Oh dear. Sorry for missing the typo! — Pattern-chaser
I couldn't resist. I suggest you blame auto-correct! — Theologian
that concept of life has been around long before the theory of evolution was accepted by anyone — TheHedoMinimalist
I must say that I’m impressed with your ability to philosophize. You are definitely the most impressive person who has responded to me thus far. — TheHedoMinimalist
Fair point.well, it appears as though infertile humans wouldn’t qualify as life by the 4 requirements you have listed — TheHedoMinimalist
I’ve been thinking about how I might myself deal with this objection. Of course, it applies not just to biologically infertile humans, but to all organisms that do not self-replicate. Worker ants, and for that matter any organism that simply fails in the evolutionary game. Could we say that a mayfly that died without ever managing to breed was never alive? There seems to be something wrong with this.
So to offer a slightly more refined version of my definition, I’d say that once you start with a complex thing that self replicates, evolution is ignited. Once that happens, you generate a tree structure that continues to exists because at least some nodes do self replicate.
Once you have that, each node on that tree – each individual organism – qualifies as alive. Regardless of whether it, as an individual node, self replicates or not.
Indeed, we may even recognize that the very fact that many nodes do not self replicate is itself a vital aspect of the evolutionary process that creates and maintains life. — Theologian
I like that. I like it a lot. Put far better than me. — Stephen Cook
Would this imply that our current software is alive? Software is both complex and self-replicating. — TheHedoMinimalist
...is that I figured that thermodynamics would take care of that automatically. No pattern will ever be able to self-replicate perfectly all of the time.2) The replication process should not, in all circumstances, produce perfect copies and should, instead, allow for a tiny amount of random variation — Stephen Cook
What if there was just one bacteria cell on Mars which almost replicated but got killed by an unlikely natural disaster the moment before successfully doing so? — TheHedoMinimalist
If there was just one alien being on a distant plant that can live forever, would he need to reproduce to be considered alive? — TheHedoMinimalist
Sooo... I hope we're in agreement that this is a purely lexical argument. And I wasn't attempting to do lexicography in this instance. In terms of the ordinary sense of the word, I think Cookie Monster did a better job than I did. Which is why I quoted him in the first place! :wink: — Theologian
Also, in the technical meta-language of linguistics, I think it's clear that the term "life" seems to be polysemous. "Poly" as in many (or at least more than one), "sem" as in semantics. By which I mean it has more than one meaning, and no-one is going to be able to reconcile them all. In fact, polysemous words are really more than one word that just happens to share the same surface form. They sound the same, and we may or may not spell them the same. — Theologian
My answer may come down to what you mean by a "being." If you mean only that it is sentient, then I think it would be a mistake to automatically equate sentience with biology. I'm not ready to rule out the idea that there may be other ways to achieve sentience — Theologian
Sorry it took me a while to respond. — TheHedoMinimalist
I think that in having previously admitted that all nodes on an evolutionary tree are "alive," where I'm ultimately headed is toward the idea that evolution produces certain kinds of order, and that we may recognize these ordered forms even when they do not reproduce. So we may apply the same principle to your hypothetical Martian bacteria. We could also apply the same principle to a cell of artificial life that was constructed in a laboratory but then just never transported to a nutrient-rich environment in which it could grow and ultimately reproduce. — Theologian
Mitochondria are semi-automomous "beings" that live inside everyone of our cells. They migrate from the mother's cells to the unborn foetus in the early stages of "life", but are themselves no living because they can have no existence outside of the cell. — Sculptor
the analogy is poor — Sculptor
oxygen is common to all things, and quite different from the co-dependancy of mitochondria and animals — Sculptor
Oxygen is not a candidate. The question is mitochondria? — Sculptor
Mitochondria are semi-automomous "beings" that live inside everyone of our cells. They migrate from the mother's cells to the unborn foetus in the early stages of "life", but are themselves no living because they can have no existence outside of the cell. — Sculptor
So is it fair to observe that humans cannot be alive, because they can have no existence outside of an oxygen-rich atmosphere? — Pattern-chaser
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