用大模型分析生命定义,发现不同观点其实共存于同一概念空间。
What Lives? A meta-analysis of diverse opinions on the definition of life
- 用大模型和配对相关性分析生命定义,构建语义向量
- 揭示生命概念是连续谱而非二元分类,存在多个原型
- 为跨学科争议性定义问题提供计算分析新路径
“什么是生命?”这一问题困扰科学家与哲学家数百年,催生了多种定义,反映其起源之谜及学科视角的多样性。尽管在生物系统、心理学、计算与信息论方面取得进展,尚未形成被普遍接受的生命定义。随着合成生物学、人工智能和天体生物学的发展,传统生命观面临挑战。本文采用大语言模型(LLMs)分析由跨学科专家提供的生命定义集合,通过新型配对相关性分析将定义映射为特征向量,结合凝聚聚类、簇内语义分析与t-SNE投影,揭示生命定义背后的潜在概念原型。该方法表明,生命定义问题不应视为二元分类,而应理解为统一概念潜在空间中的差异化视角。本研究为科学与哲学中基础性问题提供了还原论与整体论之间的方法桥梁,展示了计算语义分析在跨学科概念模式识别中的潜力,并为其他争议性定义领域开辟新路径。
原文摘要 · Abstract (English)
The question of "what is life?" has challenged scientists and philosophers for centuries, producing an array of definitions that reflect both the mystery of its emergence and the diversity of disciplinary perspectives brought to bear on the question. Despite significant progress in our understanding of biological systems, psychology, computation, and information theory, no single definition for life has yet achieved universal acceptance. This challenge becomes increasingly urgent as advances in synthetic biology, artificial intelligence, and astrobiology challenge our traditional conceptions of what it means to be alive. We undertook a methodological approach that leverages large language models (LLMs) to analyze a set of definitions of life provided by a curated set of cross-disciplinary experts. We used a novel pairwise correlation analysis to map the definitions into distinct feature vectors, followed by agglomerative clustering, intra-cluster semantic analysis, and t-SNE projection to reveal underlying conceptual archetypes. This methodology revealed a continuous landscape of the themes relating to the definition of life, suggesting that what has historically been approached as a binary taxonomic problem should be instead conceived as differentiated perspectives within a unified conceptual latent space. We offer a new methodological bridge between reductionist and holistic approaches to fundamental questions in science and philosophy, demonstrating how computational semantic analysis can reveal conceptual patterns across disciplinary boundaries, and opening similar pathways for addressing other contested definitional territories across the sciences.
Thank you to arXiv for use of its open access interoperability. PaperDance 不是 arXiv 官方产品;中文卡片由大模型生成,请以原文为准。