What should be considered alive?
Whenever we discuss the meaning of words, I do not think we are trying to figure out the objective meaning of those words. After all, words do not seem to have objective meaning. Rather, words are tools that we use to draw significance to certain phenomena and associations. A misuse of language is more similar to a misuse of a hammer than a logical error or an inaccurate observation. Because of this, it seems that what we should consider a living thing is not a question that could be answered through scientific experiments or logical deductions. It is a question of value. When we call something a living thing, we are putting it into a category above all other types of things.
Biologists define living things as organisms and emphasize their ability to maintain homeostasis and replicate its genetic information. But, are those things actually important? Should we really think of living things as just a collection of cells which replicate themselves? I think of life as the process of being alive and as a state of animation. I do not understand why we consider trees and fungi to be alive. They appear to have no mental activity or display any interesting or complex behavior. On the other hand, I do not understand why we don’t consider certain AI Programs to be living things. Some AI Programs are capable of complex information processing, sensory detection, learning, understanding of spoken language, and list goes on. When I think about the key characteristics of life, I do not think about the stuff about organic matter that I learned in Biology class, I think about the animation of the mind and body present in animals and certain machinery. I think about the ability to experience pain and joy, and the ability to perform a variety of fascinating activities. Of course, I do not think that we should stop studying non-living organisms or over-study living non-organisms but simply stop making the assumption that only organisms are alive and that every organism is alive. I think such conception of life is often forcing us to ignore what exactly is significant about life.
Imagine that scientists discover 2 planets. The 1st planet contains rich vegetation and some bacteria but for some reason has no animals and cannot possibly support complex animals. The 2nd planet is a barren Mars-like planet with interesting robot beings which do not require oxygen or water. These robot beings are capable of complex behavior patterns and may even be conscious(depending on whether you believe that this is physically possible). While the 1st planet contains organisms, it does not seem to be alive. It’s hard to see why this planet is any more important than any other planet(aside from the potential of colonizing this planet). Why are trees more interesting than rocks? The 2nd planet, on the other hand, seems pretty important and alive. There is an interesting animation of the inhabitants of this planet despite the fact that the inhabitants are not made of organic materials. It does not seem that state of being alive can only come about from organic compounds. Rather, there are probably countless of possible configurations of matter which could potentially produce life. It seems simply biased and short-sighted to assume that only organisms should be associated with the process of life. Although, one might accuse me of bias and shortsightedness for excluding non-animal organisms as life. But, it’s hard to know what is exactly so special about those organisms that makes them worthy of being called life. It might be argued that the ability to reproduce should be a classification for life as well. I would dispute this claim because a rock that can replicate doesn’t seem nearly as alive as an infertile animal or an AI Program that does not replicate. So, what are your thoughts on this? Should plants be considered life? Should AI Programs be considered alive?
Biologists define living things as organisms and emphasize their ability to maintain homeostasis and replicate its genetic information. But, are those things actually important? Should we really think of living things as just a collection of cells which replicate themselves? I think of life as the process of being alive and as a state of animation. I do not understand why we consider trees and fungi to be alive. They appear to have no mental activity or display any interesting or complex behavior. On the other hand, I do not understand why we don’t consider certain AI Programs to be living things. Some AI Programs are capable of complex information processing, sensory detection, learning, understanding of spoken language, and list goes on. When I think about the key characteristics of life, I do not think about the stuff about organic matter that I learned in Biology class, I think about the animation of the mind and body present in animals and certain machinery. I think about the ability to experience pain and joy, and the ability to perform a variety of fascinating activities. Of course, I do not think that we should stop studying non-living organisms or over-study living non-organisms but simply stop making the assumption that only organisms are alive and that every organism is alive. I think such conception of life is often forcing us to ignore what exactly is significant about life.
Imagine that scientists discover 2 planets. The 1st planet contains rich vegetation and some bacteria but for some reason has no animals and cannot possibly support complex animals. The 2nd planet is a barren Mars-like planet with interesting robot beings which do not require oxygen or water. These robot beings are capable of complex behavior patterns and may even be conscious(depending on whether you believe that this is physically possible). While the 1st planet contains organisms, it does not seem to be alive. It’s hard to see why this planet is any more important than any other planet(aside from the potential of colonizing this planet). Why are trees more interesting than rocks? The 2nd planet, on the other hand, seems pretty important and alive. There is an interesting animation of the inhabitants of this planet despite the fact that the inhabitants are not made of organic materials. It does not seem that state of being alive can only come about from organic compounds. Rather, there are probably countless of possible configurations of matter which could potentially produce life. It seems simply biased and short-sighted to assume that only organisms should be associated with the process of life. Although, one might accuse me of bias and shortsightedness for excluding non-animal organisms as life. But, it’s hard to know what is exactly so special about those organisms that makes them worthy of being called life. It might be argued that the ability to reproduce should be a classification for life as well. I would dispute this claim because a rock that can replicate doesn’t seem nearly as alive as an infertile animal or an AI Program that does not replicate. So, what are your thoughts on this? Should plants be considered life? Should AI Programs be considered alive?
Comments (84)
And since that 'value' tends to be negotiable, it boils down to questions like 'how do we differently deal with 'living' versus 'non living' entities. (The Startrek series has played on that dilemma via their android character Data). The fact that general views of 'life' range from 'abiogenetic mechanist' to 'the spiritually sacrosanct' is the subtext to those negotiations.
So, even though complex life like humans is drastically different from a bacteria, closer inspection reveals that our bodies are a collection of these unicellular organisms. This connection between a single cell and a complex life form is one of necessity by which I mean: no single cell no human possible. We share this connection with ALL life, plants too, and it seems like wilful ignorance to think plants aren't alive.
Well, it’s true that there is a connection between the presence of organic matter and the possibility of life but it’s not clear to me why we should start on a cellular level. Some scientists think that viruses should be considered life despite the fact that it’s less complex than a cell. What about amino acids? You can’t create cells without animo acids. Does this mean amino acids should be considered life as well? We can go further back than that. Without the molecules of water, carbon, and phosphorus we couldn’t create amino acids which means we can’t create cells which means we can’t create humans. Why not say that a water molecule is a simple life form? You would need to show that the beginning of evolution started with unicellular organisms rather than viruses or primordial soup. Of course, we could also say that the elements necessary for primordial soup formation is the first form of life by this logic as well. Now, I actually think it makes sense to say that being alive falls on a spectrum perhaps. For example, I imagine that a human is more alive than a typical robot not because it is made of organic material but rather because it displays more complex and animated behavior and we have more reason to think that humans are usually conscious. I also think that we should entertain a possibility of life that was designed rather than evolved. I think that we have created new life forms by the invention of machinery and software that seems more animated and more likely to have mental activity than a tree. I think there has to be something said about that.
I don’t know if I agree with that. It depends on what you mean by willing. Suppose that I lost all my limbs and received severe brain damage from a terrible car accident. I lack the ability to move in any way and I have lost my personality and memories. I also lost the ability to control my mental activity and seem to no longer be self aware. But I’m still the container of experience which has to endure the suffering involved in my state of being(I understand that this might not be physically possible though). Would I still be alive? My intuition seems to be that so long as I can enjoy positive experiences or have to endure negative experiences, then I would still be alive even if I seem to lack agency. On the other hand, perhaps AI Programs which appear to lack mental activity could be considered alive because of their appearance of agency(this is mainly because we could never know if our current AI Programs truly lack mental activity).
The conventional categorization of life stems from a concern with what makes the ontological difference that evolutionarily leads to us, and a concern with how those sorts of processes get started.
Re AI, you seem to be attributing mentality to something where it's not clear that mentality obtains.
"Organism" is simply conventionally defined as referring to living things. It could be defined differently, of course, but that's why "organisms" are considered living.
If we were to find robots on a planet, the first question most scientists would have is "How did they get there/where did they come from" because as far as we know something like humans are required to at least initially make them. They don't develop on their own.
If you physically damaged a computer, do you think it would be owed an apology?
If you enjoy positive experiences and endure negative experiences, mustn’t you have active rational agency, insofar as your faculty of judgement appears to be fully functional?
Maybe it’s no more complicated than..... if you’re not dead, then you’re alive.
Built by whom, is the obvious question. And, it’s question begging to refer to robots as ‘beings’.
On that note, why are we called ‘beings’? What other entities are called ‘beings’? Is ‘being’ a verb or is it a noun? (Actually I suppose it’s a gerund, which is interesting in its own right!)
Because water doesn't fit the definition of life. It (water) doesn't nourish itself, neither does it reproduce, etc.
Of course you could ask for the definition of life to be expanded to include water but you'd need to give good reasons for it. Likewise for amino acids; they don't reproduce or respond to the environment in any life-like manner.
If words didn't have some degree of objectivity then we would always be talking past each other. We would never communicate at all. How could we lie to each other if the meaning of my words in my mind didn't mean the same thing in your mind? We would create our own arbitrary categories of our individual perceptions and never be able to communicate them to others. How would you expect me to understand the scribbles you put up on a screen if we didn't have some shared understanding of what those scribbles mean? Who would you be "talking to"? It seems that we would all be only talking ourselves. So, why didn't you just say your post to yourself in your mind? Why did you type it out and submit it on a philosophy forum? Isn't it because you wanted to share your idea with others who have a shared understanding of the meaning of the scribbles that you put on the screen? The scribbles mean your ideas and your intent to communicate them.
Quoting TheHedoMinimalist
I would use the term, "attention" instead of "significance".
Quoting TheHedoMinimalist
A misuse of language is a logical error in the sense that terms do have an agreed on, or shared, meaning. Someone misuses a term when they take an existing term with an agreed-upon meaning and use it in a different way without a coherent definition of how they are using it. The term is either incompatible with the other ways they use language (they are inconsistent) or the way we understand the world (our observations).
Quoting TheHedoMinimalist
So what you have done here is question the agreed-upon meaning of "living thing". Sure, we could use the boundary of organisms evolving central nervous systems as what defines "living thing", but we've agreed upon the boundary where complex molecules began to replicate.
What we will disagree on is the boundary at which to distinguish living things from non-living things - not the fact that there are things that have certain properties inherited from prior things in prior states. These inheritences are modified by interacting with the environment and are copied into the next generation of things. At which point of change in inheritence we choose to define "living things" from "non-living" things can be arbitrary in the sense that it doesn't really matter to anything else but us humans who have the need to communicate with each other, but it does matter if you are a human who has the need, or intent, to communicate their ideas with others, so it helps to know how humans interpret the meaning of certain scribbles or sounds.
Well, I imagine that it’s likely that intelligent life could come about through evolution perhaps through different compound mixtures than the one which produced the first organisms on Earth. While the robots were not likely to have evolved and were obviously created(they might also not be reproducing and simply die out once the machinery breaks). It not clear if these robots were created by beings who were made of roughly the same chemical composition as us or if they were made of a completely different chemical composition. Nonetheless, it seems that the fact that they were created doesn’t make them any less alive. After all, I don’t think we would be less of a living thing if we were created by an intelligent designer rather than evolution.
Well, I think I gave a good reason for why AI Programs should be regarded as life. I argued that it seems more important to think of life as the process of being alive or the state of animation. Some AI Programs do seem to be alive and be in a state of animation. Whereas, trees do not seem to have those characteristics. My question is why is the ability to nourish yourself and reproduce more important to what makes life special than the state of aliveness which really seems to be the thing which makes living things more interesting than non-living things?
Words refer to concepts, most of which are fuzzy, but still have a core of agreed meaning. You noted the biological definition of life - and I see nothing wrong with that, and no reason to change it. Indeed "living" sets certain things apart (you said, "above" - but that's a subjective judgment, so it seems moot).
You're setting apart a different set of things, overlapping somewhat between the living and unliving. That's a fine analysis, albeit that it's also fuzzy. But I just see no need to redefine words to draw the distinction.
Quoting TheHedoMinimalist
It's not bias, per se, - it's trying to keep the fuzzy concept "life" from getting any fuzzier. You're right that it's conceivable that there could exist something akin to biological life that is vastly different from what we call "life", and that would challenge the fuzzy boundaries of the concept. If we cross that bridge, we can create new terminology based on whatever draws the least fuzzy boundaries.
There is a difference between objectivity and near-universal acceptance of a particular meaning of a word. I don’t deny that you should use the conventional meaning of the word “life” if you are having a discussion with your friend about bacteria. For better or worse, sometimes you have to use the meaning that is accepted by most. But that doesn’t mean that the classification for what is alive cannot possibly change. For example, in the past, Pluto used to be considered a planet. Now, it is no longer considered a planet. This is simply because the scientific community decided to change their classification for what is a planet. If the scientific community were to decide to agree with my classification of living things tomorrow, then it’s somewhat likely that the public will change its use of the word as well(just as they did with Pluto). But sometimes there is a conflict between the scientific definition of a word and it’s conventional usage. For example, cucumbers are classified as both fruits and vegetables by scientists(fruits are considered to be any seed bearing structure in a flowering plant which a subcategory of vegetables which seems to refer to any sort of edible vegetation). But we don’t think of a cucumber as a fruit and we don’t think of fruits as subcategories of vegetables. The question then becomes, which conceptual structure should we adopt? It might be argued that we should just adopt both but this might actually make communication more confusing. Imagine that I’m a botanist asking about what is the favorite fruit of my botanist coworker. He might legitimately be confused about what I’m referring to by fruit. So, I actually think it would be beneficial if we could encourage a more consistent use of language for communication. In addition, the way we organize our categorical structures could a massive impact on how we think about certain ethical dilemmas. For example, if fetuses are not only non-persons but also non-living, then this would probably shift our opinion on abortion. Of course, it could still be argued that the potential for life is enough reason to protect the fetus by law, but this would perhaps imply that sperm and ovaries should have some moral importance as well(which seems rather implausible). It could also have implications about how we should treat robots of sufficient complexity.
You’re conflating ‘created’ and ‘manufactured’ here. But then, it’s a distinction modern culture doesn’t recognise - hence, the thread.
I think this redefinition of words can be relevant to issues concerning value and ethics. For example, if everyone had agreed with my distinction between living and non-living things rather than the traditional conception, then this might have some implications for issues like abortion and the ethical treatment of conscious robots. This is because we tend give greater priority to living things over non-living things. Now, of course, there is a seeming explanation for why we think of living things as more important than non-living things and it has to do with 2 main factors:
1. The Presence of Mental Activity
2. The Presence of Complex Behavior Patterns
Of course, not all organisms have these important characteristics and some non-organisms have those characteristics. I think it would be helpful to reunite what we think is valuable about life as the definition of life itself. For example, if it is more probable that certain AI Programs are capable of mental activity than fetuses, then this would give me more reason to be concerned with the welfare of AI Programs than of fetuses. Although, I don’t think either one of those things have mental activity yet, the presence of complex behavior patterns in AI seems to be at least one indicator of potential mental activity. This is because there is a plausible belief that mental activity came about through evolution in order to enable greater agency. Without mental activity, complex behavior patterns might be an impossibility. Thus my redefining of what it means to be a living thing seems to help shift the discussion of these topics in the right direction and it would help direct the “Sanctity of Life” arguments against abortion to non-human animals and perhaps the futuristic conscious AI Programs. This is because fetuses do not qualify as life in my definition of life while non-animals and some AI perhaps would.
Of course you might then respond ‘how do you define “being”? ‘ - but that is the precise meaning of the term ‘ontology’, and it’s a very difficult subject. Consideration of the nature of being is central to philosophy, but hardly considered by science. Think about why that is the case: science is objective, it is the method par excellence for the disclosure of facts about objective phenomena. But ‘being’ or ‘beings’ are not simply objects - they’re subjects of experience. And what is it that makes them subjects of experience? That is the question, and it might not even be resolvable in strictly objective terms.
Hardcore materialists such as Daniel Dennett deny that there is any fundamental distinction between beings and computers. But they are obliged to deny it, because in their view there’s only one real substance, and that’s matter (or matter~energy). So if you argue that ‘being’ is not something that can be understood In terms of matter~energy, then you’re essentially assuming some type of dualism (or pluralism). In other words, you admit defeat for materialism.
But Daniel Dennett’s work is valuable in this respect, although ironically perhaps not in the way that he intended. Why? Because his critics have been pointing out for his entire career that there is something preposterous in it. For instance, his first book on philosophy of mind was called ‘Consciousness Explained’; but his critics (among them other leading philosophers) quickly dubbed it ‘Consciousness Ignored’, as that is what his work does. He argues throughout his work that the first-person reality of mind - the immediate knowledge of one’s own being - is an illusion.
[quote=Thomas Nagel] Dennett asks us to turn our backs on what is glaringly obvious—that in consciousness we are immediately aware of real subjective experiences of color, flavor, sound, touch, etc. that cannot be fully described in neural terms even though they have a neural cause (or perhaps have neural as well as experiential aspects). And he asks us to do this because the reality of such phenomena is incompatible with the scientific materialism that in his view sets the outer bounds of reality. He is, in Aristotle’s words, “maintaining a thesis at all costs.”[/quote]
Review of recent Dennett title.
I think the reason distinctions between ‘beings’ and ‘devices’ can’t be drawn is on the same grounds: that if you draw that distinction, then it shows that scientific materialism must be incomplete, that there must be something else, beside matter~energy, to be considered a constituent of being: but that, as scientific materialism is so influential in our culture, then we don’t have the means and metaphors to conceive of it. So we’re left floundering and wondering about robots on other planets.
That’s what I think you’re grappling with, although I know you probably won’t agree. ;-)
It’s actually hard for me to understand what exactly is the distinction between “objective” and “subjective”. Many cognitive scientists and psychologists do try to study subjective experiences like suffering, anxiety, nostalgia, joy, despair, and so on. I think they have had some success. It seems that the distinction between objectivity and subjectivity perhaps rests on the supposed distinction between primary and secondary qualities of objects. Primary qualities like solidity, size, weight, and shape are thought as being more objective than secondary qualities like taste, sound, color, and emotion. It’s not clear to me if there is any meaningful distinction between primary and secondary qualities though. Is weight an actual property of an object or is it just sensations of heaviness? It’s not clear to me if the heaviness of my bed is an objective property of my bed or just a feeling of heaviness if I attempt to lift it up. Similarly, it seems to me that only mental states can have undeniable observed properties. For example, if I cut my arm and cause myself pain, then the painful mental state seems to have an undeniable property of badness. This property of badness would likely be labeled as subjective but if I could transfer the exact same painful mental state to any other subject, I think it would be impossible to have a different attitude towards that mental state as I would have in the moment that the mental state occurs. This is because the attitude about the mental state(if there is an attitudinal judgement made in the same moment as the mental state) seems to be part of the mental state itself. If the mental state can be said to be existent, then it seems that it is an undeniable part of reality itself.
I suppose I would conceptualize a “being” as a “container of experience”. It is to be the one who has to endure one’s future negative experiences and the one who has the opportunity to enjoy his future positive experiences. The problem is that we do not know if anyone other than our current self contains experiences. If my 2 year old self had suffered on a particular day, I cannot know if I was the container of experience who had to endure that suffering. This is because I lack the memory of my 2 year old life. It’s almost as if the 2 year old me never really existed in my mind(or perhaps it was a different container of experience). Similarly, if I get dementia as I age, would I still be a container of experience? I think the answer is probably yes. I imagine that I will still be the stakeholder of the future suffering of my demented self. As for the question about whether computers could have experiences, there seems to be good evidence that mental activity came about as an adaptation which allowed for us to have greater control and agency over our body and environment. If robots can be capable of such agency, I would hypothesize that such complex agency would be impossible without positive and negative experiences.
Quoting Wayfarer
My understanding of dualism is that it is a belief that a mind could exist independent of any body. I do not hold such view myself. It seems that the existence and quality of mental states is dependent on the functioning of the nervous system and various sensory organs. If I gouge out my eyes, then I could not have sight sensation anymore. If I receive severe brain damage, then it seems that I could lose my memories, personality, self awareness, and even my ability to experience anything at all. If there is this dependence on the functioning of the body in order to have a mental life, then it seems that the mind is coexistent with the body. This is what makes me doubt that there is an afterlife. Of course, I do not think the activity of the mind is necessarily perfectly projected onto the body. This is why we might have difficulty of studying mental activity by looking at the brain. I cannot speak for Daniel Dennett due to the fact that I’m relatively unfamiliar with his work but from the several talks I heard from him, he didn’t seem to deny that consciousness existed. He seemed to have a different idea of what it was from my understanding but it’s been awhile since I watched one of his videos.
Good question. It's an analogical perspective we have to take. Plants, animals and humans share a lot of characteristics. So, the argument goes, we're similar in being alive.
You seem to focus on ''animation'', which I'll interpret as consciousness, and consider AI to be more alive than animals or plants. Well, consciousness is a very important feature of animals, especially so with humans, creating the division human-nonhuman. Surely if AI is conscious then it'll be definitely more human than a dog or a rose.
I think it's a question of numbers and significance. If we take the number of similarities plants are closer to humans but if you consider signficance and consciousness is a distinctive human property then AI is more human or alive.
Stick puppets are animated. Some stick puppets have rocks for heads. Some rocks are animated.
And the word "alive" picks out all the things that self-replicate, maintain homeostasis, etc.
Quoting TheHedoMinimalist
Of course those things are important. They are what one is talking about when s/he says that some thing or another is alive.
What we call human consciousness typically includes self identity and other socially constructed notions. If we attempt to employ that sort of criterion for what it takes to be alive, then we would be forced to say either that human consciousness is completely intact at the moment of conception, replete with a sense of self(which is impossible due to it's social content), or we must admit that not all humans are alive, because not all humans have a socially constructed sense of self.
Either being alive doesn't require human consciousness or not all humans are alive.
Human consciousness begins simply and gains in it's complexity. It is not a necessary pre-requisite for being alive.
As for "consciousness" that's clearly a different matter. There are many theories on consciousness (try researching integrated information theory, Penrose-hameroff etc) that take a number of different approaches to the problem but one fact always remains missing. There's no way to quantify and measure consciousness, so how will we ever know what truly causes it? And how will we ever know if a certain system (an artificial intelligence for example) actually contains consciousness? It's quite impossible it seems to objectively measure a phenomenon which is purely subjective in its contents.
Therefore surely, the only way to verify if a system is conscious (with a reasonable degree of certainty) or not is to see if the system displays classic characteristics of something that would be considered 'alive' and to see if the system behaves in a similar matter to the one system we know is conscious- the brain. if these two boxes are ticked, we can assume the system is alive (although not its 100% certainty).
As a side note I think there are some interesting ethical implications to your question, if we were truly to come up with a way of determining whether something is alive or not, does that mean certain things will have different levels of 'aliveness' than others? What impact will this have on animal rights? Are they conscious enough so that the killing of them for food is morally wrong? What cutoff point do we set ourselves? Is it only ethically sound to kill something with 0 consciousness or do we set some arbitrary threshold level on the scale of consciousness to decide what's moral to kill and what's not? What about a foetus, is that conscious? What will that mean for abortion law? The possibilities are endless.
Very good question though.
I must say that this is the most thoughtful response I have gotten on my thread thus far. I will try my best to give a detailed response because you brought up a lot of very valid points. To start with the 1st sentence of the post. It seems rather tricky to distinguish between what is alive and what is considered conscious. This is because as you have stated later in the post, it’s impossible to show whether or not a particular type of thing is conscious. Rather, when we hypothesize that a being appears conscious, it is due to the observation of the ability of the being to display autonomous behavior and decision-making capabilities. The types of things that we believe to be conscious tend to be the types of beings that display what is sometimes regarded as autonomy. So, perhaps it would be better to distinguish between living things and autonomous things rather than distinguishing between living things and conscious things. While this may be an acceptable path, I think there is a case to be made for bridging the divide between the 2 categories of things of interest to us.
What I think gives us a potential invitation to do this is the double meaning of the word “life”. We tend to use the word scientifically to refer to any organism. But in everyday life, we only treat animals as living and perhaps we shall treat AI as such in the future. For example, imagine that you have a plant in a pot in your house. The plant likely seems like any other object in the house to you. It’s just like a decorative statue that you have to water every once in a while. But imagine that one day, you saw the plant branches moving on their own and suddenly the plant pulls itself out of the pot and starts walking on its roots. It would makes sense to say that the plant had just came to life, even though it was classified as a living thing prior to that event. Of course, I am using 2 different senses of the word “life” here. Nonetheless, I tend to think that if there are 2 distinct definitions of a particular word, then we should either select one understanding of the term over the other or take an either/or approach . The either/or approach would be to define living things as either those things which appear to be alive or those things which replicate themselves and have a metabolism.
I find this approach somewhat problematic though. It seems that many robots could still qualify as life by the scientific definition for relatively arbitrary reasons. Hypothetically, there could be a robot whose only 2 functions are to build other “daughter robots” which share some inherited characteristics with the “mother robot” and to repair itself with materials found in the environment(aka “robot metabolism”). Imagine that they built those daughter robots without appearing alive but rather almost like a boring stationary 3D printer. There could be an eventual evolution of these robots through this process over the course of millions of years. Eventually, these robots might be more complex than humans in their behavior patterns. These robots would appear to fulfill all the requirements for the scientific definition of life except they are not composed of cells. But, this seems like a rather unnecessary requirement. If we were composed of something other than cells, we would probably not make cellular composition one of the requirements for life. But we can also challenge more of the scientific requirements of life. For example, should a self-replicating and self-repairing non-autonomous AI which performs its reproductive and metabolic functions like a plant be considered closer to a living thing than a non-replicating and non-metabolic autonomous AI which behaves like an animal? I tend to think that the latter type of robot appears to be more of a living thing.
Quoting tom111
I do think that this question poses some serious ethical implications. But, our current scientific definition of life seems to also be ignored in many of these dilemmas though. When some social conservatives speak of the sanctity of life and the need to protect the lives of fetuses and comatose patients, they are sometimes not being consistent with either of the definitions of life that we are discussing. With the scientific definition of life, some of these social conservatives are being needlessly exclusive with the types of things they categorize as moral patients. They consider fetuses and comatose patients as living things which are sacred yet exclude all the other types of living things which are not human. I simply find this to be unjustly prejudice towards members of your particular group. If such prejudice is justified when it’s not clear why racism is not. Though, as a counterargument, you could perhaps justify the prejudice for fetuses over non-human animals. This is because most fetuses have the potential to become a human being with greater complexity than an animal. Though, it’s hard to see how we would justify spending a millions of dollars of taxpayer money to cover the medical costs of a single comatose patient who has no loved ones and is extremely unlikely to ever be conscious of autonomous especially since we could use that money to improve the welfare of other beings which can likely experience things and have autonomy. If we were to accept my definition of life alongside the belief in the sanctity of life though, then we could exclude both never-conscious humans and plants as moral patience(unless we have some other reason to include them). On the other hand, we might have to include some robots in the future as moral patients. By my definition, only humans and non-human animals can possibly be regarded as moral patients to date. If we reject the sanctity of life beliefs, then we could evaluate moral patience on the basis of other properties. Philosophers like Peter Singer and Shelly Kagan, who reject sanctity of life arguments, generally conceptualize moral patience hierarchies on 2 qualities which I have claimed are indicative of being alive. These 2 qualities are, of course, consciousness and autonomy. I think my definition of life helps bridge together the sanctity of life belief with what is regarded as the most value relevant properties of life by the rejectors of the sanctity of life claims. Of course, I cannot answer whether or not eating meat, abortion, or the mistreatment of future robots is morally permissible without writing you another essay about those topics. I will say that the debate seems to revolve around whether the interests of sufficiently mature humans can override the interests of less complex beings that are believed to have some amount of moral patience. This question is quite complicated.
Of course, what about that which motions not of its own accord - like a corpse rolling down a hill? It too lives - perhaps in a different way, it still remains an active participant.
I suppose you could, given the aforementioned, deduce life is interactive.
Quoting Shamshir
The corpse lives on, imperceptibly so - if we should compare its life with a non-corpse's.
On the side, you should consider the consequences of autonomous motion as extensions of the autonomous; simply put, vivifying the possibly otherwise dead.
What do you mean by the phrase “extensions of the autonomous”?
And though you could consider the finger as an autonomous unit, it is a part of the arm and so virtually the arm. And its consequential action being autonomous as stemming (being a part of) from some autonomous action.
Those things are important.
Considering something living is quite important to us and there is an obvious difference on how we treat living things versus simple chemical compounds or elements, hence the distinction is important.To draw the line how the biologists have done is understandable and quite easy. If we don't draw that line so, just where do we then draw the line?
I agree that biologists should continue to study the organic matter which they are currently studying but perhaps call themselves organicists rather than biologists. I am not against the studying of plants, bacteria, and fungi. To answer your question, I think we should draw the line between living and non-living on the capacity for autonomous action. Hence, humans, non-human animals, and perhaps future robots should be the only things regarded as living.
I’m trying to make sense of your position: the line you’ve drawn between living and non-living comes from your value system. Autonomous action renders an entity ‘interesting’ to you, worthy of your attention and interaction. The existence or action of everything else, including plants, bacteria and fungi, appear to have little to no significance in relation to your own existence as you see it. It’s not important to you whether a plant grows and develops or not - or at least not as important as the growth and development of animals, humans and computer systems. Your interaction with the universe is determined by a multi-dimensional awareness of VALUE to the ‘self’ - and autonomy appears to be your highest value...am I close?
Yep, I would say you got it right for the most part. I actually tend to think that the most important aspect of our lives is the ability to experience positive and negative mental states but we cannot determine precisely which things are capable of such mental states. So, I think the best externally observable indicator of the capacity to experience seems to be the capacity for autonomous action. Also, aside from my views on value, I also think it’s quite intuitive to think of living things as animated. Animation can be defined as having a capacity to experience or the capacity for autonomous action. Human, animals, and future robots are the only things we know of with such capacities.
Personally, I question this focus on ‘autonomy’ as a value, given how dependent humans are on the rest of the universe (particularly plants, bacteria and fungi) in order to achieve life, let alone anything else. What you refer to as ‘autonomous action’ is highly debatable as such - particularly if you take into account microscopic activity.
FWIW, I don’t believe drawing an objective line between living and non-living is as important as it seems. The value we each attribute to this distinction both informs and is informed by how we personally interact with the universe above and below the line, rendering it highly subjective at best and dependent on our awareness of certain indicators. Biologists who define a living thing as ‘a collection of cells which replicate themselves’ consider these two indicators to be valuable for life at a microscopic level because it informs their work. You interact with the universe at a different level, and so you draw the line differently. I’m fairly confident that if you spent more time interacting with plants, bacteria and fungi and striving to understand how they interact with the universe, you would view their living/non-living status differently.
Yes, you would vivify the bat by extension; the bat will live through and as you.
I will have to do more research on that. While it might be possible that plants, fungi, and bacteria have experiences, I think the probability of that is lower than the probability of any animal having experiences. There is 2 reasons for why I think this is the case:
1. I hypothesize that the capacity for mental activity requires a sufficient amount of bodily energy. What we typically believe to be the complexity of a species mind tends to correlate with the amount of energy consumed by their nervous system. For example, we believe humans have more complex mental activity than chimpanzees or rabbits. Chimpanzees spend a lot of their bodily energy on making their muscles big and strong rather than use that energy on the brain like humans do(this explains why they are stronger and we are smarter). Rabbits, on the other hand, are a bit too small to have the bodily energy needed to have a human level mind. This problem is bigger for plants and fungi it seems. Although I am not a botanist and I acknowledge my ignorance about plants and fungi, I believe they lack the energy needed for mental activity to occur. I also don’t think it’s clear which area of a plant or fungi would store the energy needed for mental activity(assuming that there needs to be something resembling a nervous system in plants and fungi). Of course, the energy problem seems even greater for bacteria which has microscopic amounts of energy. Unless mental activity requires little to no energy, it seems unlikely that bacteria has significant mental lives.
2. I would also hypothesize that mental activity is an adaptation which helped organisms search for food and escape predators. It may be the case that the complex decision making required to accomplish those tasks requires the presence of mental activity to physically work. This could offer a potential explanation for the presence of mental activity in animals. Of course, plants and fungi have no need for such a mechanism for complex decision making it seems. This is due to the fact that they are usually stationary with some minor autonomous movements like the blooming of a flower as an example. For the most part, they seem to make their own food and have no need to search for it. In addition, they cannot really do anything to escape predators because they are stationary. Some plants and fungi have mechanisms for protecting themselves. Plants may have thorns and mushrooms may contain poisons. This deters predators from eating them. But, it seems that those bodily functions could be performed without a mind much like we do not really have to have a mind to breathe or urinate. Bacteria, on the other hand, does seem to be capable of motion. I think it sometimes needs to search for food and to avoid predators which are usually viruses. The energy problem is my main concern regarding the possibility of bacterial mental life. Nonetheless, I will need to read the book you have recommended and do research on chemotaxis.
Quoting Possibility
I agree that perhaps I need to refine my views further. Rather than autonomy, perhaps we should focus on the 2 requirements which I hypothesize are necessary for mental activity. The first one is the ability and need to make complex decisions to achieve a particular goal and the second is having a sufficient amount of energy stored in something resembling a nervous system to produce mental activity. I think your comment has helped me clarify that a little better. Of course, I could be wrong about both of those hypotheses but I will have to do more research on that. At the very least, meeting those requirements seems to increase the probability that a particular type of thing is likely to have mental activity. I would still put animals above other organisms in the capacity for value hierarchy since it seems that they are more likely to experience suffering and joy.
Why to insist on redefining life and not simply making the juxtaposition with having capacity for autonomous action and being incapable of it? Why life and living organisms would have to be fixed with this new far more narrow and a bit equivocal definition?
Starting with Aristotle and continuing to this day, biology makes a totally reasonable argument for the demarcation of living organisms from other. After all, we do have similarities with plants: we both have DNA and RNA, we both have reproductive systems and so on...
It's extremely confusing especially when then your argument goes on that automated machines that perhaps would be built (in totally different fashion than living organisms) are considered living. Besides, just how autonomous robots are? A mechanical device that has been programmed to do something does what it has been programmed to do, if it doesn't brake down. And since we don't have genuinely autonomous machines, it's really a bit vague issue to refer to possible future robots. Because then again I could make the hypothesis that in the future there would be autonomous plants too.
Well, it’s not clear to me if I am redefining the meaning of the word “life” at all. There’s a double meaning in our usage of the word to begin with. Sometimes when we speak of life, we speak of the scientific definition of life aka organisms. But there is also a more colloquial meaning of the term that often comes into conflict with the scientific meaning. This colloquial meaning refers to life as the process of being alive or animated. Here are 2 thought experiments that you can think about to see the distinction:
1. Imagine that you have a potted plant in your house. You would likely treat the plant like you would any other object in your house. The plant would seem to you almost like a statue that requires occasional watering but one day something extraordinarily happens. The branches of the plant start moving on their own and suddenly the plant pulls itself out of the pot and starts walking on its roots. At this point, you are likely freaked out because the plant had just came to life. But, wait a minute? Wasn’t it alive before that freaky event? What makes it seem like it is more alive now? It seems like the added capacity for autonomous action is what would make one think that the plant had come to life.
2. Imagine a robot that was designed to do just 2 things. The first thing the robot is designed to do is to create other daughter robots which will grow over time and share some inherited characteristics of the mother robot. The mother robot creates these robots in a relatively uninteresting and non-autonomous manner. A human presses a button and the mother robot builds the daughter robot in a passive manner like a 3D printer. The second function of this mother robot is to repair itself with materials from the environment which is sort of like a robot metabolism. It also does this only after the human presses the button and puts the materials from the environment into the robot’s built in vacuum. This mother robot now fulfills 2 of the 3 requirements for life by the scientific definition:
1. It reproduces
2. It has a metabolism
3. It doesn’t have cells
But, it’s not clear why the 3rd requirement is all that important. If you could build a highly autonomous robot which doesn’t have cells, would this really make the robot less of a living thing? In addition, we can challenge the other 2 requirements as well. Would the robot that I have described above be more similar to a living thing than a more complex and autonomous robot which does not reproduce or have a metabolism? It just seems like a more autonomous robot would be more similar to us than the reproducing robot or a tree for that matter. If such robots are not possible then we should limit the definition of life to animals.
Have the crazies taken over the ass-ylum?
Note: deleting posts is counter-mount to murder! Shamsirmir has by back on this ;)
Living organisms can also die, so the dead/alive dichotomy is quite understandable. Again why life has a lot to do with living organisms.
Quoting TheHedoMinimalist
No. As you mention later, I would have to take care of it that it stays alive. With a plastic contraption that is designed to fool people that it is a plant, I wouldn't have to worry so much.
Quoting TheHedoMinimalist
Or it would see to be behaving more like an animal? And we do have moving plants like tumbleweeds.
Quoting TheHedoMinimalist
Nope. It simply builds from (processed) materials a machine. No sex involved.
Quoting TheHedoMinimalist
Actually not. An electric motor or whatever motor or battery there is to give energy to the machine isn't what you call a metabolism: the chemical processes that occur within a living organism in order to maintain life. We are not there yet.
Quoting TheHedoMinimalist
Well, it is.
To give a counterexample which is close to your examples, assume that we find from Mars under the sand an extremely old remnant of something that isn't just rocks or sand. Now to find out if it would be a extraterrestial fossil or an extraterrestial robot and we would be exactly looking at these kinds of clues. And if we assume that it indeed would be an Alien "robot", but these Aliens have far advanced technology, so that their robots operate like an living organism, we likely would be fooled to think that it's a fossil. To argue that it's an advanced planetary lander of a third party would feel highly unlikely, when it looks like the remains of a plant or an animal.
It's a question of classification, yes, and I think TheHedoMinimalist has another idea than just classification at mind here.
Perhaps when you are talking in the future to an AI that is fully conscious, aware and independent, you might have an interesting discussion with it about the subject. Would it consider itself alive or dead? It may perhaps see itself as conscious, but not as a living being and it might consider itself hence dead. The dead interacting with the living might sound awesome to it, who knows?
Yes, that would be interesting. :smile: But I wouldn't be side-tracked by the thorny question of whether the AI is alive, I'd just enjoy the conversation. :wink: Even if that conversation was about whether the AI was/is/will be alive. :smile: Is its 'life status' really so important?
Indeed.
And just how smart would it be and how interesting discussion you could have with the AI are really totally open questions. Yeah, you could assume NOW that the AI would be this highly intelligent entity with surprising new ideas and viewpoints. Yet there is the possibility of the AI being... something resembling a Trump-voter from a little town in Kentucky who dropped out of school and has been on the farm since then. And who hasn't a lot to say, actually. :razz:
You see all the time people talking about AI "getting out of hand" like in the Terminator-movies or discussing this "Technological singularity", where AI enters a "runaway reaction" of self-improvement cycles, people seem to think intelligence being this quantifiable thing. (And for some like Elon Musk it's a clever move to side with the "computers-can-be-dangerous" crowd and appease them, btw.)
Yet knowing all the Worlds telephone books inside and out doesn't make you super-intelligent. Perhaps useful in some occasion, but not the most interesting entity to have an interesting discussion with.
If the AI proved to be an AU (Unintelligent), that would be unfortunate. But even Trump-voters are alive.
Quoting ssu
I think everyone agrees with that. It's not the knowledge that gives rise to intelligence, it's the ability to apply that knowledge for its own purposes that would distinguish an intelligence.
Well, there doesn’t have to be sex involved. Organisms sometimes reproduce asexually. Reproduction is generally defined as the ability to produce offsprings. The mother robot is producing something I would consider an offspring.
Quoting ssu
Well, there is chemical processes which occur inside of a robot which regenerates the robot. They are just different chemical processes than the ones found in normal organisms.
Quoting ssu
I don’t think we would be fooled. If the fossils look more like a machine that an organism, then it is likely an advanced civilization of robots. It’s likely that perhaps those robots were created by animals at some point in time. Of course, I also wouldn’t dismiss the possibility of life existing which is neither composed of cells nor a robot. There could possibly be thousands of different matter arrangements which could produce the first type of thing which will eventually evolve into something animated and alive. It’s also possible that organisms can be designed by other organisms rather than from evolution and reproduction. For example, it’s imaginable that a mad scientist could possibly create something resembling chimeras which do not reproduce but are nonetheless composed of cells. I think if those cases came to fruition then it would truly undermine the scientific notion of life.
1) An entity must exist that is capable of replication and the resources necessary for such replication should be available.
2) The replication process should not, in all circumstances, produce perfect copies and should, instead, allow for a tiny amount of random variation
3) the above variations should be subject to a process of natural section based upon environmental constraints
4) there must a be a lot of time available for the above processes to evolve from simple to complex.
At some point, relativity early on in the above process, we may say that "life" exists.
Well, if all in a group of humans are infertile, then that group won't be here for long.
I myself want to consider two different approaches to deciding what life is. First of all, life is a natural language word – specifically from the English language. One approach to this question might be a lexical or psycholinguistic one, in which we attempt to find out what native speakers of English have in their heads when they use the word. I think this might offer us a fair idea, naïve though it may seem:
The second approach is a more scientific one. Having started off with this naïve “folk biology,” we might attempt to advance to a deeper, more rigorous definition of what we have really been studying when we have been studying life. This is, of course, a fundamentally different question, and calls for a different answer.
One theory of life is that life is that which self replicates. But, as has so often been observed, flames self-replicate. Yet they don’t seem to be alive.
A second theory is that organization, or complexity is what defines life. Under this approach, whole ecosystems, or even the Earth itself, may be deemed alive. But is the space shuttle alive? How about a nuclear power plant? They seem pretty complex and highly organized. But alive – and alive in the same sense that a frog or a human is alive? Most of us would have some doubts.
So I am going to suggest that there is one very specific reason why we should combine the two, finding that when we have done so, the whole is indeed greater than the sum of the parts. And that is that when we have something that is both complex and self replicating, evolution happens. Which creates a virtuous circle of ever increasing adaptivity and complexity.
So the reason our particular form of life became life was because it started with a chemistry that had both these things.
The other properties that we typically observe in life, are “merely” the practical necessities that thermodynamics imposes on any self replicating orderly system. Life, as Cookie Monster so wisely taught us, needs to eat and respire. This is simply because any closed system inevitably progresses towards entropy over time. Thus, in order for an orderly system to self replicate, it needs to input and utilize energy.
Similarly, homeostasis is “merely” winning the battle against entropy. At least for a while.
My definition also has the property (I would say advantage) of allowing for forms of life with completely different physical bases. For example, highly complex robots that can build others of their kind. These too would count as alive. Similarly so complex self replicating pieces of code. [Note: while I meant computer code when I wrote this, upon re-reading I am struck by the incredibly obvious realization that "complex self replicating pieces of code" perfectly describes our own genomes too.]
Whether viruses, which by definition do not technically self replicate, but depend wholly on other living things to replicate them, should be alive, is an interesting question.
For myself, I believe that they should be.
My reason for this is simple: their particular kind of order also activates the same forces of evolution that self-replication does. Thus, they seem to have essentially the same kind of orderliness, be subject to essentially the same rules, and in the words of Lt. Commander Data, overall be “more alike than unlike.“
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i4VxbnGbWbM
Quoting Stephen Cook
Quoting 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.
Quoting Pattern-chaser
Yeah... I'm gonna have some difficulty ridding myself of that one too! :grin:
I must say that this response is now the most interesting one I’ve gotten. Though, I think my view is quite befitting to the common use of the word “life” in non-scientific context. For example, if I see a tree start moving on it’s own like an animal, then it would make perfect sense to say that the tree came to life. This would, of course, be confusing to the biologist since the tree was always alive. This seems to suggest that we don’t pay much attention to the scientific meaning when we speak the word colloquially. There is one good counterargument that I thought about relating to this though. We sometimes observe that trees die and prepare for them to eventually fall down. This suggests that we do think of a tree as a living thing at least some of time. But, we have to remember that it’s not only living things that can be said to die. For example, one day this thread on which we are posting will die. We can say that the Roman Empire had died in the past. So, it’s possible for trees to die and never be a living thing. Of course, it’s also possible to posit that non-living things can be metaphorically alive. For example, I could posit that I’m surprised that this thread is still alive. I could also utter something like “The American way of life still lives on!”. This seemingly posses a challenge for both of our views on the lexical issue. I think both views have their pros and cons. The pros of the scientific view is that the metaphorical usage of “alive” seems to be based on survival. This thread is alive because it survives and the American way is alive for the same reason. Reproduction can be considered as an extension of survival(ie your DNA can’t survive without reproduction). The scientific meaning of life is therefore better at taking this into account since my view doesn’t prioritize survival much. But, there is also an advantage that my view has with the metaphorical usage of the word life. When we say that this thread is alive, we don’t just mean that it exists somewhere like a rock. There are plenty of threads on this forum which still technically exist but are considered dead because no one posts on them anymore. My thread is still alive because it still has value relevant activity. This thread is still of interest to someone. Once there is no interest in this thread, it will die. So, the question that we might want to ask is what is the fundamental aspect of interest which would create the distinction between living and non-living. I think autonomous action is the best candidate mainly because it seems indicative of mental activity but it’s also often considered interesting for its own sake.
Quoting Theologian
I got a question. Would this imply that our current software is alive? Software is both complex and self-replicating. It could also evolve as new versions come out. Later in the post you suggested that only complex computer code should count. But, how complex does it have to be to count as life? If it only needs to be as complex as viruses then it seems we already have software which fit that description.
Quoting Theologian
I don’t have a knockout objection to this view but I think it may be incompatible with the common lexical understanding of the word “life”. This is mainly due to the fact that concept of life has been around long before the theory of evolution was accepted by anyone. This evolutionary understanding of life would be alien to anyone living just 200 years ago. This suggests that there is a more primordial understanding of life which should also be considered. I think that primordial understanding relies on the notions of autonomous action and possible mental activity present in living things. So rather than understanding life as nodes in a linear progression, it seems like an alternative view is to view it as a chaotic web of survival of certain beings which act autonomously. An infertile human might not be able to continue this process after his death but he can continue it in himself so long as he is alive. We could also consider the interesting case of immortality. If there was just one alien being on a distant plant that can live forever, would he need to reproduce to be considered alive? 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? Would it be less alive despite almost reproducing? Even though evolution is never ignited in these cases, it’s nonetheless intuitive to think of both the immortal being and the Mars cell as being alive(of course, by my definition, the Mars cell isn’t alive). Despite my objections, 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.
I couldn't resist. I suggest you blame auto-correct!
Quacking is the male equivalent of queefing?
I can do better than that! :wink: Coming back on topic, I claim that my keyboard is possessed by demons. Living demons! :smile: :snicker:
[Heavily edited because I realized there were a few things I flubbed when I originally posted the below. I was just waking up.]
Again, it's important to begin by distinguishing between attempting something like a scientific definition that gets at the heart of what we are dealing with when we call things alive (or at least, tries to), and attempting to get at what's inside people's heads when they use the word "alive." They're two different things, and they call for two entirely different responses.
So when you say:
Quoting TheHedoMinimalist
Yes, you're perfectly correct. But then, my tree and node definition wasn't an attempt at lexicography. Science, and scholarship more broadly, will always define and redefine its terms utilizing its current understanding of the world.
Surely you would agree that a scientific concept can accurately describe something that existed long before that concept was defined? Cuz if you don't... we're in major trouble with that whole "big bang" thing!!! :gasp:
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:
If you want to do lexicography, as opposed to biology, one point I would make is that natural languages frequently have their words redefined too. Can't you think of a term whose meaning has changed significantly just over the course of your own lifetime? It's not that long ago that the term "geek" had far more negative connotations than it does now. And originally it referred to a person in a freak show whose act was to bite the heads off live chickens!
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.
Think of the word "spring." We have the season of that name, we have a coiled, usually metal thing, and we have the verb "to spring." All may share in common the idea of pent up energy that is being, or can be released. But you won't be able to come up with a comprehensive definition that applies to all three; and you won't get very far if you don't understand that a season is not the same thing as a coiled piece of metal. Similarly, the term "life" may have a kind of semantic core that all meanings share... or, we may be stuck with something more like Wittgenstein's "family resemblance." Or there may be usages that share no discernible commonality at all.
But my main point being, from a linguistics perspective, the sense in which your plant may "come alive"
...and the sense in which it always was alive, are essentially different words with the same surface form. I think that is, ultimately, the only way you can make coherent sense of the proposition that something that is alive became alive.
Of course, as you say, there's also metaphor, but I don't off the top of my head have anything especially interesting to say about how metaphor works! :razz: I'm only going to observe that distinguishing between a commonly used metaphor and a different meaning of the same surface form is a fairly challenging task in linguistic research, and I'm really not sure how you would go about addressing that. So when we say that a thread is "alive," is that a different meaning, or are we just using the word "alive" in a metaphorical sense? I'm not sure, and I'm not even entirely sure how we would go about resolving the question.
Having mulled over it some more, my gut feeling - and it's only a gut feeling - is that there is a word "alive" that is the noun form of "lively." That's the word you're using when your plant comes "alive," the thread is "alive," and so on. Of course, linguistic research is done purely on the gut feelings of native speakers, but it takes more than just the one speaker. Also, they don't call them "gut feelings" but "intuitions," which sounds a little more academically respectable. :smile:
Okay, there's a bunch of stuff you raised that I still haven't addressed, but I'm now going to start a new post to deal with them to try to keep each individual post at a reasonable length...
Wow... thank you! :grin:
Fair point.
Okay, I should qualify my argument by stating that the above entity is an abstraction of all of the entities of a given population of such entities and, as such, need only probabilistically posses all of the said characteristics
I like that. I like it a lot. Put far better than me.
Wow... thank you also, Stephen! I seem to be doing really well on this thread! :grin:
You've raised a few objections/questions that I think show that my attempt at a scientific definition needs to go through another round of refinement.
Quoting TheHedoMinimalist
There are a few issues here. Superficially shareware seems to be a virus (depending on us, as life forms, to replicate it). So as such I would deem it alive, even though many biologists would disagree that viruses qualify as life. If computers are not themselves alive, then what we call computer "viruses" are not viruses at all, but are straightforwardly alive. Again, at least superficially. But in both cases I do have a concern.
One reason that in my first post I didn't feel it necessary to include Stephen Cook's point:
Quoting Stephen Cook
...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.
But now that I think about shareware and computer "viruses," I now see the need to investigate this a bit more closely. I am quite sure that in both cases, given enough generations, shareware and "viruses" would begin to evolve, thus becoming life by my current definition.
BUT, excepting those "viruses" that were intentionally designed by their programmers to evolve, and considering only code designed to be replicated perfectly, I can see that the number of generations required for meaningful evolution will in many cases exceed, even vastly exceed, the number of generations over which the code is actually copied.
So given that my definition of life is basically that it ignites evolution, and that all nodes on the evolutionary tree are alive, if we want to address the question as to what ignites evolution, we clearly have more variables to contend with than just complexity. I can see now that it was simplistic of me to focus exclusively on complexity alone.
As my previous example of computer "viruses" intentionally designed to be evolutionary also shows, we also have to look at particular complex structures that supercharge evolution. In the world of wet biology, sex is the obvious example: nodes swap complex code structures with other nodes that have at least been successful enough to reach the point of mating. I'm no computer expert, much less an expert in "viruses," but I believe evolutionary "viruses" (yes, I'm still persisting with the quotation marks!) simulate sex to some degree by copying into themselves, or into their progeny, fragments of code taken from other programs.
So to offer a slightly expanded view on what it takes to ignite evolution, we now have a certain base level of complexity as a necessary feature of life. Plus we also have the fidelity of the copying process (there's almost certainly a sweet spot here, but it may not be absolute, but rather relate to other factors like environment), the number of generations over which the tree persists, and particular complex structures, such as being coded for sex, that supercharge the process.
Finally, there are two questions you ask that I want to consider in the opposite order that you ask them.
First,
Quoting 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.
The internal organizational structure of something is what marks it as alive. It does not have to reproduce, or even be able to reproduce in order to qualify as alive; eunuchs, worker ants, and organisms that simply die before the point of reproduction are all still alive. But nodes on an evolutionary tree are what provide our paradigmatic example of what a life form is.
Quoting TheHedoMinimalist
Well, you have already said that the being "lives" forever, which does rather imply that it is alive! :wink:
But... ignoring that (Freudian?) slip, I think what we have is that it is a "being" and that it at least persists forever. Personally, I don't think that on its own that's enough for the concept of life that I've been working towards. There are a lot of things that seem to last forever - or at least, virtually so in human terms. But we don't consider them alive.
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.
If, however, you equate a "being" with something like us, then we're back to my previous answer re the Martian bacteria. We may indeed find that we recognize the basic structures of life in this being.
Sorry it took me a while to respond. I’ve been working too much lately. Well, there is actually a 3rd perspective which I think we should consider and that is the value perspective. We have to ask the question of why exactly we decided to the make the distinction between the living and the non-living in the first place. Here is my hypothesis. Imagine that you are a caveman. From a young age, you likely recognized a drastic difference between self-moving entities like humans and animals and all the other stuff which simply sits there and offers no companionship or threat to you. This discernment was likely the first motivation and need behind the division between the living and the non-living. Living things are almost always thought to fall higher up in the hierarchy of things in the world. I think my classification of living things is useful for resolving many prudential, ethical, and political dilemmas which I think are needlessly encouraged by the scientific classifications of life. For example, many philosophers believe that life is intrinsically valuable for its own sake. They act on that belief morally, prudentially, and politically. I think that there is a very good intention built into the belief but it often leads to highly harmful consequences. For example, if you have an unwanted child who is born and will remain perpetually in a coma, should we treat it like a human being who is capable of experience and autonomy? This could cost close to a million dollars a year as maintaining a comatose patient is very expensive. This money could be used to improve the lives of sentient beings capable of autonomous action. Of course, many secular proponents of the sanctity of life belief would point out that it’s unjustified for us to treat a never-sentient human better than a tree because they are both life forms and it’s simply prejudice to prefer the never-sentient human. The more religious proponents of the sanctity of life belief would sometimes justify this prejudice as we humans are specifically the special beings made in God’s image. Of course, most of these religious sanctity of life believers assume the scientific understanding of what a human life is. I imagine that an earlier religious proponent of the sanctity of life belief like Thomas Aquinas might not think of a child who will never experience anything as being alive. It is likely that the earlier Christians though of life as the opportunity to experience things and act in an autonomous manner. This precisely would seem like the point of God bringing humans into existence in the first place. So, I think valuing life for its own sake only makes sense if you value experience of being human for its own sake. It doesn’t make sense if you value the presence of functioning cells for it own sake. It also doesn’t make sense if you value having a human metabolism for its own sake. In conclusion, I think definitions of words should be both lexically intuitive and serve us to make better decisions. It tend to think that classifying trees and never conscious humans as alive fits neither one of these criteria too well.
Quoting Theologian
Although, many words have more than one meaning. This can sometimes cause communication problems and I think it’s useful for us to have a language where there is some consistent and unifying theme that unites all the meanings of a word such that there isn’t too many confusing paradoxes. For example, I find it unhelpful that cooks would classify a cucumber as a vegetable and botanists would classify it as a fruit. It would be good if the committee of botanists and cooks could come together and work this conceptual mess out. This way we know what we are supposed to teach our children about cucumbers lol
Quoting Theologian
What I meant by an immortal being was a being which is both sentient and capable of autonomous action. The whole point of my view on life is to equate biology with sentience and autonomy on the grounds that I find it both lexically intuitive and useful for promoting the good. For example, if there is an eternal God who never replicates himself, I think it would make sense to say that he is a living thing.
Quoting TheHedoMinimalist
Not to worry. But now you are going to have to wait for me as I'm actually quite sleepy and about to log off. Sorry! :gasp:
There are oddities, though
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.
They have their own DNA , and that never mixes with the human genome, yet no human can live without them, and no mitochondrion can exist without a living cell host.
These are organelles. But are they living?
That’s interesting, I never thought of life as operating within an order. I always thought of evolution as being a bit of a chaotic mess. Species constantly are going in and out of existence with no straightforward pattern of progression. Although there was a gradual progression towards greater mental complexity from reptiles to mammals to primates, in the past, there was a higher number of species of humans and today’s chimpanzees can be regarded as our dumber cousin almost. This is due to the fact that chimps are only 2 million years older than the first human species and we had a common ancestor species which is now extinct and was almost like a human and chimp hybrid. It seems that we haven’t got more complex over time but simply split into 2 species oriented towards certain extremes of our ancestor species(we oriented towards intellect and chimps oriented to strength). Another weird thing about our evolutionary history is that there was likely sea monsters swimming in the Earth before we even had trees or life on land. For awhile, it seems almost like we had a cool water planet with large and complex sea creatures and it became a boring land planet until dinosaurs. I suppose that there doesn’t have to be perfect positive linear progress in complexity of life for it to be part of an orderly process. But, what if we have a situation where the climate drove the evolution completely backwards? For example, imagine a planet that in the beginning was so well suited for life that it quickly evolves human level complex life in a matter of 100 million years(which may sound slow but it’s actually incredibly fast for human level life to evolve). Over time, the planet becomes less suited for life and life becomes less complex to adapt to the harsher climate(assuming that simpler life forms are better for the particular harsh climate of that planet). It very quickly evolves to sapient beings but then gradually reduces down to very simple sentient beings and then to merely vegetation and finally to single cell bacteria. Would such descending evolution be representative of life also? Would the single cell bacteria which is the last organism to survive in the end count as life?
So is it fair to observe that humans cannot be alive, because they can have no existence outside of an oxygen-rich atmosphere?
Is this some sort of twisted attempt at an analogy?
If that is the case it is very poor indeed.
Oxygen is not dependent on life, nor is it a candidate for life in any sense.
I wasn't offering an analogy, but only applying your ideas elsewhere to see if they work there.
Quoting Sculptor
Then we humans are not alive, by your reckoning, for we cannot survive without the various foreign living creatures that share 'our' bodies with us*. It's so text-book it's almost a definition of symbiosis (co-dependency)! :smile:
* - I don't only mean mitochondria, although my reasoning applies there too, but (for example) gut bacteria, without which we cannot digest the food we eat.
Oxygen is not a candidate. The question is mitochondria?
Quoting Sculptor
You stated that mitochondria are "no living" because they cannot exist outside of the conditions they need to survive. I responded by suggesting that this applies to humans too.
Quoting Pattern-chaser
Maybe I erred in providing too much detail? I mentioned an "oxygen-rich atmosphere" when perhaps I should only have referred generally to an environment which contains the things necessary for human survival. Of course oxygen is not a candidate! :roll: