This is why I think Conway's Game of Life is beautiful, as a toy model of simple rules giving rise to spectacular complexity. And how the "resolution" at which it's able to achieve replicators and factories is impressively basic, and if you grant that you can scale up several orders of magnitude from the game of life to entire systems of interacting "factories", it's not a stretch to see how those mechanisms can make up something like cells that drive biology.
A Conway "glider" has been found in nature(!!) [1], and if you combine that with an intuition from the "Size of Life" model also recently posted to hn [2], it's easy to get an intuition for how simple principles can lead to astonishing complexity. Even just scaling from DNA to Mitochondria is scaling up in size 200x. An amoeba is another 300x scaling up and if my chatGPTing is right, scaling up to a mouse is like 63,000x larger than a mitochondrion.
If you imagine zooming out from a grid of dots, like zooming out from Google Maps from a street level to planet level, there's plenty of room for physical interaction to work its magic. You just have to have to be able to comprehend the staggering scales. I worry that the "more is different" crowd haven't really appreciated the staggering scales involved or get lost in the act of romanticising it that "it can't be reductionist" is a lost persons way of saying they appreciate complexity.
Edit: Conway's glider was not found in nature, my mistake. But for a different example serving the same purpose, cellular automata modeling a "triforce" pattern of repeating triangles has been found in nature, off the top of my head.
I do not grasp the spite put forth whenever a LLM is used for a non-critical point in an argument.
1) LLMs have the potential to, on the whole, raise the base "correctness" of people's opinions. (Ex: asking Gemini flash why seed oils are unhealthy begines with "that's a highly debated and complex topic." Which, is infinitely better than believing some short form shopping channel)
2) They offer a softer emotional impact when it's inevitably corrected, making for a less toxic environment, and increasing the odds a topic will be discussed and possibly an opinion corrected.
3) more often than not, I've found them to not only be correct- but they'll offer nuance in the answer. Ex: mitochondria aren't the same size across everything that has them.
We should be pointing out flawed usage, not a wholesale assault on all usage.
I'm perfectly comfortable saying that I don't have an intuitive grasp of the conversion between nanometers, micrometers, and inches, which represent length according to different units, across different magnitudes, and especially in a context where I'm switching between talk of scales in terms of orders of magnitude and in terms of multiples (e.g. 100x is also just two orders of magnitude).
Honestly I find it kind of nuts to insist that knowing the difference in size ratio between a mitochondria and a mouse off the top of your head and to convert between them in different units is something the average person knows but whatever, maybe everyone knows that.
You're right that I was wrong about the glider but it's kind of a pennywise, pound foolish argument in this case if you think the upshot is supposed to be a blanket denial of cellular automata ever being reflected in nature. Off the top of my head I know the triforce repeating triangle pattern, perhaps the most famous cellular automata model, is found on seashells as one of many examples, so the point stands that we find in nature remarkable similarities to structures modeled in cellular automata.
A Conway "glider" has been found in nature(!!) [1], and if you combine that with an intuition from the "Size of Life" model also recently posted to hn [2], it's easy to get an intuition for how simple principles can lead to astonishing complexity. Even just scaling from DNA to Mitochondria is scaling up in size 200x. An amoeba is another 300x scaling up and if my chatGPTing is right, scaling up to a mouse is like 63,000x larger than a mitochondrion.
If you imagine zooming out from a grid of dots, like zooming out from Google Maps from a street level to planet level, there's plenty of room for physical interaction to work its magic. You just have to have to be able to comprehend the staggering scales. I worry that the "more is different" crowd haven't really appreciated the staggering scales involved or get lost in the act of romanticising it that "it can't be reductionist" is a lost persons way of saying they appreciate complexity.
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46137253 [2] https://neal.fun/size-of-life/
Edit: Conway's glider was not found in nature, my mistake. But for a different example serving the same purpose, cellular automata modeling a "triforce" pattern of repeating triangles has been found in nature, off the top of my head.