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What Lives? A meta-analysis of diverse opinions on the definition of life

Created by
  • Haebom

Author

Reed Bender, Karina Kofman, Blaise Ag uera y Arcas, Michael Levin

Outline

This paper presents a novel methodology for analyzing existing definitions reflecting perspectives from various disciplines to address the long-standing question, "What is life?", utilizing large-scale language models (LLMs). By analyzing expert-provided definitions of life using pairwise correlation analysis, agglomerative clustering, within-cluster semantic analysis, and t-SNE projection, the researchers uncovered conceptual archetypes of life definitions. This suggests that, rather than conventional dichotomous categorization, we should understand life definitions from diverse perspectives within a unified conceptual latent space. This study presents a novel methodological bridge connecting reductionist and holistic approaches and demonstrates the potential of LLMs to uncover cross-disciplinary conceptual patterns through computational semantic analysis.

Takeaways, Limitations

Takeaways:
A novel methodology for performing interdisciplinary analysis of life definitions using large-scale language models is presented.
Providing a new perspective that moves beyond the dichotomous approach to defining life and integrates diverse perspectives.
Building a methodological bridge connecting reductionist and holistic approaches.
Suggesting the possibility of identifying conceptual patterns across academic disciplines through computational semantic analysis.
Presenting a methodology applicable to controversial definitional areas in other scientific fields.
Limitations:
Limitations and potential bias of the LLMs used
Consideration needs to be given to the composition and diversity of the professional group.
Further research is needed to interpret and generalize the results.
Further validation of the applicability of the new methodology to other fields is needed.
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