Introduction
I’ve been contemplating the origins of life from a systems architecture perspective. I’ve been approaching the topic of human intelligence and large-scale language models in chat AI with the same mindset.
In this context, I’ve become intrigued by the often-overlooked nature of solids. Solids are discrete like the digital realm and can be deterministically predicted by Newtonian mechanics. This is similar to a computer program.
I’ve also realized that our usual thinking and verbal expression revolve around solids. If the world were solely composed of liquids and gases, our intelligence wouldn’t be able to grasp it effectively.
From this notion, I delve deeper into solids, leading me to recognize that the Earth’s abundant solid surface serves as the foundation for life and intelligence.
Thinking Centered on Solids
For our intelligence, solids are easy to handle.
They maintain their shape over time, even if moved or rotated. By remembering the external patterns, one solid can easily be distinguished from another. It’s also straightforward to count them — one, two, etc. It’s predictable how they’ll move when subjected to the same force. They’re easy to handle manually.
Thus, for solids, philosophical existence recognition, linguistic naming and identification, mathematical counting, physical laws, and manual manipulation are all quite straightforward.
Liquids and gases, on the other hand, are harder to manage.
We perceive and linguistically articulate, analyze, and objectify things primarily in terms of solids.
Solids Are Not Ubiquitous
In a way, we live in a world where solids are, by chance, abundant.
Space is mostly void, with matter comprising only a tiny fraction. This matter gravitates towards each other, forming celestial bodies like stars and planets.
Stars, being typically hot, are thought to be more of a molten liquid than solid. Planets vary; some are gas giants, others are liquid-covered, while some, like Earth, have a solid surface. Moreover, about 70% of Earth’s surface is covered in liquid water, with its depths filled with molten magma.
Given this, solids in space are relatively rare. This may feel counterintuitive, but it’s because we inhabit a world teeming with solids and perceive things based on that.
Benefits of Solids
It’s undeniable that water plays a significant role in life on Earth. Cells, the building blocks of organisms, store water. Water ionizes water-soluble chemicals and serves as a medium for chemical reactions. Hydrophobic substances, while in water, can also interact freely with other chemicals.
Liquid water is crucial since life requires continuous complex chemical reactions. Neither ice nor steam can facilitate these reactions. A temperature and pressure range where water remains liquid, like on Earth’s surface, is necessary.
On the other hand, emphasizing the importance of liquid water to life might be based on the notion that solids are prevalent. Considering that solids are not ubiquitous in space, they too must play a crucial role in life.
DNA, cell membranes, endoplasmic reticulum, and Golgi apparatuses are all solids. They might have elasticity like rubber, but they don’t flow like liquids. Without solids, at least Earth’s mechanism of life wouldn’t work.
What Are Solids?
While there are hard solids like metals with little to no elasticity, there are also solids like rubber and jelly that are flexible. Anything that doesn’t allow internal molecular flow and can maintain its shape is a solid.
From a temporal perspective, solids have the ability to “remember” their shape. Spatially, they have a “structure.”
This might seem abstract, but comparing them with liquids or gases makes it clearer. Because of their fluidity, liquids and gases cannot remember shapes or have structures.
Conceptually, a solid can be described as “something that remembers its structure in the physical spacetime.”
Recognition through Intelligence
When discussing recognition through intelligence, it’s essential to address scale and aspect.
To recognize a solid as “something that remembers its structure in the physical spacetime,” appropriate spatial and temporal scales are vital.
From a human’s spatial scale perspective, solids seem to have remembered structures. But if we minimize this to a quantum scale, an uncertain world emerges where these structures aren’t recognizable. Similarly, on a universal scale, while there are clusters like star systems and galaxies, their fluidity and structural memory are limited.
The same goes for time scales. On extremely micro or macro time scales, recognizing a solid’s structural memory becomes impossible.
The aspect of perception also matters. We understand structural memory because of our vision and touch. With hearing, smell, or taste, recognizing this property of solids would be impossible. Thus, the way intelligence recognizes structural memory depends on whether we perceive an object through light, sound, smell, taste, or touch.
Advanced Functions of Solids
We tend to overlook that solids have advanced functions because they seem so common to us.
I believe that information processing by ordinary computers is similar to solids in that it’s deterministic processing. It also shares the nature of solids in that it deals with discrete digital values like integers rather than continuous analog values like real numbers.
On the other hand, our brains or artificial intelligence using neural networks have fluidity like liquids in the sense that they are continuous and have ambiguity. They are also considered to have quantum uncertainty in a probabilistic sense.
Generally speaking, human brains or artificial intelligence through neural networks tend to be regarded as achieving more advanced things than regular computers. Indeed, in areas such as pattern recognition, human brains and neural networks accomplish processing that ordinary computers cannot.
However, considering the evolution of the brain as a biological neural center, it’s rather the opposite. Pattern recognition is performed by the old brain. Inference or simulation-like processing is a unique ability of the evolved new brain. AI has also evolved from being able to perform only pattern recognition to gaining the ability to reason.
This ability to infer or simulate is precisely the solid-like processing that ordinary computers excel at.
Even in the origin of life, if we consider it based on the chemical evolution theory, it is believed that cells were born in a liquid state of organic soup initially.
The universe also went through stages of hot plasma, gas, and liquid after the Big Bang before solids appeared.
In this sense, the nature of storing solid or solid-like structures is an advanced function, something at the further end of evolution. We often overlook this because we live in a world where solids are commonplace, but solids are playing a very advanced role.
Free Structure: Structures with a Range of Motion
Solids, even if they have flexibility and elasticity, will return to the structure they remember once the force is released. However, when solids are connected and the connection points are given freedom, that part becomes a range of motion.
The range of motion is easy to understand if you imagine the joints between bones. The mating part of a wall and door, and the contact point between a wheel and bearing are also ranges of motion.
I mentioned that information processing by ordinary computers also has the nature of solids. When linking programs together, the interface part that becomes the connection point is the range of motion.
Here, we will call the structure that combines such a range of motion and solids with a range of motion a free structure.
Living beings, by acquiring skeletons in the process of evolution, have gained free structures. This expanded their range of behavior, enabled them to move faster, and control greater forces. Machines also have a free structure.
Computer programs are also free structures. They can realize a wide range of processing for information. The evolved brain can also perform solid-like processing like computers, such as reasoning and simulation. This is based on language. Not only programming languages but also natural languages have a free structure.
In Conclusion: Earth as a Free Structure
The Earth is a solid planet, as I stated. However, it’s not simply a static star covered in hard rocks. There are water and atmosphere on the surface, and mantle deep underground. This makes the Earth’s environment a structure with a range of motion, a free structure.
The mantle mobilizes the land. It’s the theory of continental drift. Since the birth of life, ecosystems that evolved uniquely in each continent’s environment were divided or merged by the movement of continents. This is thought to have had a significant impact on the evolution of ecosystems.
Water and atmosphere move substances. This property must have accelerated chemical evolution on Earth before the birth of the first cell. It is thought that the Earth’s water and atmospheric circulation connected many pools where organic matter accumulated.
Solidity and free structure in intelligence, solidity and free structure in biology. These emerged on a planet with solidity and a free structure, which is exceptionally rare in the universe: Earth. This nature of the Earth is the foundation of life and intelligence.
