And what would 'objective' here mean? After all, there is an objectivity to looking itself, which is what studies of illusion show us.

Well if you can make sense of what a thing looks like when there is no looking involved, then be my guest.

Correct.

Then you have a poor grasp of the English language.

And what does this have to do with perception? Jesus.

But that's not a sensical claim. It is not even wrong. It's a grammatically correct salad of words.

Whereas the indirect realist says that a thing's appearance is only representative of its objective properties — Michael

But what is the status of this 'only'? Only, as opposed to what, exactly? A thing's appearance is not... nonsense?

Make up your mind: does science 'extract properties which aren't creature dependant' or is science 'creature dependent'. You can't have you cake and eat it. Note that I don't at all agree with your understanding of science, but that's not relevant.

But doesn't science do exactly that by extracting the properties which aren't creature dependant to arrive at an abstract picture? Nagel's view from nowhere. That's the point of objectivity. — Marchesk

And if I were to grant that this is what science does, what would this have to do with perception? If 'science says': here are some properties of the thing which is not 'creature dependent', then by definition it clearly isn't talking about anything to do with perception, with how a thing appears to a 'creature'.

Do our experiences provide us with information about what the world is like when we're not looking? — Michael

But looking provides us with information about how a thing looks to that which looks at it. If this has a ring of tautology to it, it should. But the creation of a false problem happens when you try and step outside this tautology to ask: but what would it look like to something which doesn't look at it? But of course the question is nonsense. But - and this is why this problem is so prevalent - the nonsensical nature of the question is covered over and 'hidden' by the illegitimate semantic slide by how a thing looks like and how a thing 'is' ('what the world 'is' like'). But the question of appearance belongs in the domain of appearance. A thing looks like how it looks like to you. A legitimate question might be: but why does it look this way and not another way? But not: what does it look like when there is no looking involved?

If you don't keep absolutely clear the distinction between a thing's appearance and what it 'is' (the 'apperential' properties of a thing being a subset of the many properties a thing might have), and if you speak about them as though they belonged in the same category, you're going to ask pseudo-questions.

How is it not? What are the external inputs? What are their properties? Do any of those properties show up in our experiences? — Marchesk

What would it mean for something to be 'unlike' what it appears? Would it appear differently? But appearance is just a function of a perceptual process, and to speak of an appearence-which-is-not-an-appearence simply makes no sense. A different kind of perceptual system might perceive things that we don't (the eyes of an insect, say), but - to put it tautologically - there is no point of view which is not a point of view.

You've basically quoted evidence that our perception is internally generated from a combination of external inputs, and ongoing processing in the brain (conversation between cortex and thalamus). — Marchesk

Sure, but what would it otherwise be? What sense can be made of saying that perception is not as such? What you call 'anti-realism' only makes sense when countervailed by 'realism', but what you call 'realism' can be given no sensical content as far as I can see, which makes 'anti-realism' itself a position which states nothing, that marks a difference which makes no difference.

That would seem to largely support indirect realism, even if you're not interested in framing it that way. It also seems to support the Cyrenaic view of perception, which was that it was the result of bodily movements, with the addition of external inputs. — Marchesk

It only supports 'indirect realism' if the very distinction between direct and indirect realism makes sense. But of course, the point is that it doesn't. We see (to speak in the overused modality of sight) exactly what appears, insofar as appearance just is the result of a perceptual process. It could not even in principle be otherwise: there is nothing to 'compare' it to, there is no appearence-that-is-not-an-appearance, no perception which is not a result of a perceptual process.

As Michael points out, the external inputs can be totally unlike what consciousness presents us. — Marchesk

It's not clear that this is a sensical statement either.

.

This part is particularly intriguing. I can just hear some philosophers gnashing their teeth over this. Would love to see Dennett's reaction to it. — Marchesk

Anything that makes a Dennett gnash teeth - hopefully to grind them down to the point of silence - is fine by me!

I understand, but I don't see how it accomplishes that, since we do have sensory experiences which are not externally generated. — Marchesk

Those 'sensory experiences' are precisely what happens when the the vast physiological and psychological machinery that regulates our perception are not constrained by environmental affordances: dreams and hallucinations are the ultimate proof that there is a shit-ton that is 'contributed' by us in the process of perception, and which is let to 'run free' in abnormal circumstances. Another way to put this is that the difference between waking and dreaming is vastly overstated. Here is Evan Thompson on dreams:

"Wakefulness is nothing other than a dreamlike state constrained by external sensory inputs... the brain sustains the same core state of consciousness during REM sleep and wakefulness, but the sensory and motor systems we use to perceive and act can’t affect this consciousness in regular ways when we’re REM-sleep dreaming. Consciousness itself doesn’t arise from sensory inputs; it’s generated within the brain by an ongoing dialogue between the cortex and the thalamus. The difference between wakefulness and REM sleep lies in the degree to which sensory and motor information can influence this thalamocortical conversation. During REM sleep, sensory inputs are kept from entering the dialogue, while motor systems are shut down (you’re paralyzed except for eye movements) and attention fastens onto memories.

Simply put, when sensory inputs participate in the thalamocortical dialogue generating consciousness, they constrain what we experience and we have waking perception. When sensory inputs can’t participate in this dialogue in sleep, we dream. To put the idea another way, from the brain’s perspective—or rather from the perspective of the thalamocortical system sustaining consciousness—wakefulness is a case of dreaming with sensorimotor constraints, and dreaming is a case of perceiving without sensorimotor constraints." (Thompson, Waking, Dreaming, Being - this book has so much else to say on this subject, you really ought to read it).

This being a more scientifically elaborated idea which Bergson had decades ago: "We must suppose, in deep sleep, at least a functional break in the relation established in the nervous system between stimulation and motor reaction. So dreams would always be the state of a mind of which the attention was not fixed by the sensori-motor equilibrium of the body. ... If our analyses are correct, the concrete feeling that we have of present reality consists, in fact, of our consciousness of the actual movements whereby our organism is naturally responding to stimulation; so that where the connecting links between sensations and movements are slackened or tangled, the sense of the real grows weaker, or disappears." (Bergson, Matter and Memory).

Perception is loop that runs from body to world and back again; when the loop is broken or interrupted, there is still alot that goes on, but it does so aberrantly, in fragments. Hence the weird phenomenology of dreams, the general tendency to 'float' (unconstrained by a fixed body!), the general fragmentary nature of dreams, etc.

I'm not sure how putting it in those terms dissolves the philosophical issue of what a perceived tree is, or the skeptical concern that we can't know. — Marchesk

It dissolves it because it puts to ground the untenable, philosophically atrophied distinction between the 'mental' and the 'thing itself'; the very question posed by the OP is an error. The challenge is not to answer it but to reformulate its terms entirely.

As long as 'perception' continues to be spoken about as a 'mental', imagistic phenomenon - and not the bodily/physinomic, interactive, environmental, affective, anticipatory, and memory-laden process that it is - this thread will continue to be mired in aporia - as it currently is.

Luciano Floridi - Information: A Very Short Introduction (this was so incredibly average)
Lila Gatlin - Information Theory and the Living System
Dorion Sagan & Eric Schneider - Into the Cool: Energy Flow, Thermodynamics, and Life

One thing to note here is that contradiction is not inconsistency. Or, as a matter of terminological precision: inconsistency is a function of contradiction within a formal system: a system is said to be inconsistent if it contains contradictions. The claimed inconsistencies between relativity and QM are not of this kind: the entire point is that there are inconsistencies between two systems.

Note also just how strict the criteria are to meet the standard of contradiction: X and its opposite must be 'true' in order for contradiction to hold: a proposition must say that X AND ¬X is true. But of course there is no theory that claims any such thing. As it stands, the operator between the apparently 'contradictory' statements between QM and relativity is - I think assumed to be - a XOR operator (exclusive or): X ⊻ ¬X , not X ∧ ¬X. There is no 'contradiction' here, in the logical, intra-systemic sense. Things might be confusing because science writers are not logicians, and they are apt to use terms in ways that are not the technical terms of logic. This is to be expected, but it is also to be watched out for when trying to draw conclusions.

But among such correct statements is that every thing is what it is and is not what it is not, and so the thing does not contradict itself or any other thing. In other words, every thing - and therefore reality - is non-contradictory. — litewave

Your 'in other words' does not follow. Again, a lack of argument, and a missing minor premise.

I think non-contradiction applies to reality very well because only non-contradictory statements can correspond to reality — litewave

Granting that one can make any sense of the murky and loaded idea of 'correspondence', you've just made a claim about 'statements' - about what we can say of the world. And this is just where contradiction is applicable. And your 'because' does not have a minor premise attached to it: it is an incomplete chain of reasoning. As it stands, it does not qualify as a coherent argument at the level of sheer form, let alone content.

You misunderstand. I do not think that there may be balls that are not balls. I think that this is a non-issue. To say that contradictions do not apply to reality is not to say that there are contradictions in reality. It is to say that there neither are nor are not contradictions in reality. This is what non-application means. It's like asking how much an idea weighs: it neither weighs nor does not weigh anything - the very notion is a category mistake, an error of grammar.

But if such a state of affairs obtained in reality then reality would be absurd too. But I can't imagine that reality would be absurd... — litewave

In other words, contradiction is not something that could even in principle apply - or not - to things in the world; you 'can't imagine that reality would be absurd' because absurdity is a function of your imagination, not of the world. The failure of your imagination here simply marks the indifference of the world to the things that can be said of your imagination. The mistake is in projecting that failure of thought into the world as if your failure was a positive feature of the world itself.

Lord X’s cavalry were trying to move from point A to point B and simultaneously Lord X’s cavalry were not trying to move from point A to point B. — litewave

What does this even mean? Is this a state of affairs that can obtain in reality? No, but then, that's because it's your description that is absurd. It's an artificial knot you tied with language, nothing more.

it would be absurd if a thing or an action contradicted itself. It would mean that the thing or the action is not what it is. — litewave

Another knot, linguistically derived: create an absurdity, declare it's impossibility, than say that such a thing cannot be. A closed circle of triviality, finding what it put there in the first place, bewitchment of language. One wants to invert and extend Wittgenstein on this score...

""A thing is identical with itself."—There is no finer example of a useless proposition, which yet is connected with a certain play of the imagination. It is as if in imagination we put a thing into its own shape and saw that it fitted." (Wittgenstein, PI §216);

"A thing is and is not identical with itself" - The second best example of a useless proposition...

How is this relevant? — Michael

How indeed.

If it is nonsensical to apply the law of noncontradiction to nature then what is nature? — litewave

But this is the wrong question. It's a question of grammar and sense, not 'being' (what 'is'...?). It makes perfect sense to say that proposition X and proposition ¬X contradict: from this, one can draw conclusions, make inferences, etc. This is just what is means to make sense, to be sensical. No such way of proceeding presents itself when saying that some determinate thing or action or whathaveyou 'contradicts' itself or another thing. One cannot make sense of such a statement, cannot place it in the logical space of giving and asking for reasons. As Raymond Geuss points out, what we mistakenly think of as 'contradictions' in actions (for example) are generally just conflicts:

"The very idea of “contradiction,” taken strictly as a logical term, has no direct application to actions. This is not a point about logic, but about human action. Two actions can, of course, conflict in any number of ways. To use Kant’s example, two brothers, Lord X and Lord Y, may both be good Christians in that each wants what his brother wants: Milan. They can both “want Milan” (i.e., want to possess and control the city), and they can fight, either diplomatically or militarily, for control over it, but an action does not in itself become even a candidate for standing in a relation of contradiction or noncontradiction with another action until both actions are artificially “prepared” by being described in a canonical way. It is not the physical shock of Lord X’s and Lord Y’s cavalry in the Po Valley which constitutes a “contradiction” but the description of that shock in a very particular way.

It is no contradiction to say that Lord X’s cavalry were trying to move from point A to point B, and encountered Lord Y’s cavalry, who were trying to move from point B to point A. To speak of a “contradiction” one would at least need to describe what was happening in a statement like “Lord X is trying to make it the case that he (reflexive, i.e., Latin: se) controls Milan and that Lord Y does not control Milan” and “Lord Y is trying to make it the case that he (se) controls Milan and that Lord X does not control Milan.” Note how complicated and convoluted this formulation is, but note also that even this complex interpretative process has not visibly generated anything that one could call a contradiction. Lord X has a completely coherent project and so equally does Lord Y. To generate a contradiction one would have to move out of the real world altogether, in which Lord X and Lord Y are two distinct persons, and attribute the conjunction of projects of Lord X and Lord Y to the same person, say Z. About the hypothetical Z then one might say that what he wants is a contradiction: that Lord X control Milan and not control Milan, and that Lord Y control Milan and not control Milan. What status does this hypothetical Z have?" (Geuss, Moralism and Realpolitik).

To Geuss's understanding of action, one simply needs to add the category of 'events'. 'Contradiction' is a largely trivial and anaemic notion that is of limited use in approaching things. The presence of a contradiction invariably indicates a failure of thought and sense-making, not a property of the world; a failure of language and grammar, which the OP is a marvellous example of.

It's worth noting the distinction between saying that 'there are no contradictions in nature' (implying that, at least in principle, there could be) and that 'the very idea of a contradiction is inapplicable to nature' (i.e. that it is not impossible but non-sensical to speak of 'things/entities/events/actions' as contradictory or not: an error of grammar, as if to ask if an idea is coloured or not). The OP trades on the second kind of error - it is a grammatical mistake.

Is there anything to this thread other than your incredulity?

I don't think I've ever felt alienated doing philosophy; if anything, philosophy is 'home' for me; it's in its world that I feel challenged, comforted, exhilarated and, well, happy. I feel like an explorer doing philosophy, searching out new vistas and being thrilled by discoveries. I've certainly been alienated by certain texts or ideas, but only because I've found them absurd or bizarre - but not in a way that rebounds upon myself. But then, I'm generally of a sunny disposition to begin with ^.^

Cool. To provoke/frame a little more, I guess part of what's at stake is an 'anti-descriptivist' approach to 'life'. In fact I'd suggest the kinds of problems at work here at equally at work in all forms of nomination, whether it be life or - to crib from Kripke - Kurt Godel.

To try and square the circle you’ve pointed out: one thing that I wanted to bring out with the focus on gene expression is that, to the degree that we take expression to be an exemplar of a living process, life itself must be thought of in processual terms. This is a fairly uncontroversial point in-itself, I hope: life is not a ‘thing’ but a process - or, in a less ‘dualizing’ approach: life is a ‘thing’ composed of processes (the language here is strained). But, and this is the crux, the peculiarity of the process is that it is neither biotic nor abiotic, but is, as it were, continuous between the two realms - in fact, such is the continuity that to speak of ‘two realms’ is already something of an after-the-fact projection: the process itself ‘doesn’t care’ about the rather arbitrary labels imposed upon the ‘elements’ involved. In principle, one could map the causal dynamics involved in gene expression without parsing the constituent elements into biotic and abiotic and do so without any loss of information.

This indifference, I think, opens up a fascinating speculative possibility: that life itself can be entirely divorced from the biotic. To pursue this thought in a different register, consider the following line of speculation from the evolutionary biologists Eva Jablonka and Marion Lamb, who envisage a possible future in which the DNA inheritance system is altogether replaced by higher-order one - and that, not only could this possibly happen, but that something like it might have already happened with respect to our already existing DNA system:

"In existing organisms, which all have a nucleic acid–based inheritance system, it is inconceivable that the DNA inheritance system will be eliminated by another one that operates at a higher level. But theoretically it is possible that one heredity system can replace another. It may well have happened at an early stage in the evolution of life, during the murky period between chemical and biological evolution. Many theorists suggest that heredity during these early stages was not based on nucleic acids, and that the nucleic acid systems came later and replaced the primitive heredity systems. Maybe such a replacement will also occur in the distant future— if we create intelligent, reproducing, and evolving robots, they may eventually eliminate us. This would be equivalent to the elimination of one heredity system by another”. (Jablonka and Lamb, Evolution in Four Dimensions)

J+L are here not talking of course, about gene expression but inheritance systems in evolution more generally, but the principle is the same: that life itself may be considered as something entirely separate from the biotic. Life would thus be a formal principle rather than a material one: so long as the process and its organisation are kept in place, the exact ‘instantiation’ of the formal principle is - from a very specific perspective - a matter of sheer indifference (I take inspiration also from Robert Rosen and Nicholas Rashevsky’s imperative to "throw away the matter and keep the underlying organisation”, when speaking about biological systems).

The final step here is to see that formal systems, by definition, do not provide an index of their own applicability. That is, they simply say: ‘anything that meets these organisational criteria belong to the class of systems so named living’. But what does and does not count as ‘a’ thing here is not something that can be read off the phenomena itself: someone on a life support system might be said to be structurally coupled to that system, without which they would die: but the individuation of what counts and does not count here is a matter of judgement, not a matter of empirical study - hence the moral dilemmas we face when, in some circumstances, we decide on turning off a life support system or removing an breathing tube. Again, I’ve gone on too long and there’s still lots to say. But hope this fills out some possible gaps.

But I am talking about life, and quite specifically the question of 'what does and does not count as 'alive'. The emphasis is on the counting-as: a question of the applicability of criteria and the individuation of what, precisely, is at issue. And I was quite clear in the opening paragraph of the OP that I was concerned precisely with the process of gene expression - I even italicized the word in that paragraph - and what this process entails for thinking about what counts as life.

Perhaps I can put it this - not super precise - way: the question is not 'what is alive?', but 'what is alive?'. This latter is the question of individuation, of what counts-as a-life, a question which I think is opened by a reflection on the process of gene expression.

I don't think so, do other systems reproduce, metabolize, using the same unique set of tools (biological molecular parts)? — schopenhauer1

But this is the first time you've mentioned metabolism or reproduction. You previously spoke simply of hierarchical networked systems, that were, in a way not yet specified, biological.You seem to be filling in your definition as you go along. But - and this is about the fourth time I'm making this point, and I'm afraid I will not make it again - whether or not you do have an adequate definition of the living is not in question. It is a question of application, which is why I spoke about limit cases like viruses or life-support systems with fdrake, and which even Harry mentioned. Further, I never once asked 'what makes an ecosystem different than an organism', because I have been quite clear that I've been speaking about processes, and not 'units' of things. You seem to keep going over ground that is not relevant to what is being addressed. Perhaps I have not been clear, but it is tiring trying to correct for viewpoints I do not hold.

I don't think so because you are forgetting the part about biological constituents with the unique evolutionary ways that the organism uses to solve problems in the environment. — schopenhauer1

But this is just circular then: biological systems are systems with biological constituents...

Should there be limits to any system which is open and sharing some form of information? Do you accept that there can be discrete units that relate with other discrete units? — schopenhauer1

I don't understand what you're asking with these questions. Could you be more specific?

biological systems are a series of networks that are hierarchical. They are relational, and if some important components of the "nodes" are taken away, the system stops functioning. — schopenhauer1

This description would apply to literally any complex system, living or not. And besides, to repeat for the third time, the question is not whether or not we have a criteria for a living system or not, but whether one can discern whether or not such a criteria would apply to begin with. If you keep ignoring the fact that at issue is a question of individuation (what does and does not count as 'a' system), you'll miss what I'm trying to say.

Biotic processes are ones that have a mix BUT have the known constituent parts that comprise biological molecules. — schopenhauer1

But this would include say, ecosystems and river catchments. In any case I'm not arguing that we can't distinguish between biotic and abiotic processes: my point is rather that life itself traverses both such that life cannot be defined in strictly biotic terms. And to be extra clear, I'm also not arguing that we can't distinguish between life and not-life, only that such a distinction cannot be 'read off' the phenomena themselves in any straightforward way, if only because what exactly would and would not count as 'a' phenomena is precisely what is in question: a question of individuation.

. The organism, its genes, its environment, and its traits all have concrete physical existence in space and time, and can be distinguished accordingly. — Cabbage Farmer

But I'm talking about a process: the process of gene expression, and the question of how this process, which necessarily traverses both biotic and abiotic elements, entails an inability to situate life clearly on the side of the biotic. If anything, the abstraction lies in breaking down the process into it's analytic elements and ignoring its holistic aspects. If, on the other hand, I speak about the process in terms of a network, it is because network thinking best brings out the processual nature of what is at stake. It is no use, as such, in simply speaking of individual entities like 'organism', 'environment', etc - none of these capture of processual specificity of what is at stake here.

The point is that life cannot be analyzed from the ek-static point of view; an intentional account of it cannot be given, and no account of life can be inter-subjectively corroborated. — Janus

Ah fair enough, that makes more sense.

Thanks for the other references, anyway, but, really I am just beginning to explore Henry's ideas, and I would much rather flounder my way to a creative misreading, if that's what it is to come to; than be 'corrected' by 'expert' secondary opinions. — Janus

Heh, that's fine too, and despite my critical take on Henry, I still think he's an absolutely incredible philosopher who deserves to be widely studied and read. I think his intitutions regarding intentionality are absolutely right, even if I think his 'solution' is entirely wrong! Glad you're reading him nonetheless.

OK, but that leaves me wondering what criteria the political and ethical judgements will ideally be based upon. — Janus

Man, that's a whole other kettle of fish, but, at a minimum, I'd say that part of the challenge of both ethics and politics - the myriad differences between them notwithstanding - is that there can be no ideal criteria, only criteria immanent to the context(s) of judgement in which judgement must be exercised. But again, that's outside the scope fo this thread.

Among my favorite passages on this subject:

"[In Heidegger] the death that approaches ... singles me out, singularizes me, [and] posits my being on its own, delivers me over to the force of life that is singularly my own. It is the shadow of nothingness approaching that gives me the sense of the end, the end of the life that is singularly my own to live, that disconnects me from the general and recurrent fields of tasks that are for others. The dark shadow of death closing in draws the line of demarcation between the possibilities and tasks that are recurrent, walling them off from me as possibilities and tasks that are for-others, and isolating the range of possibilities and tasks that are for-me. The sense of the end that anxiety contains, the sense of ending, is what assigns an end to every move, and to the whole trajectory of my life. lt is what determines
ends, ends that are for-me, and an ending for each of my moves. The irreversible direction that my own death assigns to me is what gives direction and directives to each move that is my own." (Alphonso Lingis, Sensation)

It's not news that organisms like us need oxygen to stay alive. That gives us no reason to speak as though oxygen is alive. — Cabbage Farmer

Because the topology between 'inside' and 'outside' at stake here is different: it's not just that there are 'organisms' on the one side and 'oxygen' on the other; it's that epigenetic and environmental influences are already 'on the side' of life, or rather the organism, to begin with. That's the whole point of focusing on networks: whether the nodes in a genomnic network are biotic or abiotic is a matter of sheer indifference from the point of view of the network, which can only 'see' relations, topologies, and threshold values. While it's true, as others have pointed out, there is a kind of specificity provided by the spatio-temporal dynamics of the cellular environment itself, this only serves, as I've argued, to worsen the ambiguity because those dynamics themselves also cannot be neatly parsed along biotic/abiotic lines.

The problem is that life traverses both 'sides' in the manner of a mobius strip or klein bottle, where the distinction between inside and outside cannot really, be made:

It may even lead some thinkers to dissolve the distinction altogether which is what you and fdrake seem to have been alluding to in some of your comments. — Janus

It's not so much the goal to 'dissolve' the distinction as to 'denaturalize' it, to make it an object less of scientific analysis than political and ethical judgement.

It doesn't surprise me that you would think that given the presuppositions that are inherent in your approach. In a way I agree; life, as conceived by Henry is vacuous from the viewpoint of the determinate world of "ek-static phenomena". However, it is anything but vacuous in terms of living affection; which is really Henry's point. — Janus

But Life is not vacuous from the ek-static point of view: as Henry is everywhere at pains to point out, Life is the quite literally the essence of manifestation; Henry's critique of the whole phenomenological tradition before him is that time and time again, it comes across Life, only to end up ignoring it. The problem, if anything, is the other way around - it's the Henry's own philosophy is almost entirely uncritical, in the Kantian sense - Life is the essence of manifestation, but it cannot, ironically, account for the manifestation of the ek-static phenomena which it everywhere underlies. This is not an original critique, and has been pointed out time and time again by many commentators of Henry's work - and entirely rightly, I think.

Here is Renaud Barbaras: "Although he discovers auto-affection at the heart of aIl givenness at a distance, Henry never heads down the opposite path to discover how auto-affection leads into intentionality, how we can go from immanence to transcendence.... Henry cannot provide answers to these questions precisely because he argues that they concern two completely impenetrable regimes of appearance. " (Barbaras, The Essence of Life: Desire or Drive?); and Dan Zahavi: "Henry operates with the notion of an absolutely self-sufficient, non-ekstatic, irrelational self-manifestation, but he never presents us with a convincing explanation of how a subjectivity essentially characterized by such a complete self-presence can simultaneously be in possession of an inner temporal articulation; how it can simultaneously be directed intentionally toward something different from itself; how it can be capable of recognizing other subjects (being acquainted with subjectivity as it is through a completely unique self-presence); how it can be in possession of a bodily exteriority; and finally how it can give rise to the self-division found in reflection:" (Zahavi, Subjectivity and Immanence in Michel Henry). See also Ray Brassier's devastating reading of Henry in his Alien Theory, which I won't quote here.

Finally, your own point that Life isn't vacuous form the point of view of Life is... well, just a tautology. But again, this is all very off-topic!

In the ordinary sense we all broadly understand the distinction between "living' and 'non-living'. As per Wittgenstein; there is no determinate essence that could define the difference; rather the difference is found in the whole context of networks of "family resemblances" between phenomenal manifestations that we think of divergently as either living or non-living. — Janus

Sure, sure, but the question is what kind of licence developmental biology allows us when it comes to speaking about life in the terms it provides. The context here is quite rigoursly defined, and is not at odds with Witty's insights.

Since I have been reading his works lately Michel Henry is also much in my thoughts at the moment. He draws what he sees as an all-important distinction between Life and Being. Since Being is the always-already externalized world, life, for Henry, cannot be found there at all, but we will find only entities which do or do not manifest phenomena that we might understand to be 'life functions'. — Janus

Yeah, I'm familiar with Henry - I think he's an absolute genius - but I also think his conception of 'Life' qua self-affecting, pathic 'Subjectivity' is - there's no nice way to put this - entirely vacuous. I wrote a long, multipost thread in the old forum about this - on his conception of immanence in particular - which is lost to time now, but yeah, I've never found his mobilization of the concept of 'Life' very - if at all - useful, unfortunately.