Define inanimate. What is its essence? — apokrisis

That I couldn't describe the difference between animate and inanimate, in a way which would be acceptable to you, doesn't ,mean that there isn't such a difference. It could mean that I don't know the difference, and it could mean that you are obstinate.

So somewhere life must have an idea of the material structure it desires to build or maintain. Which is where the imateriality enters the picture. — apokrisis

Why does this need to be an "idea"? Many of the activities of living things are of the nature of trial and error. Trial and error requires the will to act, but it does not require an idea of what success consists of. The will to act is most often driven by indeterminate feelings such as hunger, and these feelings cannot be classified as ideas. It is not necessary to assume an "idea" as the motivation behind the desire to act.

In many metaphysical stances, immateriality "enters the picture", as the immaterial cause, the will. Yes, we are lead to acceptance of the immaterial, through the existence of ideas, as ideas are evidence of the immaterial, but "the idea" is denied active status, and therefore causal status in the world, by the well established principles of Aristotle. Therefore the idea cannot have "actual" existence in the real physical world, its existence is confined to the minds of living beings.

So as metaphysicians we are forced to seek the means whereby that which is immaterial acts within the physical world, and this is the will. The will, as the immaterial cause, is something completely distinct from the idea. And as I described above, the will to act, as a cause of activity, is not necessarily guided by ideas. We feel the will to act, motivating us through indeterminate feelings. The rational mind attempts to put a halt to these motivating feelings with "will power", allowing ideas to intervene as guidance.

Would you categorise a tornado as inanimate and on what grounds precisely?

Define inanimate. What is its essence? :) — apokrisis

Not animate. Duhhh...

It doesn't in any direct way. We got side tracked by you claiming that the essence of A and B must exist for the law of non-contradiction to be applicable. I refute this by claiming that we only need consistency and not essence for it. If we agree to this, then my first premise in the argument to prove that essences exist stands: "Either a being is a living being or a non-living being. It cannot be both." — Samuel Lacrampe

Let me try this logic out. Suppose I try to nail down the essence of 'cute'. I pick an arbitrary way to sort things into two heaps: A thing is cute if it masses more than a KG. So I am cute, but this pebble is not. There is at least one thing in each heap, therefore there must be an essence of cute. Somehow the proof seems invalid. Your 'bald' criteria (admittedly not the actual essence) is more a description of alopecia, not bald.

Maybe "circular" was the wrong word; my bad. Nevertheless, it sounds like you demand to know X in order to prove X using the law of non-contradiction.

That X exists, not that it is known. If it doesn't exist, then there is no definite is-life or not sorting, and your first premise fails. Not talking about our ability to know or not, but an actual indeterminate state of some thing being life or not. Without the essence, there is no fact of the matter, and no contradiction by something being in that questionable state.

I invoke Aristotle's theory of abstraction: We all have in ourselves the implicit knowledge of terms such as 'living' and 'non-living'. This is so by our years of sense observation of the world. — Samuel Lacrampe

And we have but one example from all our sense observation. Our implicit knowledge concerns only that one example. Intuitions will not serve us for the general case as we attempt to recognize the second example.

This implicit knowledge is what enables us to use the terms correctly in everyday language, even if we don't have the explicit definition of all the terms used. Thus a 10-year old can have a meaningful conversation without ever having read a dictionary. Finding the essence of terms is simply acquiring explicit knowledge based on our implicit knowledge. I think our implicit knowledge that a dog is living and a rock is non-living is pretty grounded.

Read the NASA link that Banno posted. Dr Cleland speaks speaks directly about this. We are unconcerned with the 'definition of life', which would be a description of how the word is used in our language, and by said 10-year-old. What we're seeking in this thread is what she calls a "scientific theory of life" which seeks to define a set of rules for the more general case. Common language usage is of zero importance to what NASA does.

I notice that in that article, no attempt is made to set out any rules or traits or other progression towards this essence.

A definition of mind is required when it becomes necessary to differentiate between types of life. And different types of life have different types of mind. I think most biologists would agree that some types of life have no mind (e.g., plants).

The fields of ethology, comparative psychology, sociobiology and behavioural ecology are beginning to provide a common framework for understanding animal and human minds based on behaviour.

Apokrisis provides compelling explanatory metaphors to assert the existence of physical mind using semiotic terms based on physical behaviour.

Is it possible to extrapolate a definition of inorganic mind from what we know about organic minds using functional and/or semiotic terms without resorting to metaphor?

A biologist would stress that what is definitional is replication and metabolism. Respiration releases energy, but life also requires the ability to direct some of that into work - the work that rebuilds the body doing the respiring. — apokrisis

The reference to reproduction appears to allude to biological fitness. Still, for a given to have biological fitness, it must first be living. Life, of itself, is not defined by its replication—though replication is an empirical reality of life. But consider an organism that has never reproduced during the entirety of its lifespan; it would hold no biological fitness but would yet have been alive. And, at least as concerns humans, biological fitness seems to be lacking in some ways: Michelangelo had a far more significant impact on our species—on how our species has adapted to environment—than any contemporary that gave birth to say over twenty offspring. This obviously addresses replicability of phenotype and not of genotype.

On a different note, fire both replicates and releases energy—but it does not metabolize (hence does not engage in respiration as part of a metabolism). We can metaphorically describe fire as alive but it is not—it is not negentropic.

Also, as you likely well know, the process of metabolism is far more complex than a simple, linear chain reaction. It requires a type of holistic interaction, and integration, on the part of that which metabolizes—be it a bacterium, a plant, or a human. This holistic interaction—together with all that it entails—is what Francisco Varela termed autopoiesis, i.e. self-generation. There is a bridge between autopoiesis and mind: to metabolize is to, in part, a) delineate self from non-self via behavior and b) to act and react relative to context in manners that best sustain the negentropy of self (one, for example, must find ways of obtaining that which is required for the releasing of energy). So, the autopoiesis of metabolism could be argued to imply some form of at least rudimentary mind—this as some of Varela’s crowd do uphold. While metabolism unfolds on a physical plane, autopoiesis can be contemplated on a metaphysical plane. The latter, in turn, could then be potentially applicable to the Cosmos. But I as of yet haven’t thought out this perspective of the Cosmos’s autopoiesis in what is to me a satisfactory manner--this to have any informed opinion.

[It’s interesting to me that while the Latin term for soul is anima, mind is termed animus. Both anima and animus refer to the same underlying process that facilitates breath. Again, given our modern knowledge, this addressed underlying process is respiration, an essential aspect of metabolism. And metabolism, as just mentioned, can tie into Varela’s et al.’s concepts of autopoiesis and mind.]

I think most biologists would agree that some types of life have no mind (e.g., plants). — Galuchat

This consensus by most biologists is most likely real. Still, some burgeoning fields of biology do uphold plants to have intelligence and, therefore, plant-minds.

An internet search on “plant intelligence” brings up any number of articles on the subject. An easily appraised example—because it is so visual—is that of what is commonly known as the “dancing plant”. You can find videos of it on youtube. Its leaves will move in response to sounds in timespans that make the motion visible to us. The big deal is multifaceted: its mechanisms for the perception of sound are a mystery; then there’s the reaction aspect: why and how do individual leaves move in certain ways when sound is present … say, as compared to all its movable leaves moving at once in response to sound? But other harder to visualize examples of what some uphold as plant intelligence abound. I more recently saw a documentary where, as far as I recall, a certain tree species in Africa was discovered to collectively kill off herbivores that ate its leaves during times of drought: when its leaves were over-grazed it reacted by a) increasing the tannins it otherwise naturally produced, now to the point of lethality, and b) appearing to somehow convey information for an increase in tannin production to nearby trees of the same species.

Plants are weird lifeforms, though. For example, their selfhood as unique beings is poorly understood (if at all ever philosophically contemplated): such as when one root system gives rise to what above ground appears as multiple individual plants. Is it one lifeform or many that are intertwined?

I’ve mentioned this only because I’m in favor of upholding plant intelligence: imo, if it’s alive, it has some form of mind. This gets back to metabolism and autopoiesis as mentioned in my previous post. But I’d welcome learning of alternative definitions of what mind minimally is.

Not animate. Duhhh... — noAxioms

So the LEM applies to inanimate, but not to animate? Interesting.

Would you categorise a tornado as inanimate and on what grounds precisely? — apokrisis

It's not a living thing. Inanimate means not living. You could, if you want, say that the tornado is animate by some other definition of "animate", but then we're not talking about the same thing. I'm talking about the difference between living and not-living. What are you talking about?

This consensus by most biologists is most likely real. Still, some burgeoning fields of biology do uphold plants to have intelligence and, therefore, plant-minds. — javra

Apparently, trees send within themselves, electrical messages, similar to the nerves of animals but they travel much slower. They are communicate through there roots and networks of mycelium which intertwine with the roots

Is it possible to extrapolate a definition of inorganic mind from what we know about organic minds using functional and/or semiotic terms without resorting to metaphor? — Galuchat

In science, talk about any quality ceases to be metaphor to the degree the quality can be measured or quantified. And my pansemiotic argument is that the two sides of hylomorphic nature - its informational form and its material dynamics - can be measure in the one shared coin of information (canonical degrees of freedom).

So metaphorically, Shannon information is "mindful" and Boltzmann/Gibbs entropy is "material". And the two can be brought together in a common semiotic framework such as Stan Salthe's infodynamics - https://www.ecologyandsociety.org/vol7/iss3/art3/

The idea is that all existence can be understood in terms of a systems ontology. That is, everything is a case of downwardly acting constraints shaping upwardly constructing degrees of freedom. And so we have Peirce's triadic system of interpretance. The constraints are Shannon information. The degrees of freedom are Boltzmann entropy. The message of one acts on the uncertainty of the other to create a substantial world.

This general pansemiotic framework thus allows you to talk about dissipative structures like tornadoes or the Cosmos itself in terms of the "mindful" constraint of "material" freedoms. There is a common coin of measurement - Planck-scale bits of information. Or to dig deeper, there is a canonical scale of (quantum) indeterminacy - ie: Apeiron, firstness, vagueness - that constraints collapse to classical actuality (the definite microstates that thermodynamics counts).

So pansemiosis has become a pretty concrete proposal for a generalised metaphysics in that it ties any talk of mind - or matter - to a more foundational notion of being ... bits of information. And then even the bits of information are explained in terms of emergence or symmetry breaking, the collapse of indeterminism.

People think they know what they are talking about when they speak dualistically about mind and matter. However the purpose of science is to inquire rather deeper into the true nature of existence. And so it is no surprise if this folk ontology distinction - the oh so familiar Cartesian framing of the question - will come out sounding very different once science has been used to precisify our concepts in ways that actually make them measurable.

I note that you still seem unable to define what you mean by inanimate. That is pretty telling.

Not surprisingly, the major criticism that theoretical biologists would have of autopoiesis is that it undercooks the informational aspect of dissipative structure. It doesn't account for the repair or replication aspect by which an organism is able to maintain its existence through having a model of itself.

So autopoiesis was great - back when mainstream biology was doing the opposite of undercooking the dynamical or developmental aspect of life. After DNA was discovered, the self-model became the big deal. And autopoiesis was one of the many responses, tugging at the mainstream's sleeve and saying, no guys, hang on a minute.

But still it remains the case that both information and dynamics are required to explain life and mind (as well as "inanimate, because lacking a self-replicating model" dissipative structure). So a balanced definition of life - such as to be found in the works of Rosen, Pattee and Salthe - stresses the complementary duality of metabolism and replication, or the material processes and the informational constraints.

Apparently, trees send within themselves, electrical messages, similar to the nerves of animals but they travel much slower. They are communicate through there roots and networks of mycelium which intertwine with the roots — Metaphysician Undercover

I’ve come across similar information in passing—though I haven’t paid close attention to it. Apparently the consensus is that it’s a plant’s roots which most likely serve as the decision center of the plant.

I note that you still seem unable to define what you mean by inanimate. That is pretty telling. — apokrisis

Yes, it's very telling. It tells me that you are being obstinate.

I just told you, inanimate means not-living. What more are you asking for?

I'll repeat myself:

That I couldn't describe the difference between animate and inanimate, in a way which would be acceptable to you, doesn't ,mean that there isn't such a difference. It could mean that I don't know the difference, and it could mean that you are obstinate. — Metaphysician Undercover

Your metaphysics denies the difference between living and not living, so no matter how I define this difference you'll simply reject it in favour of your metaphysics. What's the point?

Not surprisingly, the major criticism that theoretical biologists would have of autopoiesis is that it undercooks the informational aspect of dissipative structure. It doesn't account for the repair or replication aspect by which an organism is able to maintain its existence [...]. — apokrisis

Accounts such as those of Evan Thompson in the book Mind in Life (2007) have it otherwise.

So a balanced definition of life - such as to be found in the works of Rosen, Pattee and Salthe - stresses the complementary duality of metabolism and replication, or the material processes and the informational constraints. — apokrisis

If you are addressing nucleic acids replication, isn't nucleic acids replication part of metabolism to begin with? Such as in the production of proteins, etc. It is as far as I know.

Makes it sound as though you are addressing reproduction in general. But, then, mules would be non-living organisms by definition--to list just one example.

There's a book by a German forester Peter Wohlleben, called "The Hidden Life of Trees". It's quite interesting, with reference to numerous scientific studies. He considers the root system to be the tree's brain. There are many exchanges between the roots of different trees, carried out through mycelium which live in a symbiotic relationship with the trees. There is evidence that the trees communicate.

You claim that you only won't provide your definition because I would obstinately just then reject it.

I call obvious BS. You don't have one. So there is not even a definition of yours to accept.

I follow Aristotle's description which is mostly accepted by modern biology. Life is defined by the potencies of the living being, from the simplest, the power of self-nourishment, through self-movement, to the more complex, sensation, and intellection.

Found the book online. Thanks.

And what you were asked for was the essence of inanimate matter.

Does it not have its own form of nous - its reason for being - under Aristotelian hylomorphism? Is it not Platonically necessary as the indeterminate chora to accept the impression of the eternal ideas?

Remember it was you who brought up the distinction between animate and inanimate. And you are proving my guess that it was an empty distinction as you can't now define what you actually mean by things that lack animation.

Accounts such as those of Evan Thompson in the book Mind in Life (2007) have it otherwise. — javra

Of course Thompson defends autopoeisis. This is a contentious issue with two sides. And it is not that autopoeisis is wrong - it accounts for dissipative structure level self organisation. But the criticism is that it doesn't adequately define life, which has the extra thing of an epistemic cut to separate the self (the auto) from the production (the poeisis) in proper semiotic fashion.

The battle does still rumble on in the background for some - here are papers from both directions...

https://biologyofcognition.files.wordpress.com/2008/06/autopoietic_mr.pdf

http://www.orgs-evolution-knowledge.net/Index/DocumentKMOrgTheoryPapers/HallNousala2010AutopoiesisCognitionKnowledgeSelfSustainingOrganizations(final).pdf

If you are addressing nucleic acids replication, isn't nucleic acids replication part of metabolism to begin with? Such as in the production of proteins, etc. It is as far as I know.

Makes it sound as though you are addressing reproduction in general. But, then, mules would be non-living organisms by definition--to list just one example. — javra

I'm addressing what I've been addressing all along - the separation of the model of the self from the production of the self in organisms. Now we can call those the replication and the metabolism, so long as those terms are understood in this generic sense. More precise to me would be Pattee's distinction between rate-independent information and rate-dependent dynamics.

So you are getting bogged down by particular expressions of informational control - the functional ability to repair cellular processes, or reproduce individual cells and whole organisms, or to enter into the evolutionary race first by the free exchange of genetic fragments and eventually via whole genome replication.

But I am talking about the code-matter duality at its most general or abstract level as understood within theoretical biology.

And some of the new points I mentioned - given the excitingly rapid advances being made at the moment - were the proof that there is a thermal quasiclassical zone where this kind of semiosis can physically take place, because that is the scale where material dynamics is so critically poised (between autopoeietic remaking and thermal dissoloution). And so in turn organismic information can tilt action in directions of "its own choice" from safe in its haven of DNA and other information capturing mechanism.

So the point of that is we don't just have to talk about high level functional concepts like replication and reproduction. We can talk about this infodynamic duality right down at the nanoscale level of the molecular machinery. We can see that definitional distinction in action down there - where life really begins.

The confusion arises from your criticism of metabolism being the essence of life; more specifically, from your statements that there is a duality between metabolism and replication required for life to obtain. With my justifications previously expressed, I still find reason to uphold that metabolism is a sufficient definition of life (granted that it includes the self-generation of the metabolizing self which, in part, requires nucleic acid replication, obviously).

The code-matter duality you address was for me something removed to the barebones hypothesis I’ve put forward. And you have yet to make the case that life requires something other than metabolism--whatever the metaphysical underpinnings of metabolism might be.

In truth, to my knowledge, one of the harshest criticisms of autopoiesis regards its implied metaphysics of causality: autopoiesis is impossible within a system fully comprised of efficient causation. Nor can it be stated to be causally indeterministic. And teleological causation on its own seems insufficient to explain it. But this metaphysical topic regarding non-classical forms of causation (here: the origination of effects) seems best suited to a different thread.

Eppur si muove. (Galileo intended this for planet Earth, but the quote also works for life’s movements via self-generating, negentropic, holistic, metabolic processes)

And you have yet to make the case that life requires something other than metabolism--whatever the metaphysical underpinnings of metabolism might be. — javra

Obviously, metabolism being unstable, it needs the further thing of a stabilising overlay of informational machinery. I think you are presuming that other aspect of a living system as part of your understanding of metabolism rather than breaking it out explicitly.

I still find reason to uphold that metabolism is a sufficient definition of life (granted that it includes the self-generation of the metabolizing self which, in part, requires nucleic acid replication, obviously). — javra

Yep. Metabolism + repair. You can have a metabolic network of components and processes. But the components don't last so some higher level memory must know how and when to replace them. Which is where a hierarchical or semiotic modelling relation is required. It is the instability of the metabolic parts that require some longer term machinery to provide the stability.

And what you were asked for was the essence of inanimate matter. — apokrisis

No, that's not true. You ought to make yourself more clear. What you asked of me was to define "inanimate". That I did. Now you add a subject, which is "matter", and make "inanimate" a predicate. So you are now asking for the essence of matter which is inanimate. I now need to produce two distinct definitions, one for "inanimate", and one for "matter".

Does it not have its own form of nous - its reason for being - under Aristotelian hylomorphism? Is it not Platonically necessary as the indeterminate chora to accept the impression of the eternal ideas? — apokrisis

You have now completed your change of subject. The subject is no longer "inanimate", which is what you first asked me to define, the subject is now "matter". You appear to be suggesting that there is no such thing as inanimate matter, that all matter has inherent within it, properties of animate being, such as mind and intention. But this is not at all necessary to the concept of matter. "Matter" is a concept which accounts for our observed temporal continuity of existence. In Newtonian physics its essential property is expressed as inertia. Aristotle posited "matter", in his physics as that which persists, does not change, when change is occurring. Form is what is active and changing. With the assumption of matter, Aristotle could coherently talk about a changing object as continuing to be the same object despite changes to its form.

There is no need to assume that matter must have any properties of life. So long as the concept of "matter" provides us with the principles of temporal extension, there is no need to assign "life" to that temporal extension. In modern physics, "energy" has replaced the concept of "matter", because Newton's expression of "inertia" as the essence of matter replaced Aristotle's expression of "temporal continuity". These two are incompatible because Newton allows that inertia may be changed with force, while Aristotle does not allow that matter can change.

Since Newton's concept of matter replaced Aristotle's, there was a new need for a concept to account for observed temporal continuity. This need was filled by the concept of "energy" which now provides us with the principles of temporal extension. But there is no logical necessity forcing us to assume that energy must be living. So we have two distinct forms of temporal extension, living and not-living. Therefore we have two distinct classifications of matter and energy, living matter and energy, and inanimate matter and energy. There is no reason to conflate the two because that is simply category error.

So forget matter (or rather, substantial being) and give me your definition of inanimate. I presumed you thought of it as some kind of predicate of substantial being. Indeed, surely it is? But now you are being even more strangely evasive.

I already gave my definition of inanimate, it means not-living. You don't understand, because you see everything in terms dichotomy, so from your perspective, one cannot simply define one side of an opposing pair. But in reality, that's what we do. We describe the characteristics of one side, say "living" for example, and if the observed thing does not fulfill the conditions, we designate it not-living. Likewise, we define what it means to be circular, and everything else is not circular. Obviously, I can tell you what it means to be not-circular without telling you what it means to be circular. To be not-circular means that it doesn't fulfill the conditions for being circular. It means nothing more than that.

So I don't know why you're so hung up on "inanimate". It's very simply "not-living". The more relevant question is the one of the op, what constitutes "living". If one is wrong in their determination as to what constitutes living, then that person might also be wrong when they come to designate something as inanimate. But there is no need for an extensive description of "inanimate". It is just everything which does not fulfill the conditions in the description of what it means to be living.

Can you give me a general definition of "mind" which is consistent with "how the physical world is itself a mind" and the human mind? Presumably, this definition would be consistent with current work in physiosemiotics and psychosemiotics. — Galuchat

Is it possible to extrapolate a definition of inorganic mind from what we know about organic minds using functional and/or semiotic terms without resorting to metaphor? — Galuchat

In science, talk about any quality ceases to be metaphor to the degree the quality can be measured or quantified. And my pansemiotic argument is... — Apokrisis

I'll take that as a "No".

Your explanatory metaphors may be compelling, but until they are translated into the specialist vocabulary of each particular science, and your concept of pansemiosis is accepted as an overarching principle, they are of no scientific value.

How does (healthy) metabolism not imply the presence of homeostasis and repair?

Can empirical examples of the first devoid of either of the latter be provided?

I'll take that as a "No". — Galuchat

I gave a lengthy answer. You can pretend I didn't if you like.

What your monadism implies, my dualism (which in fact unfolds to a hierarchical triadism) seeks to make explicit.

In particular, I refer to those advancements which have created the categories of animate and inanimate things. — Metaphysician Undercover

So inanimate is a category? But it lacks a definite essence? A tornado can move, grow, die, dissipate energy, sort of like something animate, but we can't yet put a finger on why it is in fact inanimate?

Sounds legit.