This is an old article from 2024, how on earth did I miss this? Do we know if any work using arthrobots to deliver any kind of successful therapy is in development?
Thank you!
Also it’s strongly evoking memories of Tibetan bardo state! 🫣
Interesting article!
“Taken together, these findings demonstrate the inherent plasticity of cellular systems and challenge the idea that cells and organisms can evolve only in predetermined ways,” wrote microbiologist Peter Noble and bioinformatics researcher Alex Pozhitkov in an article for The Conversation. “The third state suggests that organismal death may play a significant role in how life transforms over time.”
Dialectics, our old friend. You have to wonder how much quicker scientific progress would have been if didn’t have to battle positivism endemic to academia.
It seems it might be worth noting in scientific experiments that the act of observation can change a thing’s behavior, but I am not a scientist!
This is why it’s impossible to study shy bladder syndrome.
It’s impossible to ethically study shy bladder syndrome.
Bladder Superposition Principle.
I’m 90% sure that saying comes from quantum physics, where the tools used to make measurements also destroy the subject in the process. But that’s just how it goes when you’re trying to study the smallest things in the universe. Looking at stuff doesn’t do anything, but “observing” an atom by blasting it apart does.
not necessarily destroy, but if you want to check a property of a particle as small as a photon you kind of have to affect it. For example if you measure where it’s going, that probably involves measuring how it affects a magnetic field, but that field would also affect its position or smth.
Double slit experiment didn’t do that, did it?
Did it? Idk I’m not a physicist so I can’t tell precisely what scientists mean by “detect”, “measure”, “view”, “observe” and I get sleepy reading their papers. Either way, the measurement problem is a quantum mechanics thing specifically.
Observed really just means observed. It has no fancy “scientific” meaning.
I think the reason people get stumped on this is because a lot of popsci articles treat the wavefunction as a physical object and thus its collapse as a physical event.
They then get confused as to how simply observing and becoming consciously aware of something can physically alter the system and cause a physical “collapse.”
But Copenhagen (the orthodox interpretation) treats the wavefunction as merely an accounting of your knowledge of how the system was initially prepared and the collapse as just bookkeeping of new knowledge you acquired of its state at a later time.
The collapse is therefore not treated as a physical event at all; you learn something about the system through measuring it and then update your bookkeeping according to the new knowledge (“collapse” it). It’s a formal accounting and not a physical event
If one believes the collapse represents a physical event, this is called a physical collapse theory and you can prove that these must necessarily deviate from the empirical predictions of orthodox quantum mechanics, and so Copenhagen does not uphold the collapse to represent a physical event (in the sense that it represents a physical perturbation to the system) at all but is instead epistemic (dealing witha change to the observer’s subjective knowledge).
They just set up a projector and ran the light through slitted screens. Some light behaved as individual particles and some as waves, while being observed. They didn’t blast it or smash it.
Which is interesting, since everything observable came into existence through pretty violent blasts and smashes.
Edit: now that I think of it, projecting light is blasting it through space, I suppose.
I think professor dave has good videos about that, since we’re kinda approaching quantum mysticism territory here. He’s a bit confrontational, but he does support palestine for what it’s worth.
Thanks I saved your post for next downtime I can watch. Unfortunately I ignored chores so that may take a minute. I assume it will need watching as opposed to listening while catching up.
listening is probably fine, I don’t watch the visuals either lol
Oh cool, thanks! I was imagining whiteboards and complicated explanations!
Considering all life began as single cell organisms it makes sense that some cells when the environment changes would revert to their natural state of floating around and reproducing.
In a controlled environment, it will be really something if observed in the wild!
We tend to forget that classifications such as life and death are the way we organize things in our minds, not inherent facts of nature. There’s no strict boundary between organic and inorganic world. Life is just emergent complexity expressed in self replicating chemical patterns. It’s a gradient.
The older I get, the more gradation seems to apply to probably anything I can think of. Death may point to entropy within a particular system, but (left alone) contributes to organization of other systems. Whether those other systems are desirable to individuals and societies is a new conversation.
Right, and I try to think of everything as interconnected flows now instead of independent boxes. Once you become aware of the fact that compartmentalizing things is just how we abstract complexity, you start seeing the world in a different way.
Once you become aware of the fact that compartmentalizing things is just how we abstract complexity, you start seeing the world in a different way.
❤️
How is this a third state? Either an organism is keeping itself from degrading or it isn’t. If a cell changes its function then it’s still alive, just serving a different purpose. I seriously don’t understand how the author came to this conclusion (besides clickbait).
I searched for the least clickbaity title I could find, but they were all the same. As I noted in the thread, this is also in a controlled environment, as the article mentioned. My fascination is what may or not be happening in different, uncontrolled environments, as I also already said, especially given subjects and objects tend to change behavior with observation, and wondering if anyone knows anything about arthrobots being studied and developed to deliver medical treatments.
It’s cool, I’m not attacking you or anything and it’s my bad if I came off that way.
The xenobots and anthrobots described by the article are plainly alive imo so it’s weird that the takeaway is “there is a new category beyond life and death” instead of “dead cells can be repurposed to create new life.”
I took away that they’re not “alive” in the way we typically imagine, as in some cells change behavior on their own, then self-replicate, and they’re obviously not dead. I see your point, as well.
