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From: rmw@netcom.com (Richard M. Weinapple)
Subject: Re: Star Life (was Re: Randomness is a human concept (was Re:
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Date: Thu, 1 Dec 1994 01:23:05 GMT
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Hans Moravec (hpm@cs.cmu.edu) wrote:
: warrl@pnw.net (Don Edwards):
: >                      The essence of life is a structure that is
: >capable of duplicating itself using nearby "stuff".  Thus, we have
: >no reason to believe that life of *any* kind can exist in the
: >critical portion of a star where nuclear properties are more important
: >than chemical properties.

: I can think of ways.  The most prosaic involves complexly structured
: plasmas shaped by and shaping intense, complex, self-generated
: magnetic fields.  Magnetic confinement fusion works with simple
: versions of this idea.  Arthur Clarke once wrote a story about a
: plasma creature of this type ejected from the sun during a solar flare
: (and what would happen if the main body of such creatures in the sun
: decided someday to reach out and wipe off the scum growing on the
: planets).
<snip>
: This idea relates to Hal Finney's question on comp.ai.philosophy about
: whether computational complexity can be used to rule out certain
: interpretations of activity as mind, for instance seeing a rock as a
: simulation of a complex world containing intelligent minds by mapping
: the rock's thermal motions into the states of such a world via an
: astronomical lookup table.  The frequency creatures in the sun, and we
: creatures in conventional space, can't see each other without such a
: huge interpretation process.  But, such a huge interpretation is
: necessary only for we space creatures and they frequency creatures to
: interact.  It's not necessary if we each simply want to live out our
: own lives in our respective domains.  The complexity question only
: addresses how far apart we and the frequency creatures are.  Maybe
: they are too far away, in a complexity metric, from us to ever
: interact with them.  But that doesn't mean they don't exist.  And who
: knows, maybe someday we will be able to build a Fourier mapping device
: that allows us to image them, and vice versa.

A fascinating set of ideas.  I should get over to comp.ai.philsophy more
often.  A question arises for me:  To my mind, one of the most important
aspects of a living being is its relationship to other such beings,
and indeed to its environment as a whole.  What we consider
conventional life is virtually defined by the flow of matter, energy
and information both inward and outward.  (No man is an island,
and all that...)

(BTW, I'm guessing that part of the reason our attempts at AI
haven't been as successful as we'd like, is the incredibly small
sensory (input) and output bandwidth we've been able to build so
far.  Consider just how much matter, energy and information a human
being excretes and absorbs via the skin alone!)

Would you care to expound not only on the structure of the "plasma"
and "rock" beings, but on their interaction with their environment?
As you described them they seem somewhat more self-contained than I
would normally require to feel I was in the presence of life.
In other words, have you thought much about what these guys
might eat for dinner, or what they'd have to say to each other?

Richard
