A great debate in the scientific and philosophical community surrounds the meaning of the term life. What is life? What does it mean to live?
Wired Science recently posted at article claiming that Scientists are blurring the lines of "living and active" with specially engineered polymers that move in the light. But does it make sense to say that the concept of life has "lines" which are being "blurred"? Aren't scientific definitions meant to be unambiguous? What do we mean when we use the term life?
It was no surprise that, Wired's article provided no unambiguous definition of the crucial term life.
At the Rational Science group, Bill Gaede and many others have brainstormed a rational; i.e. unambiguous and non-contradictory definition for the term life. That discussion is below:
- Jake Archer Living: The movement of objects, specifically of those functioning collections of objects defined as animals. Life: Animals/and/or functioning/non functioning products of loop/rope/atoms and other animals.. Animals:Those collections of objects/living or non living/functioning/non functioning, which when functioning perform and are called LIVING. Those collections called the animals include flora and fauna AND viruses, and some of the products therof, i.e advanced computers and robots, engineered bio-technical simulations of cells and other organisms.
- Jake Archer Artificial:Noun; the products/assemblages/analogous or at least related to an animal. Artificial:Verb; the behavior of animals related to their individual architectures and the inter-relationships between other animals/ objects, in their environment. Miketake note..?
- Bill Gaede “Living: The movement of object”
.
Can’t put an article in front of a verb in Science. Hopefully, ‘living’ refers to the object and not to its motion. Nevertheless, ‘the’ movement of objects is called ‘motion’. A rock moves. A rock is not living/alive.
.
“Life: … products…”
.
Life is a result???
.
“Animals:Those collections of objects/living or non living/functioning/non functioning, which when functioning perform and are called LIVING.”
.
Boy you really went way out of your way, there Jakey boy! Too complex! The plants also perform a function called ‘living’. Any diff b/w plants and animals in your world?
.
.
. - Jake Archer If your brain is functioning, to allow you to think, and other parts of you to allow blood to be pumped..you are still functioning.
- Elizabeth Anne Norman Fair comment, Jake - my body may not be moving against gravity, but bits of my innards are!
- Jake Archer Functioning..no part of you is "moving against gravity"-that's an irrational property".no-thing moves against a concept..that's not scientific at all. Natural machines all move in relation to other objects..for and against them...
- Bill Gaede “Life= Functioning machine”
.
I suppose that means that when my car runs it’s alive… It’s when that battery shuts off that my car dies…
.
“if I become paralyised I cease to be alive?”
.
‘I’ is ALL of you!!! Can you move your head? Can you move your eyes? Do you grow? You can perhaps argue that “My arm is no longer alive”, not that “I am not alive.”
.
You absolutely MUST specify the unit that is alive. We either consider all of 'you' or parts of you. Even after a man dies, his hair continues to grow and many of his cells are still alive. A quadriplegic boy continues to grow even after he loses the ability to move an arm.
.
living/alive: an object that moves by itself against gravity
.
Gravity is a dynamic concept explained here…
.
http://billgaede.hubpages.com/hub/Einsteins-Idiots-12
.
Therefore, he who wishes to present an irrelevant, semantic, “can’t move against concepts” argument can knock himself out. The definition is clear. Once we define 'gravity' as a phenomenon where objects move towards each other in direct proportion to the matter they contain and inverse proportion to the sq of the dist that separates them, the word ‘gravity’ in the def of ‘living’ needs no further clarification. ‘Living’ is a word we use to refer to an object that has the ability to violate Newt’s eq. A rock can’t do that.
.
And again, ‘reproduction’ is not a scientific criterion. Neither is eating or moving. None of these can be used consistently. All objects in existence move. Even a dead cell moves wrt Jupiter! What a dead cell can’t do despite that it has the same structure and composition as it had before it died is move against gravity. A dead cell is slapped by the wind, floated by water, and squeezed by earthquakes. Before an object eats or reproduces or dies it absolutely MUST show the crowd that it can move against the will of the God of Gravity!
.
The only purpose of the ‘reproduction’ definition of ‘life’ is to DEFINE Panspermia rather than propose (and defend) it as a theory. By doing so the proponent is skirting the Scientific Method, plain and simple. If PansBS states that all living entities descend from other living entities, the ‘repro’ definition suits that ‘theory’ just fine. It is a definition with an agenda. The definition summarily excludes the manufacture or evolution or natural production of atoms into molecules and these into cells (i.e., abiogenesis) because pursuant to the definition life must come from life.
.
The problem is that the ‘repro’ def can’t pass the most basic tests.
.
a. Is a baby that has not yet reproduced alive?
b. Is a fossil which reproduced in its heyday alive?
c. Is Sue the T-Rex alive because it’s head fell off the skeleton?
.
We can go on and on with the examples of why the ‘repro’ def won’t fly. The Pansbullshitters cannot avoid the issue with definitions or by skirting the Qs. They will have to tell the crowd…
.
a. How the entity was born/created
.
b. How it managed to survive the billion-years journey thru an extremely inhospitable environment (Warning: I will attack your theory with the Bird’s Beak – WGDE, pp. 277-279!!! Specifically, be prepared to answer how the rock made it thru the Linear Regime! If Thread Theory has any merit, it demolishes the idea that asteroids or humans can travel to the nearest star by drifting on a raft.)
.
c. How it avoided all calamities which typically affect life (DDBR, Pop/Eco Pyr Overturn, food/scarce resources, extinction, etc)
.
No evidence, please! We have no use for proof, evidence, knowledge or experiments in Science! Just a simple, straight forward explanation! Begin with a definition of life you can use consistently (rationally, scientifically).
.
life/living/alive: ___
.
Please fill in the blanks before you use these words in a sentence.
.
.
. - Jake Archer Biology is just an extension of physics...man classifies certain objects for study..but the Physical Universe cares not for mans classifications, and any special category for animals is merely to satisfy mans caprice, that he is special, that he has a "special purpose."
- Bill Gaede “Biology is just an extension of physics”
.
Indeed, Biology is a branch of Physics.
.
“...man classifies certain objects for study..but the Physical Universe cares not for mans classifications”
.
We are in agreement! No quarrel there!
.
However, in Science, we must communicate theories. The purpose of Physics is to explain and understand causes. If we are going to talk about objects that are alive, we must distinguish between ‘alive’ and ‘dead/inert’. The proponent has to define these make-or-break terms unambiguously because they are at the foundations of the theory he’s about to explain. If there are exceptions to his definition, he needs to brainstorm a bit more.
.
‘Living’ cannot be made a synonym of ‘machine’ to begin with because machine (which essentially means ‘moving object’) is a word we purposely use to designate that which is not living. A robot is a machine. A toy car is a machine. A computer is a machine. A robot is typically not considered alive primarily because it is an artificial gadget. It is a second-hand product, something built purposely by a living object. Therefore, life precedes robots/cars/computers and is thus regarded as a separate category.
.
‘Living’ is not just motion because all atoms in existence move wrt one another whether they are part of an inert object or of a living object. And all objects in existence are made of atoms. Therefore, the ‘motion’ criterion is insufficient to distinguish b/w living and inert. - Bill Gaede Function/functioning merely means “motion with a purpose.” And, of course, the rock did not put it in its mind to break the window on purpose. But then neither does a chicken without a head move for the next few seconds with a purpose nor does a patient in a coma or undergoing an epileptic seizure move for a purpose. Whether with or without a purpose, the word ‘purpose’ introduces an unscientific subjective bias into the def of ‘life’. We now have to guess what purpose the virus had in mind when it gave you the flu or the DNA when it split.
- Bill Gaede Is software a physical object to begin with? Only objects have the ability to move and be affected by gravity. Pixels, information, fire, tornado, waves, energy, spirits, holograms, mass, plasma, black holes, vortices... are NOT objects! These words are not nouns for the purposes of Physics.
- Daniel Tocila I'll have to do some research on the physics behind pixels and information. You guys ever see Blade Runner? This is a tangent but I think it's worth considering the ethics. What if we create human beings in a lab for the express purpose of harvesting organs? What if we make self-aware robots that surpass human cognitive function? Not life?
- Elizabeth Anne Norman Bill, hair does not continue to grow after death - the bodily tissue shrinks away from it, giving the illusion of growth.
http://www.newscientist.com/blog/lastword/2007/06/life-after-death.html - Monk E. Mind A tornado may be said to be an object for purposes of explaining this, "The tornado tore through the town destroying everything. Not a building was left standing."
- Elizabeth Anne Norman A tornado is a group of particles behaving as an entity, rather like a flick of birds, but driven by different energies and without consciousness.
- Elizabeth Anne Norman Yes but they are violently rotating because of interactions of pressure, temperature, particulate characteristics etc which mean that you can say 'oh look, there's a tornado!'
- Monk E. Mind Conversational language is different than scientific language. If you wish to explain how the tornado does what it does in a scientific presentation that is a different matter.
- Monk E. Mind A rock is an object. A pile of rocks is concept. A pile of rocks may be considered an object depending on it's use. If I tell the prisoner to move that pile of rocks from here to there, he will understand that I mean, take a collection of rocks (depending on size) perhaps one at a time... He understands that I do not want him to lift up the entire pile of rocks and move 'it' all at once.
- Monk E. Mind When we talk about waves, what do we mean? I wave my hand in the air. The ocean swells and displaces the air above it.......
A wave is what something does, not what something is....Except when it comes to particle physicists, most kindergarten children understand this. - Elizabeth Anne Norman I don't have the skill to do that, Monk E, and it would take up a lot of space, but surely you aren't suggesting there is no difference in the way the particles comprising the air behave in a tornado from the way they behave when not in a tornado, and there isn't a complex cause for that difference which allows one to, for example, run a computer model of said tornado?
- Monk E. Mind I'm not talking about difference in the way air behaves at all. I'm talking about differences in the use of terms. Whether object or concept.
- Monk E. Mind Well, you do rememebr when you were a child, don't you? Did yu not understand that wave was something you did?
- Monk E. Mind Fire is a concept. Flame is an object. Yet we may say that the house was destroyed in a fire.
- Monk E. Mind Every word in the human language is a concept that resolves to either an object or a concept. There is no third category.
- Monk E. Mind As for explaining phenomena (such as wind or tornadoes) we need to understand what are the objects involved. We understand that all phenomena are the result of surface to surface contact between objects.
- Elizabeth Anne Norman I am actually interested in the interaction ( or not) of the application of a nominative description to something eg a tornado which is generally recognised as being an entity entitled to that description, and whether there is an objective means of def...See More
- Monk E. Mind A wave in the ocean does not travel for many thousands of miles. A wave is the concept of moving water. It is the water that 'travels.'
- Monk E. Mind Actually the surface water does not really move forward very much at all, but that is a whole different can of worms.
- Fatfist Fattie “I don't think the 'wave' a child does to its mother is the same as a wave in the ocean”
It’s identical….but on a different medium.
“wave in the ocean, which travels for many thousands of miles”
Nothing travelled. Waves are concepts….transverse undulations on the water’s surface. Impossible for waves to travel. Only objects can travel.
http://hyperphysics.phy-astr.gsu.edu/hbase/sound/tralon.html
l. - Monk E. Mind In order to study ocean waves we also need to define and understand energy and motion.
"It is important to realize that in physics today, we have no knowledge of what energy is." – Richard Feynman
http://monkeyminds.hubpages.com/hub/Energy-According-to-Relativity - Monk E. Mind "A slime mould doesn't have a permanent shape, and yet again we talk about 'a' slime mould."
Shape is the important criteria we use for object.
Object: that which has shape- Monk E. Mind However, a VERY important distinction needs to be made about things which have shape; does the object have location?
A circle has shape. It can be imagined, and it can be illustrated, but it does not have location. If I draw a circle on a piece of paper with ink, I have demonstrated the concept circle, so that you can imagine it also, but it is the ink and paper which has location.
We are talking about what it means to exist.
Exist: object with location
- Jake Archer After physics it's pretty much all stamp collecting....animals are machines, manufactured by different processes than artificial machines, and performing different functions than machines like Suns or Galaxies, or Pulsars for that matter..
- Monk E. Mind RepRap is humanity's first general-purpose self-replicating manufacturing machine.
http://reprap.org/wiki/RepRap- Serge Kim Bill, asking how the entity was born is killing the spontaneous generation alchemy religion on the spot. Unless you are using being born metaphorically being born means being made a copy of themselves by parent machines. Machine is quite good a term. Root idea is: that which is able. The same Greek root is still present in the Russian verb with the same meaning. It is able to initiate co-ordinated actions or move against gravity by itself, whichever you prefer, while the rest of objects is not. All manufactured machines are extensions of natural ones and are patterned after them.
- Bill Gaede “being born means being made a copy of themselves”
.
I have no idea where you came up with that one. I never thought of myself as a copy of my parents, specifically of my mother. In the instant context being born means, “Where did the living entity originate? How did it come into being? How was the ‘machine’ manufactured? How were all the constituent atoms put together? Did God wave His magic wand and yell ‘ABRACADABRA’ or did Dr. Jekyll mix a potion in his lab?”
.
I mean, most if not all living entities go through some growth cycle throughout their lives. They are not born as adults. In the case of macro animals and plants – a group we form a part of – they manufacture more cells. Trees notoriously begin their lives as seeds and end up as gigantic monsters. All done with inert molecules! Molecules come in, living tissue comes out like miracle! We humans also manufacture life every day inside our bodies, almost always from inert molecules. Try it some day. Fry an egg until not one cell is alive. Eat it. Your body will bring those dead cells back to life in one way or another. If anything, do it for the Fatherland! The birth rate is falling. Pitch your grain and at least contribute with more ‘mass’.
.
“Machine is quite good a term…”
.
…for inanimate objects! Great metaphor! Good for poetry! Lousy for formal scientific definitions! A human is not a machine. Of course, I can’t speak for you. Your reasoning seems to have machine-like tendencies… something like Data: no ability to discern between living and dead.
.
“parent machines”
.
So if R2D2 grabs his tools and manufactures little Junior inside the clanking womb of Rosey, the Jetsons’ maid, the robots have now spawned life for the first time, huh?
.
“that which is able”
.
We won’t know whether it will be able until we run some kind of test. Experiments are outside the bounds of Science, specifically, beyond the purview of definitions.
.
.
.
0 comments:
Post a Comment