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Thank you for indulging with my thought process.Off late I have been using the word entity to describe similar traits. The reason for that choice of word are as follows:- It allows me to remove physical attributes - It leaves me with enough room to talk about intelligence at various levels such as intelligence at a microscopic level to intelligence at a larger social level

On the above line of thought, in my opinion, when we talk about future of life in the universe we should split it further- Future of life form as an entity ( notice how I’m not making it specific here )- Future of life form as a physical manifestation in human form perhaps ?- Future of life form as a non-physical manifestation

One of the pieces I’m personally struggling with is dynamics around whenever the topic of generic vs specific comes and whether one holds more meaning than other. Allow me to elaborate, in the above context a generic life form would be, as I understand from your posts, some form of life whereas as biologists see ( once again from your posts ), life as a specific form of what we call biological in nature. I believe both are valid lines of thought even though it is true that our biological form gives us certain disadvantages when it comes to universe faring entities but on the other hand, a generic meaning of life could as well mean that it exists in current universe just our brain is unable to comprehend it.

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What is your suggestion for better terminology?

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Thank you for this post.

- By using the word artificial vs non artificial, we are forcing our definition of natural life form. It can be argued that given we still don’t know origin of the universe that all life forms including us humans are “artificial”. So the point of artificial vs non artificial might be on a time scale as opposed to being the nature of that entity. - Do you think it would be better to chat about this topic by removing certain words which come with preconceived notions about life forms such as artificial / non artificial and instead focus on words like intelligent life form which may or may not use genetic material or electronic chips or some other exotic matter we find in the future ? ( it can be argued that changing words might not help a lot in the discussion but something to consider )

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I'm not sure this should be terribly surprising. Like most good academics, they know their field and they know speculation outside their field is a trap - they'll make some stupid mistake if they try it. (Academics usually only try this if they're incompetent or if they have Nobel prizes and become arrogant - either way, they make stupid mistakes when they try it.)

They're biologists, so if they're going to write about biology expanding into the universe, they write about the type of biology they know about, and how that biology would do it.

They don't know much if anything about artificial life and are reluctant to even talk about it.

This is a - perhaps inevitable - consequence of narrow specialization in science.

We could use more generalists, but it's difficult to become one and easy to make mistakes because you don't know enough detail about some critical thing.

To the extent there exist any experts on artificial life expanding in the universe, it's mostly you, Robin. I'm not sure it's fair for you to be pointing fingers at biologists for not being experts in AL. (Altho they ought to acknowledge that fact and at least say they don't know enough to speculate on how it might affect their scenarios.)

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Is the Borg a machine or a life form?

(Sorry, could not resist).

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I said stuff pretty close to that; I don't think he'd react any differently to those words.

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What makes you think they are any different regarding this?

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You might have to go and find the biologists who study extremophiles that live deep down in the crust, or who create new bacteria one base pair at a time. Apologies if those are the people you were already talking to.

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Funny, today I was talking to someone about using an electric fly swatter, and she said we might someday be able to talk to the fly. I said we’d likely sooner be able to talk to the swatter.

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I agree: these are mere blindspots. Lots of scientists have a serious status quo bias, especially when they feel a bit uneasy about doing futurism. Even an economist like Robin can write about ems and somehow overlay that setting with a pretty vanilla labor market that works like ours (but faster!).

This particular blindspot probably goes back to the childhood suspicion that civilizations can exist in our galaxy without us noticing them. Artificial life would inevitably be grabby in a way that would be obvious across lots of spacetime. So to preserve our Star Trek fantasies about hidden aliens, we assume that artificial life must be really unlikely, or else it would have blown through here and made all our local rocks into something more valuable. Here I think it's Robin who has a much better view. Tech-capable life tends to turn grabby, expands spherically at a decent fraction of c, and must arise rarely in these early days of the universe.

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I agree this looks like a blind spot. Reading Mason's response in the debate, he seems to think it would take more than 500 years for artificial life to emerge and he also doesn't seem to think that it would be particularly more adaptive than natural life.

I read Robin as saying that he expects artificial life to completely replace biological life in <500 years. But I don't think Mason understood that that's what Robin was saying, and Robin did not carefully articulate his view in a way that would make that clear.

What I think would have been clear would have been if Robin had said, "artificial life will most likely replace biological life in less than 500 years. This means that genetically engineering biological humans to be more robust would prove irrelevant, because they'd be extinct or at least sidelined by the time any progress had been made." And I'm curious what Mason would have said to that!

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Another way to look at this is that scientific research, and speculations, is all about developing models for what happens when a system is reduced to one or two degrees of freedom:

a) Keep everything but this one parameter stabilized;

b) Systematically change this one parameter, and only it;

c) Figure out the law governing variations of this one parameter;

d) Fix this parameter, and chose another to systematically change;

e) Do this with two parameters at once, verifying it they can be combined into a more encompassing law;

f) Wash, rinse, repeat.

No scientist trying to speculate and extrapolate from within their field feels comfortable moving much beyond that. It begins to feel like one's doing sci-fi, not science.

Hence, in regards to biology, the taboo isn't towards artificial life, it's towards non-science.

A very different mentality exists among engineers, who, in a way, do the exact opposite of what scientists do.

Engineers try to do and make concrete things using anything they can put their hands on that works, so they're used to picking up the laws identified by scientific research and to mix and match them in pursuit of a specific result, to the point a running joke (with a lot of truth) is that an engineer would gladly use black magic if they thought it would help.

Schematically:

* Science: Phenomena 'p' minus freedom 'a' minus freedom 'b' minus ... plus freedom 'z' --> law L

* Engineering: law A plus law B plus law C plus ... plus experimental fine-tuning not covered by any law --> blueprint B

The kind of speculation you're asking for requires this engineering mentality more than a scientific one, as it depends on speculating broadly on the results of mixing unrelated laws from very different fields, rather than speculating narrowly from a small set of laws.

This suggests a better source for this kind of speculation would be either bio-engineers, or biologists heavily involved in interdisciplinary studies involving Computer Science and Philosophy of Mind, which, I presume, is a rare combination.

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It could also in some cases be that they see the undiscussed topic as outside their expertise, and/or too uncertain to be the basis for more than speculation. I suspect this may also be true of some of the cosmologists who study the future of the cosmos, while explicitly or implicitly ignoring the potential effects of intelligent activity.

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I'd frame this more as a blind spot than a taboo. It's like how some pursuit predators are momentarily confused by prey that won't flee (or stop fleeing).

I like your earlier framing about a biology's relative lack of facility with abstractions. But a notable exception is Maynard Smith's transitions theory. It is half-heartedly applied to aliens in this paper (apologies if I only found it through your blog, as I can't remember how I found it). The conclusions are modest, and they don't explicitly consider artificial substrates, but well, they're trying.

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