Re: Question, life on other worlds

[Dan Fiscus <***>]

Howard,

I would think so. And I would think this another place where'd we
expect some differences. Rosen might urge that context dependence
is fundamental, and so any attempt to generalize life to another
context would have to do so while still addressing life's context
dependence on Earth. Langton et al. might think of life as more
context independent and thus he might not care about or seek to
understand a causal or integral role for context while studying the
only example of life we have. To me, Rosen's view is more complex
as in impredicative, paradoxical, irreducible - in essence I take his
work to suggest that life achieve's context independence (we see it
in so many varying and extreme environments on Earth) through
intimate context-interdependence. So it's also a lot like Stuart
Kauffman's view that life may know how to "be at home"
anywhere in the universe, that it is to be expected rather than
assumed ultra-rare. But this ability to make a home and make a
living does not come from algorithmic "substrate independence",
but non-algorithmic life-substrate mutual causality. The
"hardware" and the "software" have to "bootstrap" together. This
perspective throws doubt on the equating of "life in silico" with
life itself...

Maybe I am still too much in an either/or mode here...

Dan

Howard Pattee wrote:
> Another form of the question:
>
> Langton (and many other AL modelers) feels that life on Earth is just one carbon-based realization. To have a general theory of life they think we need to understand not just “life-as-we-know-it” here on Earth but “life as-it-could-be” in other galaxies or in other worlds.
>
> Would this kind of thinking be consistent with the Rosen’s concept of a theory of life?
>
> Howard