[3:13:56 AM] Zero: do you /know/ why life /exists/ in reality?
[3:14:05 AM] Zero: it's not because a magic god brought us to life for sure
[3:14:10 AM] Zero: or because of 'soul energy'
[3:14:12 AM] Charles: No we don't know
[3:14:15 AM] Charles: no one knows
[3:14:25 AM] Zero: the concept of soul energy or elan vital or phlogiston is-
[3:14:28 AM] Zero: Vitalism shared with phlogiston the error of encapsulating the mystery as a substance. Fire was mysterious, and the phlogiston theory encapsulated the mystery in a mysterious substance called "phlogiston". Life was a sacred mystery, and vitalism encapsulated the sacred mystery in a mysterious substance called "elan vital". Neither answer helped concentrate the model's probability density—make some outcomes easier to explain than others. The "explanation" just wrapped up the question as a small, hard, opaque black ball.
[3:14:45 AM] Zero: also, people sort of already know where life came from in general terms
[3:14:52 AM] Zero: it's the absolutes that we don't have down yet
[3:14:58 AM] Zero: we don't know WHICH self-replicator came into being first
[3:15:02 AM] Zero: but we know HOW self-replicators came into being
[3:15:13 AM] Charles: we don't know where the actual force of life is created
[3:15:13 AM] Zero: have i given you the nanobot lecture?
[3:15:19 AM] Zero: the actual /what/?
[3:15:30 AM] Charles: I suppose
[3:15:31 AM] Zero: are you seriously suggesting you have a battery of life in your appendix or stomach or something
[3:15:34 AM] Charles: counciousness
[3:15:34 AM] Zero: that keeps you alive
[3:15:38 AM] Zero: and then when you run out you die
[3:15:44 AM] Charles: where does our counciousness come from
[3:15:50 AM] Zero: your body's WAY more complicated than that, dude
[3:16:00 AM] Charles: how do we go from a little ball of cells to a living, concious being
[3:16:18 AM] Zero: okay, i do not have enough time to explain everything to you right now
[3:16:25 AM] Zero: i'll dig up things that explain it
[3:16:29 AM] Zero: you can read it on your own
[3:16:32 AM] Zero: i might give you a summary at the same time
[3:16:43 AM] Charles: no we don't have batteries
[3:16:50 AM] Charles: but we have life
[3:16:59 AM] Charles: without life, we're dead bodies
[3:17:11 AM] Zero: life is not a magical black box, dude
[3:17:15 AM] Zero: life is one of those concepts you can break apart
[3:17:17 AM] Zero: and analyze piece by piece
[3:17:26 AM] Zero: it's not like if you cut open some dude's chest you'll find a screaming void of eldritch horror
[3:17:30 AM] Charles: do you understand life?
[3:17:31 AM] Zero: telling you that YOU SHOULD NOT LOOK HERE
[3:17:37 AM] Zero: no, i don't, because i'm not a biologist
[3:17:47 AM] Zero: that's not the same as saying that there's no such thing as biology
[3:17:51 AM] Zero: have you totally forgotten the wizard discussion we had
[3:17:58 AM] Charles: no
[3:18:00 AM] Zero: you, thinking you do not understand, conclude that NOBODY understands
[3:18:12 AM] Charles: nobody *CURRENTLY* understands
[3:18:17 AM] Zero: life is /not magic/
[3:18:21 AM] Zero: there are systems in our body
[3:18:28 AM] Zero: our cells are nanomachines honed over eons of evolution
[3:18:37 AM] Charles: yes
[3:18:45 AM] Zero: if nobody understands, oh look you have room to become the next archmage
[3:18:49 AM] Zero: go and discover o mighty wizard
[3:18:59 AM] Charles: but why are we *ALIVE*?
[3:19:04 AM] Zero: okay, look
[3:19:06 AM] Charles: this thing that we call "Life"
[3:19:10 AM] Charles: what is it?
[3:19:12 AM] Zero: we're alive because we are REALLY GOOD at cloning ourselves.
[3:19:14 AM] Zero: life is a replicating process.
[3:19:21 AM] Charles: and what started it?
[3:19:24 AM] Zero: life, specifically, is REALLY REALLY advanced biological nanobots.
[3:19:25 AM] Zero: okay, imagine this.
[3:19:27 AM] Zero: earth is barren.
[3:19:32 AM] Zero: the primordial goop.
[3:19:42 AM] Zero: filled with sulfurs and carbons and chains of all kinds of hydrocarbons and all good stuff
[3:19:47 AM] Zero: and THEN
[3:19:51 AM] Zero: an alien spaceship arrives on earth
[3:19:58 AM] Zero: and dumps a bucket of nanobots into the water.
[3:20:09 AM] Zero: these nanobots are REALLY good at finding molecules and building new nanobots out of them
[3:20:11 AM] Zero: they spread like, a plague really
[3:20:16 AM] Zero: and begin filling up the whole damn ocean
[3:20:25 AM] Zero: and then, out of resources, the nanobots start eating each other
[3:20:47 AM] Zero: in a process where nanobots build more nanobots like themselves, the nanobots that build the most and most accurately and fastest and strongest consume the slower nanobots
[3:21:08 AM] Zero: over time, tiny differences like an atom placed wrongly here or there in a nanobot causes change by changing their functional ability to make more nanobots
[3:21:19 AM] Zero: and you end up with a sea of nanobots that get better and better at making more nanobots
[3:21:38 AM] Zero: sometimes a lot of nanobots of the same strand clump together to survive as a colony and start adapting to work as a team
[3:22:06 AM] Zero: some nanobots escape from the high-competition ocean and evolve for land and air survivability as light spores or crawling amphibious nanobots
[3:22:11 AM] Zero: do you see where i am going here
[3:22:17 AM] Zero: /life/ as we know it came from that
[3:22:19 AM] Zero: not alien nanobots
[3:22:25 AM] Zero: but the first random clump of molecules
[3:22:30 AM] Zero: which happened by chance to be able to spin out more of itself
[3:22:37 AM] Zero: and which, due to evolution, got BETTER at spinning more copies of itself
[3:22:43 AM] Zero: and got better at defending itself from other copies of itself
[3:22:51 AM] Zero: that is ALL life is
[3:22:57 AM] Zero: optimized reproduction over generations
[3:23:03 AM] Zero: if you don't optimize for reproduction you get shunted away by creatures that do
[3:23:09 AM] Zero: as they out-reproduce you
[3:23:14 AM] Zero: http://wiki.lesswrong.com/wiki/Evolution
[3:23:29 AM] Charles: I think I was making an analogy out of this and kinda failed. The concept of life is what the aspect of life in shadowm's canon is about. but us, in real life, don't have that. we have evolution, not magical gods
[3:23:44 AM] Zero: and yes it is possible to /create/ life
[3:23:54 AM] Zero: we might create life in the future with better bioengineering know-how
[3:23:58 AM] Zero: but even that is not magical life powers
[3:24:08 AM] Zero: the closest you get to 'magical souls' is... an MMO, really
[3:24:27 AM] Charles: but the point i was making is, do we really know what started the assembly lines? what created the first "nanobot"?
[3:24:27 AM] Zero: real humans, dropped into a fantasy universe with fake static NPCs, allowed to live actual human lives without having any of th ehuman neuromachinery in the actual program or characters
[3:24:33 AM] Zero: we don't
[3:24:36 AM] Zero: it COULD have been aliens
[3:24:38 AM] Zero: it COULD have been chance
[3:24:43 AM] Zero: it has a very very infinitesimal chance of being god
[3:24:58 AM] Charles: how did the universe go from a big bang to being filled with "life"
[3:24:59 AM] Zero: but for people who think that god created humans out of thin air exactly the way we are- that's REALLY wrong.
[3:25:12 AM] Zero: the big bang is how all the MATTER got here.
[3:25:18 AM] Zero: from there it's a problem of turning matter into nanobots.
[3:25:25 AM] Charles: how did it go from raw periodid table elements to life
[3:25:28 AM] Zero: and from there it's turning nanobots into really advanced complicated nanobots.
[3:25:41 AM] Charles: how did those combine to make a "nanobot"
[3:25:45 AM] Zero: okay, look, you can LOOK at viruses
[3:25:46 AM] Zero: really really simple ones
[3:25:51 AM] Zero: you can break them apart like legoes
[3:25:56 AM] Zero: pick each atom off individually
[3:26:00 AM] Zero: THAT is how you go from raw elements to life
[3:26:06 AM] Zero: well, not even that
[3:26:11 AM] Zero: the first replicator had to be WAY simpler than viruses
[3:26:20 AM] Zero: probably just the internal genetic core, or a ridiculously generic version of it
[3:26:36 AM] Zero: you can build viruses in conway's game of life, you know
[3:26:41 AM] Charles: so life is a reaction between elements
[3:26:44 AM] Zero: like, you can build self-reassembling factories that spit out more of themselves
[3:26:48 AM] Charles: that somehow...reacted more
[3:26:55 AM] Zero: what do you mean 'reacted more'
[3:26:55 AM] Charles: and eventually ended up with...us
[3:27:02 AM] Zero: life is an /emergent process/ of physics
[3:27:17 AM] Zero: the economy is an emergent process of human merchanting and civilization
[3:27:25 AM] Zero: that doesn't mean that somewhere there was money that 'reacted more'
[3:27:29 AM] Zero: it's just what HAPPENED
[3:27:34 AM] Charles: did the way to make life exist at the big bang?
[3:27:40 AM] Charles: was it part of reality?
[3:27:43 AM] Zero: i don't think you /understand/
[3:27:48 AM] Zero: there is NO DIFFERENCE between life and physics
[3:27:51 AM] Zero: life is a SUBSET of physics
[3:27:58 AM] Zero: calculus is a SUBSET of all possible mathematics
[3:28:04 AM] Zero: life runs on physics
[3:28:14 AM] Zero: every single nanomachine in our biological bodies follows the laws of physics
[3:28:21 AM] Zero: break it down as much as you want you won't find any life magic anywhere in the pieces
[3:28:31 AM] Zero: the closest thing to 'life magic' is this thing called negentropy
[3:28:38 AM] Zero: it's what keeps our universe from heat death
[3:28:44 AM] Zero: it is also finite and disappears with time
[3:28:50 AM] Zero: in classic terms it's called /order/
[3:28:54 AM] Zero: our bodies maintain order by eating items for energy
[3:29:00 AM] Zero: and using the energy to repair damage
[3:29:03 AM] Zero: that's why you don't /decay/
[3:29:04 AM] Zero: like a corpse