Year: 2022

STRANGE UNIVERSE. “Phenomena of the physical world, as immediately given to us, appear in inexhaustible structures and formations of matter.” https://lnkd.in/dQ9VgzAr View in LinkedIn

Triplets. View in LinkedIn

“RESULTS show eight major clusters of properties: two that relate to metabolism, one to structure, one to genetics, another to evolvability, and three others to environment-interactions broadly construed. By measuring the semantic proximity of the words representing the target entities to the set of words associated with each one of the property clusters, we found that this semantic proximity varied.” https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11229-019-02356-w View in LinkedIn

ANALYSIS. “We hence defined an 8-dimensional “lifeness space” on the basis of these property clusters and used semantic proximity as a metric for assessing the relative positioning of the target entities along these dimensions. These findings corroborate the intuition that different entities perform differently along each lifeness dimension.” https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11229-019-02356-w View in LinkedIn

PROPERTY CLUSTERS. “They also show how different degrees of overall lifeness can be achieved in different ways. This multidimensional way of mapping borderline entities exemplifies the need of reformulating questions of the type “Is X alive?” into questions of the type “What is the lifeness of X?”. https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11229-019-02356-w View in LinkedIn

DEGREES OF LIFELESSNESS. “Building on these dimensions-related differences, we also computed a single value of overall lifeness for each more-or-less-alive entity, thereby providing an empirically-founded quantification of degrees of lifeness.” https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11229-019-02356-w View in LinkedIn

DEFINITION OF LIFE. “However the real difficulty lays elsewhere: in the surprising diversity of borderline cases—giant viruses, sterile organisms, extreme microsymbionts, etc.—and disputes that follow their categorization as alive or not.” https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11229-019-02356-w View in LinkedIn

THE HARD TO CLASSIFY. “From spontaneously self-reorganizing crystals to mega-viruses to drastically reduced micro-endosymbionts, all these microscopic entities that we mentioned in the introduction constitute a set of entities that are hard to categorize as either truly living or truly non-living.” https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11229-019-02356-w View in LinkedIn

THE THESIS. “Being alive is a matter of degrees. The origination of life is a matter of degrees.” https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11229-019-02356-w View in LinkedIn

DEGREES OF LIFE. “In this sense, viruses can be said to be more alive than bacteria along those functional dimensions. But “viruses” also rank lower than “bacteria” on all other dimensions, most notably on metabolism and proteins/catalysis (dimensions A and B) and environment interactions (dimension D), which is in line with the general characterization of viruses as lacking metabolism and being incapable of making a living by themselves.” https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11229-019-02356-w View in LinkedIn