big universe has only one kind of life is not evidence for number 1.

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/*DNAunion*/ Wrong. It is evidence for (1). What it isn’t is sufficient evidence to prove (1) or to rule out (2).

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Crashfrog: In the meantime it would seem reasonable to go with the assumption that doesn't assume an undiscovered law of chemistry; number 2.

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/*DNAunion*/ Wrong. In the meantime, it would seem reasonable to go with one that all the empirical evidence to date supports. That makes more sense than going with the one that goes against all current empirical observations, and which lacks any support of its own, which suggests it may be wrong (absence of evidence is evidence of absence).

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/*DNAunion*/ Based on the supported (but not proven) assumption that life is restricted to LAWKI, the Universe is fine-tuned for life.

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Crashfrog: But such a position can't even be supported.

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/*DNAunion*/ LOL! And you can support yours? Nope. You are arguing from a sample size of 0...much worse off than I am.[This message has been edited by DNAunion, 11-04-2003]

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MrJack: While Lawki is almost certainly not the only life that can be (as we are increasingly discovering; hyperthermophiles and all that),...

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/*DNAunion*/ Hyperthermophiles are "life as we know it". They are based on organic compounds/biochemistry, using DNA to store their genetic information, proteins to catalyze metabolic reactions, etc.[This message has been edited by DNAunion, 11-04-2003]