Happiness may lie in how you spent the day, but true happiness is in what you come home to.
I saw a meme today on r/ProgrammerHumor as to how executives are regretting firing those employees as the Claude subscription costs are ginormous. It felt a little silly. I think a more pointed and fairer question to ask is – how many software engineer hours did Claude’s one month subscription save?
What is life? is a question that puzzles philosophers and scientists alike. Famously, Schrodinger in his series of talks has elucidated what life does but couldn’t really tell what life is. A widely accepted definition goes something like–any thing that has some “common properties” such as autonomy, homeostasis, metabolism, growth, adaptation, response to stimuli, and reproduction is considered to be alive. But this definition is not without its problems. Let’s examine one of these properties which I think is a bit vague–autonomy. Darwin has given us the idea of “survival of the fittest”. This inherently assumes that all life strives to survive and whoever strives the best and whoever’s environment allows it survives. But where does this “strive” to survive come from? Is it hard coded into DNA? Is it a consequence of the laws of physics? Or is it something else? For example, a fire looks for resources, tries to expand, adapts to stimuli. Is fire alive? Many such questions come up. Another example, is a virus alive?
This is full blown speculation bordering on science fiction and if you permit me to be self-debasing, it borders stupid science fiction. Many theories on the origins of life. The Miller-Urey experiment. The RNA world hypothesis. The primordial soup. The panspermia hypothesis. But I think the most interesting one is the idea that life is a consequence of the laws of physics. Life is a consequence of the second law of thermodynamics, which states that the entropy of a closed system will always increase. Self-organization should be a way to increase entropy, which might have lead to the birth of the first cell. While my intuition is convinced, my incomplete knowledge of the physical laws says “entropy is a measure of disorderlyness”. How then, does an organized system have more entropy than its counterparts? Could it be that an organized system can perform more tasks than its independent components and there is a net gain in entropy? I need to study more on this. Will get back at some point in the future.