Proto-Life

In this blog, I introduce two categories of "life" that may be regarded as controversial or "merely" a matter of definition. "Supermind" is at the "high" end. At the low, primitive, "old" end is "proto-life" - life before (or simply without) DNA ("before" being evolutionary speculation I avoid).

Here is a good presentation on work on "proto-life". I'll try to add more examples as I come across them.

Current work in this field can be regarded as an "existence proof": if there is any way we can make "life" out of non-living molecules, there may be others, one of which presumably actually happened. For my purposes, it's sufficient to see how such systems are possible, at least in theory. I leave the discovery of actual evolutionary processes to others. I avoid using "evolutionary fairy dust" to support the ideas put forward here. This blog does not put forward or support any particular theory about the sequence of events or mechanism of actual evolution here on Earth.

Among serious researchers in the field, "proto-life" is expected to exist in an environment (which can be seen as part of the proto-life system) which is:

• Not in equilibrium - the possibility of change is key;
• Liquid - hard for us to imagine life without some possibility of movement, but I'm not sure about this one ...
• Allowing making and breaking of chemical bonds - "metabolism"

For my purposes, it's sufficient to notice that the programming of this system - the rules that make it do what it does - are physical and chemical. There is no "abstraction" of the rules into some other medium like DNA. It's all chemistry and physics. On the other hand, the laws of physics and chemistry depend on something even deeper, which emerges again at the "top" of the pyramid in the supermind.

This is the subtle point, worth careful consideration. The "laws" of physics and chemistry are known to the supermind. They are a special case of "knowledge" that restricts (or should restrict) the "ideas" that make up the supermind. This means that each level of "mind" contains all the others below it. Another way of seeing it is that the supermind can't act in the world in ways that violate the laws of physics and chemistry.

As soon as we move "up" the pyramid of complexity to the DNA level, there is a separation between the "stuff" of the organism and the "stuff" of the "program" or guiding "software". DNA is a 4-letter code that just happens to be implemented in a huge molecule, but it is the code that matters. At the DNA level and levels above it, the "program" is abstract - "pure" information. It is also, interestingly, a "proto-language" that "talks" mainly about proteins. "Up" the pyramid a different kind of language will emerge that "talks" about a much wider range of things.

"Godel Escher Bach" is the book that made Hofstader famous.  Along the way to illustrating his central point (Godel's Theorem), the book this exposes the absurdity of computer intelligence simply by imagining that we switch the medium or "substrate" of the program from electronics to an ordinary book. He imagined, for example, someone using a huge rule book to translate Engish to Chinese by rote, then asking if this person (or the rulebooks)  "understood" Chinese. Somehow, when you think of the program running on a computer, there is a temptation to answer "yes" to this question. To Hofstadter, we owe the insight that the "substrate" of the "program" matters but not in the way we thought.

In the case of "proto-life", we can, indeed, separate the "meaning" of the "program" from the substrate. This is akin to Dennett's idea of a design without a designer. The "designer" is hidden in the "laws of physics" or, as the ancients would have put it, the "Tao". But, as they would have put it, there is danger in confusing talk about the Tao (even the "math") with the Tao itself. Broadly speaking, "proto-life" seems to emerge directly from the "Tao" with no programming needed.