What is Life? A comment on Viruses

There have been many definitions of “life”. I think the simplest definition of life is this one: Life is a system that acquires the substances and energy needed to continue to exist and to reproduce. If it fails to do this, it ceases to exist. Any such system is an organism.

By that definition, a virus is alive. It’s the simplest form of life: a packet of genetic information that drifts about until it latches onto a cell that it can invade. It then uses the cell to acquire the substance and energy it needs in order to reproduce.

Since a virus needs another organism to survive and reproduce, it is a parasite. Most parasites either do not harm their hosts or provide some benefit. A few (mostly microbes) are necessary for their host’s well-being and even continued existence. A few parasites harm their hosts, and some kill their hosts. A parasite species will survive only as long as its hosts do not die out.

It’s likely that many viruses, like many microbes, are not merely beneficial but necessary for their hosts’ well being. We know enough about bacteria, for example, to know that without them we would have trouble digesting much of our food. We don’t know that much about viruses. But we do know that some of them kill bacteria that are dangerous to us. We also know that viruses can transport bits of DNA between species, and that this sometimes results in beneficial changes to an organism’s genome.

What all this amounts to is that we are woefully ignorant of viruses’ roles in the web of life. The handful that bother us create the impression that we would be better off without them. That is certainly a false impression. We just don’t know enough. Yet.

Footnote: Very early on, some computer programmers wrote small programs with a rather strange property: they would use the computer's operating system to write copies of themselves into every available memory space. Rewriting these programs so that they would send copies of themselves to other computers was the next step. Thus the computer virus. Are they alive? Most of them are not. To be alive, the program would have to also prevent the computer from shutting down, thus maintaining the energy it needs for continued existence.

Do we live in a simulation? (long read)

A comment on David Chalmers’ ideas about virtual reality

Abstract: I argue that the brain’s construction of our experience is in fact a simulation, and consider some of the implications of this view.

David Chalmers has recently been noticed for his ruminations about whether we live in a virtual reality (or simulation), and whether we could tell. In an interview published in New Scientist, he claims that we could not know whether we are living in a simulation. (1) On CBC’s radio program Quirks and Quarks he was one of three people asked this question (2), and Mary Hynes interviewed him on Tapestry. (3) Several of his discussions around this topic are available online: a search on “David Chalmers virtual reality” will present a dozen or more examples.

My answer is, “Of course we live in a simulation. It’s the one created by our brains.” (4) What’s more, the “I” that experiences this simulation is itself part of the simulation. So it would be more accurate to say that “We live as a simulation created by our brains.”

As asked, the question assumes that “I” is somehow distinct from the simulation. That assumption is misleading. Its explicit formulation dates from Descartes, who assumed that mind (or perhaps soul, he’s not very clear on the distinction) and body are separate. He does this because we experience our bodies. But that experience of my body is the “I” that experiences it. There is no separate experience. That is, there is no evidence that “I” can experience anything other than what my body and brain present as reality, which includes the experience of “I”. Thus, the simulation of reality includes “I”. (5)

Elsewhere, Chalmers has claimed that consciousness is the hard problem. Yes it is, if one assumes that “I” is separate from the reality it experiences. However, if “I” and experienced reality are one, then “I” is what is simulated as the experiencer.

Each of us lives as their own simulation. We can compare those simulations by converting them into other simulations. We can talk about our experience, or make pictures, or replicate the situation in the presence of other people, or ask others to do what we did. (6) What’s important about these comparisons is that we can detect differences, and we can detect them reliably. For example, I don’t know whether you see red or green as I do, but we can tell whether or not we see the same or similar differences between red and green. I don’t know how you see Aunt Emily, but we can both recognise that a photo is or is not a picture of her. We can also tell whether we both see that one portrait is a painting and another is a photograph. And that one shows her as a girl, and the other as an old lady. (7)

Science is the attempt to describe whatever it is that the brain simulates. That is, science is an attempt to create a simulation that is the same for everyone. Thus, a scientific theory is an attempt to eliminate the differences between our individual simulations. Suppose I can’t see the same red/green difference that you see, yet by some method we can both detect the same difference between red and green. One method would be to measure the frequency of red and green light, and agree that we observe the same measurements. By this method we have filtered out those idiosyncratic differences caused by the differences in our retinal cells and brains. We have created a simulation (the measurements) that we have in common. We have replaced our individual “subjective” simulations with a common “objective” one. We infer that the shared method of seeing red/green difference must therefore be closer to whatever it is that our simulation simulates. We call that whatever-it-is “reality”. But in fact all we ever do is compare simulations.

Scientists have discovered that aspects that can be mathematised are constant in a way that other aspects are not. This relates to what Wigner called the “The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Mathematics in the Natural Sciences”. (8) I don’t think it’s unreasonable at all. Mathematics is the part of language that translates exactly from one language to another; it’s a lossless translation. For example, no matter how the symbols are pronounced, the algebraic expression (a+b=c) means exactly the same in every language. (9) As every multi-lingual person knows, there is something lost in the translation of every other kind of speech. Each language creates a different simulation; neither their elements nor the relationship between elements map exactly onto each other. Languages are not congruent simulations; they are similar but not identical. The constancy of mathematics across languages preserves what’s constant across simulations. (10)

Mathematics works by abstraction. Moreover, it does not describe content, but structure. A mathematical statement expresses a relationship between two or more entities. The red/green difference can be expressed as a difference in wavelength: red is larger than green. This statement says nothing about the experience of red and green that we may or may not share, nor does it say anything about the quality we label “colour”. It states only that one aspect of our experience of the colours red and green is constant. It also states that we must take care to arrange our experience so that this constancy is revealed.

The consequence is that the closer science gets to a universal simulation, the more abstract that simulation becomes. It is finally pure structure. The most abstract simulation is that created by physics. Einstein’s relativity theories are descriptions of structure. Special relativity describes how the shape of one person’s experience can be precisely transformed into the shape of another person’s experience, given that we know their relative velocities. General relativity goes a step further and describes our experience of reality in terms of its space-time structure. Quantum physics describes interactions, that is, the behaviour of entities that behave differently (for example like waves or particles) depending on context. Hence what we can know about them is context bound. What’s more, context defines events and vice versa. Thus, quantum physics describes reality in terms of event-contexts.

But neither theory describes whatever it is that we label reality. They describe structures, the structure of space-time in the one case, and the structure of event-contexts in the other.    

Both theories are highly abstract. They are highly reliable and precise in predicting how we will experience those abstract aspects. Hence the belief that these more abstract descriptions are truer descriptions of reality than the more concrete subjective simulations of reality that our brains create. I don’t think that belief is justified. What’s more, I think the question of what’s real is an unanswerable one. We know our own experience, because we are that experience. We can know some of what each other’s experiences have in common, because we can talk about them, or make pictures of them, or express aspects of them in music and dance, or describe them using mathematics.

                                     

In the New Scientist interview, Chalmers says “I think, at the very least, virtual worlds [created by virtual reality devices] provide a particularly pure illustration of Descartes’s problem.” Descartes had a problem because he assumed not only that body and mind are separate entities, but that one is physical and the other is not. (11) Chalmers perpetuates Descartes error by asking whether we can know whether we “live in” a simulation. That question makes sense only if “I” and the simulation are ontologically distinct entities. (12) Assuming that distinction begs the question: If “I” is not an essential part of the simulation, then of course we can know “I” is “living in” that simulation. The question is interesting, that is productive, if and only if “I” is an essential part of the simulation.

The brain creates the experience of reality, including “I” as the experiencer of that reality. We can know no other. It is the brain’s creation of our experience that enables “virtual reality” devices. What’s significant about these devices is that they present the “first-person” viewpoint. That is, they present the same structure as the subjective reality that they imitate. They are incomplete, however, because they do not simulate the proprioception necessary to experience the 1st person viewpoint as “I”. (13)

Chalmers ends his New Scientist interview with “A sort of structuralist conception of reality – that the world isn’t intrinsically the way we thought it was, but still has a similar sort of structure – is very strongly suggested by modern science.” I think he’s right. The brain’s simulation of reality is enough like reality, whatever reality “really is”, that we survive quite well. But exactly how much it is like reality can’t be decided. The theories of physics are highly abstract descriptions of some aspects of the structure of our experience of reality, and that is the best we can do.

Notes
(1) Interview with David Chalmers in New Scientist: https://www.newscientist.com/article/mg25333710-900-david-chalmers-interview-virtual-reality-is-as-real-as-real-reality/

(2) Broadcast 2022-03-05. https://www.cbc.ca/listen/live-radio/1-51-quirks-and-quarks/clip/15898721-could-living-computer-simulation-and-were-tell

(3) Broadcast 2022-08-23 https://www.cbc.ca/radio/tapestry/are-we-living-in-a-simulation-look-to-free-guy-not-the-matrix-for-answers-says-david-chalmers-1.6393525

(4) Here’s one explanation of how the brain does this; an online search will garner many more: https://neuroscience.stanford.edu/news/reality-constructed-your-brain-here-s-what-means-and-why-it-matters

(5 ) Every creature with a brain computes some simulation of reality. The bar for accuracy and completeness is rather low. The simulation needs only to be good enough to raise the odds that the creature will survive long enough to reproduce. For example, a frog reacts to a moving fly-size blob, but not to a static one. It will try to catch a raisin tossed past it, but will ignore a dead fly lying near it.

(6) The arts can create simulations of realities that don’t exist, and even of realities that can’t exist. We call these simulations “fictions”. Simulations of reality are called “history”, “physics” “reports”, “portraits”, "descriptions", etc. We have many terms for simulations, because we can make so many different kinds of them.

(7) These comparisons depend on our memories of Aunt Emily. That is, we compare one simulation (the photo of Aunt Emily) with another (our memories of Aunt Emily).

(8) http://www.hep.upenn.edu/~johnda/Papers/wignerUnreasonableEffectiveness.pdf

(9) Wigner writes “My principal aim is to illuminate it from several sides. The first point is that the enormous usefulness of mathematics in the natural sciences is something bordering on the mysterious and that there is no rational explanation for it.” It seems to me that this statement encapsulates Wigner’s puzzlement. I think he fails to notice that mathematics is a component of language. It is not a separate language.
    All known languages include ways of expressing or describing number, size, shape, spatial and temporal relations, collections of things (sets), kinship (classification), rates of change, etc. These terms label mathematical concepts. The number and sophistication of mathematical terms or concepts varies between cultures, but all cultures have mathematical concepts. These concepts are used to communicate individual experience just as the rest of language is used.
    Mathematics begins as an attempt to regularise trade, property, kinship obligations and rights, etc. That is, mathematics is part of the attempt to find those common elements of our individual experience that satisfy our desire for justice, fairness, equity, connection, community, etc.
    Mathematics as a method for enabling and enforcing justice, fairness, equity and so on was formalised in rules of kinship rights and obligations in pre-literate tribal societies, and such rules still make up an essential part of what we experience as our way of life. Literate societies wrote down these rules, and added recipes for calculating the requisite quantities.
    Mathematics as a discipline begins with Euclid’s attempt to organise the concepts into a logical structure. This logical structure translates exactly from one language to another.

(10) Linguists refer to “idiolects”, our idiosyncratic versions of our common language. That idiosyncrasy is in fact the definition of “style”. To understand someone is to translate their idiolect into one’s own, a process we perform almost entirely without conscious awareness. That unconscious translation is one source of mutual misunderstanding. See Steiner (1975).

(11) Another problem generated by the mind-body dichotomy is expressed as “How can the non-physical mind cause physical effects?”

(12) Another version of this problem is whether we would ever know whether we were minds uploaded into a computer.

(13) It’s not clear how a virtual reality systems could provide proprioception. Some kind of body-suit could provide external sensory inputs, but it couldn’t provide internal ones. Perhaps inputs through the brainstem could do it, but experimentation would raise interesting ethical problems. The study of the sensations produced by training simulators is instructive: Our brains can and often will construct more complex sensory experiences than the actual sensory data provide.

Bibliography
Many thinkers have stimulated my ideas. I am grateful to them all. The following represents a small selection of the sources most relevant to this paper.

Damasio, A: Descartes' Error: Emotion, Reason, and the Human Brain (1994; revised 2005)
Damasio, A: The Feeling of What Happens: Body and Emotion in the Making of Consciousness (1999)
Gelernter, David H: The Muse in the Machine: Computerizing the Poetry of Human Thought (1994)
Hawking, Stephen: The Theory of Everything (2002)
Hofstadter Douglas & Dennett, Daniel: The Mind's I: Fantasies and Reflections on Self and Soul (1981)
Hofstadter, Douglas: Gödel, Esher, Bach: an Eternal Golden Braid (1979)
Hofstadter, Douglas: I Am a Strange Loop (2007)
Kraus, Lawrence: A Universe From Nothing (2012)
Norman, Donald A.: The Psychology of Everyday Things (1988)
Rees, Martin: Just Six Numbers (1999)
Rosenfeld, Israel: The Strange, Familiar, and Forgotten. (1991)
Sacks, O: The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat (1985
Sacks, O: The Island of the Colorblind (1997)
Sacks, O: The Mind's Eye (2010)
Steiner, George: After Babel (1975)

2022-04-14

Fish provide the clue: Scales of Justice (Ngaio Marsh)

 

Ngaio Marsh. Scales of Justice (1955). A tight-knit community settled along an idyllic trout stream in an idyllic English vale suffers a nasty murder. Alleyn, Fox and Co. winkle out family and personal secrets, collect a convincing number of clues, and arrive at a suitably surprising solution. Along the way breaches are healed, character is revealed, people learn salutary lessons, and true love blossoms twice over. A nicely constructed puzzle kept me turning the pages, and I hardly had time to notice the creaky wheels of the plot and the barely 2D characters. The scales in the title belong to two fish, one of which was a source of conflict between neighbours, supplying both important forensic clues and a possible motive.
     Marsh here indulges in a fantasy of an England in which social class and degree kept people within moral bounds. In other books, she satirises this kind of romantic comedy, so I don’t know what she’s up to. With a severely limited cast of characters, she’d written herself into a corner, and maintaining the tradition of noblesse oblige must have seemed the only plausible path out of the maze. A good entertainment, but not her best work. **

Alleyn's First Case: A Man Lay Dead

 

Ngaio Marsh. A Man Lay Dead (1934) The first Alleyn novel. Pretty good puzzle, albeit with a murder method that’s a bit too contrived, and actually impossible. The setting is a country house whose owner gives fabulous weekend entertainments. This one is the game of Murder, and of course the corpse is really dead.
     Alleyn isn’t much more than a talking head, but so are the other characters. Fairly placed clues and red herrings, with Bailey and the other cops lending an air of verismilitudinous police procedure. Marsh never did pay much attention to procedure, though. Apart from photography, dusting for prints, and the collection of odd objects, mentioned but never well described, the forensics happen offstage. Nigel Bathgate, aspiring reporter, who figures in many of the early Alleyns, provides the admiring amateur foil. His admiration is not uncritical, however. The book ends on a more realistic note as Bathgate and Alleyn ride the train into Paddington. Bathgate’s romantic life gives us the necessary coda for every comic romance: love prevails.
     Marsh wrote this book to see if she could make a plausible entertainment. She succeeded. In the 1920s and 30s there was a great demand for light reading to while away train and ocean journeys, and damp weekends. The crime puzzle was one of many genres supplying the market. Pretty well all the genres were translated into film and television over the next few decades, when those media became mass entertainment and needed a constant supply of product.
     Alleyn develops into a much more complex human being in the later novels; Marsh’s talent for satire makes them social comedies hung on crime puzzle plots. I like Alleyn and his colleagues. I like the world they inhabit, a world looks and feels like the world I knew in England in the 1940s and 50s, but one in which justice is, inevitably, done. It’s a comforting fantasy. **

Three more by Lapham: Philanthropy, Spies, and Disaster.

Lapham’s Quarterly VIII-3: Philanthropy (2015) There are two main themes: you should give alms or other assistance to those who need it; and you should give alms or other assistance to those who deserve it. This collection offers argument to support both principles, but on the whole, those who wish to limit their philanthropy to the deserving tend to concoct self-serving rationalisations to avoid giving anything. There are also accounts showing us what it’s like to be at the giving or receiving end, which range from the amusing to the harrowing.
     Anthropologically speaking, humans have survived and thrived best when they collaborated, and have kept accounts more in terms of ability than performance. The golden rule applies as much to sharing one’s wealth as to any other aspect of our lives. ****

 Lapham’s Quarterly IX-1: Spies (2016) Spying is as old as human conflict. “Intel” has determined the outcome of battles and wars. But success in spycraft appears to be random. Too many things can change between acquisition and delivery, quite apart from the inevitable defects of error, lack of context, and limited scope. Spies are traitors, hence we despise them even as we use thme. And reliance on spycraft as a tool of government fosters paranoia, which renders rational calculation difficult. For paranoia suffers from the prime weakness of all logic-based attitudes: logic is no better than the premises on which we use it. It’s garbage in, garbage out.

     These, and other like ruminations, were prompted by this collection, which has the rather sad effect of melancholy. For if we cannot trust each other, we cannot live together. ****

Lapham’s Quarterly IX-2: Disaster (2016) Whether caused by human error or malice, or by natural accidents, disasters shift our common enterprises into new directions, and sometimes completely change them. Soon after their effects have subsided to a pre-catastrophic level, we forget the perils that threatened our existence. Our preparations for the next disaster diminish as the memories of the last one fade. Eventually, we resent the cost of maintaining the defenses, and the next disaster’s destruction is, once again, greater than it could have been. – That’s the general thesis that emerges from these accounts of the sometimes unspeakable horrors we visit on each other or that are visited upon us.

     This collection was assembled four years before the covid pandemic upset all our plans. The records of past disasters show that our responses to covid-19 are simply the human responses to any disasters. Pity for the victims, help offered, sometimes heroic sacrifice, as well as denial, suspicion of conspiracies, blaming of the outsiders, rage at the authorities who must do the unwelcome work of constraining our choices, we find all these in the record. When it comes to disasters, only the details differ. Our behaviour repeats. Which is, I suppose, one reason that we wisely nod our heads and mumble cliches about not learning from experience. ****

Reread of Ngaio Marsh's Light Thickens.

 I've added a note to my review of Ngaio Marsh's Light Thickens, which I've just finished rereading.

Sixteenth century women: Tougher than they seemed.

 

Antonia Fraser. The Weaker Vessel (1984) A thorough survey of women’s lives in the 1600s. Fraser covers every role for which we have direct or indirect documentary evidence. The result is the usual mess of human virtue and vice, wisdom and folly. The sad fact is that during the 1600s, women lost some of the gains in legal and economic power that they had gained during Elizabeth I’s rule, which demonstrated that women were as capable as men. But even Elizabeth had to admit (in public anyhow) that her talent for government was a masculine one.
     A reminder that women have been treated as chattel through most of history. There are Y-chromosome burdened people who would like women to revert to that status. And also a reminder that women had (and have) to be tougher than men. The title is ironic: pregnancy and childbirth were and are dangerous; only the toughest (and luckiest) survived.

     Recommended, but it’s a long read. ***