No Stupid Questions
No such thing. Ask away!
!nostupidquestions is a community dedicated to being helpful and answering each others' questions on various topics.
The rules for posting and commenting, besides the rules defined here for lemmy.world, are as follows:
Rules (interactive)
Rule 1- All posts must be legitimate questions. All post titles must include a question.
All posts must be legitimate questions, and all post titles must include a question. Questions that are joke or trolling questions, memes, song lyrics as title, etc. are not allowed here. See Rule 6 for all exceptions.
Rule 2- Your question subject cannot be illegal or NSFW material.
Your question subject cannot be illegal or NSFW material. You will be warned first, banned second.
Rule 3- Do not seek mental, medical and professional help here.
Do not seek mental, medical and professional help here. Breaking this rule will not get you or your post removed, but it will put you at risk, and possibly in danger.
Rule 4- No self promotion or upvote-farming of any kind.
That's it.
Rule 5- No baiting or sealioning or promoting an agenda.
Questions which, instead of being of an innocuous nature, are specifically intended (based on reports and in the opinion of our crack moderation team) to bait users into ideological wars on charged political topics will be removed and the authors warned - or banned - depending on severity.
Rule 6- Regarding META posts and joke questions.
Provided it is about the community itself, you may post non-question posts using the [META] tag on your post title.
On fridays, you are allowed to post meme and troll questions, on the condition that it's in text format only, and conforms with our other rules. These posts MUST include the [NSQ Friday] tag in their title.
If you post a serious question on friday and are looking only for legitimate answers, then please include the [Serious] tag on your post. Irrelevant replies will then be removed by moderators.
Rule 7- You can't intentionally annoy, mock, or harass other members.
If you intentionally annoy, mock, harass, or discriminate against any individual member, you will be removed.
Likewise, if you are a member, sympathiser or a resemblant of a movement that is known to largely hate, mock, discriminate against, and/or want to take lives of a group of people, and you were provably vocal about your hate, then you will be banned on sight.
Rule 8- All comments should try to stay relevant to their parent content.
Rule 9- Reposts from other platforms are not allowed.
Let everyone have their own content.
Rule 10- Majority of bots aren't allowed to participate here. This includes using AI responses and summaries.
Credits
Our breathtaking icon was bestowed upon us by @Cevilia!
The greatest banner of all time: by @TheOneWithTheHair!
view the rest of the comments
The architect and accidental inspiration for the idea of Object Oriented Programming, Christopher Alexander has some fascinating ideas on this subjet even if they lack scientific rigor.
The essence of his ideas, which I agree with (while recognizing there isn't any scientific rigor to disprove or prove his ideas yet) is that life is not a property of a body that the body either possesses or does not. Life is a pattern of arrangement of material in space, and Christopher to his credit is as precise about this as he can be from the lens of architecture. He defines several aspects to "living" architecture (which he means quite literally he... in a fascinating way that is actually kind of hard to argue against) such as deep interlock between borders, good negative space, imperfect but stable repetition, detail at different scale levels, centers that make other centers more vibrant in a work of art rather than draw all the focus etc....
All this to say, I think life must be an analog value, the universe doesn't have binary aspects to bodies where they are either ARE or ARE NOT something unless you are talking really fundamental physics and even then... and I agree then that life is a set of patterns that were and are woven together from a prexisting diversity and dynamism that opened the door to the genesis of what we would confidently call life.
Consider some recent research on categorizing all of the minerals on earth and how surprising or perhaps unsurprising it is that life has massively increased the diversity of geologic minerals on earth, and this is a two way street, the geologic diversity from active plate tectonics on earth provided the necessary conditions for life to form.
https://www.quantamagazine.org/life-helps-make-almost-half-of-all-minerals-20220701/
All of this leads me to think.. Life isn't a thing it is a style that things can have. Intelligence then.. is just the idea of life made meta and integrated into conscious action by the body that perceivees instinctually that it is alive.
Wow, I didn’t know what. Life probably is an “analog value”, since things like viruses exist where they don’t perfectly slot into our method of categorizing what is and isn’t life. This might be a question that will be asked until the end of time, what is life really?
Yes but I think Life is a question, and it can be answered by many different methods some of which are very difficult to prove if they fully answer the question or not.. or impossible to prove at this moment.
Here is a blog post that I think does a good job of describing Christopher Alexander's (he says non-exhaustive and that the number of properties isn't overly special, these can be divided or smushed together into more or less rules depending on your perspective) properties of things that have life.
https://iamronen.com/blog/2018/03/24/christopher-alexander-the-fifteen-properties-in-nature/
Don't treat this as pseudo-science trying to masquerade as science, treat this as a very intelligent architect (as in building architect) making some very compelling points through the lens of art in a way that I think has scientific implications once people figure out how better to translate these ideas into hypotheses that can be tested and such.