Newsgroups: comp.ai.alife
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From: mwtilden@math.uwaterloo.ca (Mark W. Tilden)
Subject: Re: Stumbled across new definition for life...
Message-ID: <Cvu7n9.21A@undergrad.math.uwaterloo.ca>
Summary: yearg.
Keywords: It's alive i tell you!
Sender: mwtilden@lanl.gov
Nntp-Posting-Host: math.uwaterloo.ca
Organization: Los Alamos National Labs, Physics Division.
References: lots
Date: Fri, 9 Sep 1994 00:49:57 GMT
Lines: 67


In my opinion, Life is that which moves for its own purposes.  Here's why.

"Life" is broken up into three parts; reproduction, survival, and
boredom.  This has produced two types of lifeform, vertebrates and
invertebrates which fall into 3.5 survival classes: breeders,
followers, loners, and civilizers.

For small creatures, because they lack the complexity for any other
strategy, they must reproduce all the time to outrace the formidibale
dangers of their environment.  When situations aren't tenable for
reproduction, they go inert, which is a form of protection survival.
Reproduction unfortunately gets slower the larger a species becomes
because chemical physics only goes so fast, so the next class of
creature, the follower, emerges because there's safety in tight numbers
while waiting for breeding opportunities and/or results.  Loosely
coupled invertebrate organisms to herd creatures fall into this
category. The loner class evolved from the get-bigger-and-complex
incentive because of the obvious advantages of being larger, faster,
and smarter than your prey.  These advantages make loners the most
complex mechanisms because they must carry sufficient survival
characteristics in or on themselves rather than trusting to stocastical
group protection.  These characteristics come in three levels,
biocognitive, subcognitive, and concious.  The first level is the
form-follows-function rule, and discribes those survival
characteristics which are implicit to the creatures design structure
(ie: crustacean armor).  Subcognitiion evolves as more complex control
abilities allow larger creatures to make better use of their tool
cost-to-function ratio (ie: cheetahs).  Cognition arose as a need to
form better social interactions amongst self contained and
reproductively sparse (timewise) loners to again increase their
cost-to-function ratio.  Not by much granted, but it allows loners to
form more complex relationships with their own kind to assure species
success and survival (ie: wolves, elephants, whales).  It's a tough
world, and though predators are at the top of the pyramid, they are
also the worst to suffer when the base shakes.  Social orders survive
better, still most prey-predator ratios range around 100 to 1.

All of these have formed reasonable, balanced, nondominant, symbiotic
interactions for several billion years.  The last example, civilizers,
only rates half a survival characteristic as we have seen only one
example that has attained externalized rape-cognition, the use of tools
to replace the environment with a one-way, feed-me ethos.  It is not
certain at this point if it works because the experiment is only half
over.  Simulations, however, are not promising.

The bottom line is, if you're not breeding, then you're surviving, and
that means you're doing one of three things, Moving, Aquiring food, or
Protecting yourself.  Evolution for the higher creatures (ie: larger
than dedicated breeder organisms) involves optimizing one or more of these
characteristics, producing such extreeme variations as the turtle (high
protection coefficient), birds (high mobility coefficient), and goats
(high food-aquisition coefficient).

And if you're not doing any of these, then you're not living, you're
bored.  Drive to the store, buy some twinkies, rent a video, and pass
the time in your protective cave until some life happens.  Remember, if
life is that which moves for its own purposes, what the hell are you
doing?

Is all.

-- 
Mark W. Tilden.  "Gomi no Sensei des"   _    _    ________________________
P3, LANL, Los Alamos, NM 87545, USA.   / \  / \  /________________________)
505/667-2902 <mwtilden@lanl.gov>      //\ \//\ \// ___o___________________
#include (standard.disclaimer);      //  \_/  \_/ (_______________________)
