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Natural Computing
Published in: Natural Computing 3/2019

25-10-2017

Waiting for the rapture: What can we do with computers to (hopefully) witness the emergence of life?

Author: Tommaso Toffoli

Published in: Natural Computing | Issue 3/2019

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Abstract

Hadn’t this question already been answered? We all know about computation-universal Turing Machines. And we know that any such machine can simulate a space–time dynamics not unlike von Neumann’s cellular automaton (CA), which is computation- and construction-universal and among other things can play host to self-replicating machines. And that self-replication sprinkled with a bit of randomness should inexorably lead to descent with variation, competition, and thence to evolution and all that. “So what?” Enrico Fermi would have asked, “Where is your emergent life?” (and note that our understanding of both natural and artificial life has much advanced in the 50 years since). It turns out that life is by its very nature a marginal, fragile, and ephemeral kind of phenomenon. For a substrate or a “culture medium” to be able to support the emergence from scratch of a lifelike lineage, computation- and construction-universality are necessary—but by no means sufficient! Paraphrasing Fermi, what automata that you know—including von Neumann’s CA and Conway’s very game of Life—have managed so far to “capture for us on film” the origin of some kind of life? What questions, then, should we ask of a prospective medium—be it a Turing machine, a CA, or some other kind of automaton—that will best probe its capabilities to originate (as well as sustain) some form of life, and which will provide us with a sense of direction to help us more quickly converge in this quest.
previous article Cellular automata on group sets and the uniform Curtis–Hedlund–Lyndon theorem
next article UCNC 2018 special issue editorial

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Footnotes
1
Nowadays the most common use of the term “rapture” especially among fundamentalist Christians in the United States, refers to the belief that with the Second Coming of Jesus Christ to Earth, believers who are still alive (together with the resurrected dead believers) shall be “vacuumed up” through the air to meet the Lord in the clouds and then proceed to eternal life; while the unbelievers, live or dead, will be left on Earth—abandoned to their devices (and vices)—or pulled and bundled like weeds and thrown into Hell’s furnaces. This kind of rapture theology was popularized extensively in the 1830s by John Nelson Darby and the Plymouth Brethren, and further popularized in the United States in the early twentieth century by the wide circulation of the Scofield Reference Bible. [Adapted from en.​wikipedia.​org/​wiki/​Rapture, 22 Nov 2016].
 
2
Jorge Luis Borges, “La biblioteca de Babel,” in El Jardín de senderos que se bifurcan, 1941. The story repeats the theme of Borges’s 1939 essay “The Total Library,” which in turn acknowledges the earlier development of this theme by Kurd Lasswitz in his 1901 story “The Universal Library.” See en.​wikipedia.​org/​wiki/​The_​Library_​of_​Babel.
 
3
If you think of it, the most compact (as well as most straightforward) catalog indexing scheme for this library is that which assigns to each volume as a “call number” the very textual content of the volume itself! (My app would then simply echo what you typed!) A scheme that reserves shorter, more practical call numbers to the more frequently requested, more interesting, more truthful, or more “informative” books (note that the library will consist by far of utterly nonsensical volumes) would depend on information that is not contained in the library itself.
 
4
Analysis (or columnar) pad; [Archaic] A wide, finely-ruled pad, usually printed on durable light-green paper, divided into a dozen columns each suitable for lining up numbers of a size encountered in typical scientific or accounting calculations. You may print your own: www.​printablepaper.​net/​category/​columnar.
 
5
If a photograph of the dune field is slowly dragged under your eyes perpendicularly to the direction of the dunes, a ridge will gradually turn into a slope, then a valley, ... until at the end of one cycle will have been replaced by the next ridge. Phase is the amount of offset of the ridge (and of the whole pattern) from the initial configuration; in analogy with, say, the phases of the Moon, a whole cycle or “turn” may be divided into \(360^\circ \).
 
6
The scavenging of electrons by nuclei make the universe transparent, as photons can now traverse the whole universe with hardly any loose electrons to hinder them.
 
7
Or the asymptotic versions thereof—a limit point and a limit cycle.
 
8
That is, disturbances that in the emergent phenomenon’s characterization are not even considered.
 
9
A difference much like that between a general-purpose programmable computer and the dedicate microcontroller that runs a washing machine.
 
10
More precisely, a predictability source, as we shall see in Sect. 6.
 
11
Journal of Discourses13:271.
 
12
Even today, a variety of bacterial life routinely “thrives,” as it were, in the Earth’s rocky subsurface down to a couple of miles deep! (Fredrickson and Onstott 1996).
 
13
A form of life in many ways analogous to but philogenetically distinct from bacteria; discovered, proposed (1977), and doggedly defended by Carl Woese until it achieved universal acceptance (mid-80’s). In spite of its late discovery, it actually represents about one-third of the whole tree of life.
 
14
Oxygenic photosynthesis uses chloroplasts, organelles of bacterial lineage. These exploit sunlight power to synthesize glucose from atmospheric \({\text{CO}}_2\) and water, releasing oxygen in the atmosphere as a “waste” product. Aerobic respiration—essentially the converse process—uses mitochondria, they too organelles of bacterial lineage, as self-contained power plants to release energy from the burning of glucose in oxygen. This energy is used to recharge the cell’s spent batteries (adp) to fresh batteries (atp). In a cell, a charged atp molecule is the energy currency unit honored for driving virtually all energy-requiring cellular processes.
 
16
This is due to hydrogen being fused to denser helium in the Sun’s core. Intuitively, the resulting smaller-radius core will feel a stronger gravitational force, and a more intense fusion will be needed to create enough counterpression to keep the core from collapsing.
 
17
To highlight a trap that is easy to fall into, I used a misleading phrase when I said that the emergence of intelligence “will have had probability 1,” Should I have said instead “has” or “will have,” since the conditioning event—us being here—is at the present time? Nonsense! A probability is not something material existing at one time and place—an external object “then and there,” as it were—to be touched, measured, and its properties discovered and recorded. It is a number that by certain rules we associate with a (timeless) description given as a tentative model of a certain state of affairs. Like a syllogism, probability theory (which is in fact a way of dealing concurrently with a large number of syllogisms) can never tell us more than what is contained in the premises that we supplied. It’s a way to organize our knowledge, not to extrapolate from it! (Jaynes 2003; Toffoli 2016).
 
18
In this team guessing game, feedback about how close to the answer is a tentative guess is given by rating the latter in terms of how “hot”—or close to the answer—it is. “Is it an insect?” (the right answer being “a ladybug”) “Now you’re getting warm!” “A spider?” “Booh! You’re cooling off.”
 
19
The original article is (Gauthier-Lafaye et al. 1996), which gave tangible confirmations to an amazingly prescient conjecture (from 40 years before!) of Kuroda (1956). The foregoing paragraph is a passim abridgment and adaptation of Gauthier-Lafaye et al. (1996), while the following dialogue is my dramatic adaptation of a more recent blog by Mervine (2011) giving an impressively clear reconstruction and explanation of events. Also see the excellent Scientific American article (Meshik 2005).
 
20
Typically, in fluids and simple lubricated mechanisms the dependence of drag on speed is linear at low speeds and quadratical at higher speeds. Depending on the complexity of the mechanism, eventually higher and higher “parasitic modes” may be excited (parts may even break and jam one another), with drag vs speed better approximated by an exponential dependence.
 
21
It may happen that phenotype A gives birth to a different phenotype B, and this to a different C, and so forth, but at one point of this chain the offspring of M is identical to M itself—\(A\rightarrow B\rightarrow C\dots \rightarrow M\rightarrow M\rightarrow M\dots \). In this case does “life” begin with A or with M? Or, more simply, in the cycle \(A\rightarrow B\rightarrow A\rightarrow B\dots \), daughter B is not identical to mother A, and so, strictly speaking, A did not reproduce itself—yet the sequence \(A\rightarrow B\) did!
Dawkins (2009) proposes a compelling image—a 300-mile chain of apes, each link being a mother holding her daughter’s hand, spanning seven million years and terminating with a contemporary female human. One may ask, Where, in this chain, does human life begin? And is this life at all, if they were not reproducing identically?
These are definitional—“chicken-and-egg”—quibbles, mostly irrelevant to our discussion.
 
22
This is substantially the same as a famous (though apocryphal) argument by Henry Ford. If transmission axles found in a car cemetery turned out to be mostly in very good shape, while, say, the cylinders tended to be worn out, one shouldn’t praise the axles’ designers and tell them to make even better ones. Rather, such quality axles were a luxury Ford could not afford: some of the resources invested in axle making should be taken away from that business (as essentially wasted) and shifted to the cylinder-making business!
 
23
Most “elementary” particles will consist of stable clusters of bits periodically progressing each one on its own peculiar finite cycle—like Life’s gliders—so the the outcome of a collision will depend on the relative phase of the colliding objects.
 
24
If most of a library’s books had a call number that began with P, the first letter of a book’s call number would carry very little information—and so be of little use in classification.
 
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Metadata
Title
Waiting for the rapture: What can we do with computers to (hopefully) witness the emergence of life?
Author
Tommaso Toffoli
Publication date
25-10-2017
Publisher
Springer Netherlands
Published in
Natural Computing / Issue 3/2019
Print ISSN: 1567-7818
Electronic ISSN: 1572-9796
DOI
https://doi.org/10.1007/s11047-017-9644-z

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