Thread: What/who Is Alive

Originally Posted by sogart

2)Why are organisms BOUND to have cells by the physical laws? I have studied biology a lot (maybe too much) and I don't see why it would be a prerequisite for life. Maybe life on earth, or in a liquid environment. But I could easily imagine replicating crystals that hold some genetic information in their structure. No cells - Alive (I would say)[/b]

I think that's a valid point: we only have access to life on Earth and so far biologists are in agreement that cell-based organisms are the low threshold of what constitutes life. But what about elsewhere in the universe?

3)Virii: Please don't talk about "stupid majorities" or things like that. If nobody can say what is alive or not please don't tell me that I am stupid if I say a virus is alive. I know it has to "hijack" a cell to replicate but it has quite a lot of organization, contains information for its replication and I think it has an indirect mode of replication. BUT if we can't say what is the criterion fro being alive we can't say of a virus is a live or not.[/b]

In my opinion, a virus is alive. Not being a biologist myself I would gladly defer to their judgement. Unfortunately, biologists are still debating it and iit is unresolved at this point. I think they are at least willing to categorize them as "semi-life", or as one biologist put it "acellular biological entities".

4)What does consciousness and free will have to do with life??? Someone (sorry I dont remember any names) made an argument like this: If you disconnect life from consciousness and say that bacteria are not conscious then it is like saying that people are automata and have no free will. This is a very tricky point. I don't believe in free will. People can not do anything they want seperately from their body. Try to quit heroin and you know what I mean. I believe in thought and the mind as a manifestation of our brain chemistry. I'll leave it to this as it might be too much for a day. (Maybe someone would like to explain what exactly IS this free will that people have - please no christian analysis keep it philosophical)[/b]

In my opinion, the higher a consciousness evolves, the greater its free will. And "life" exists to serve as host to consciousness. Life evolves along side consciousness. I.e., an a advanced consciousness seeks an advanced life form as host. Evolution is driven by consciousness.

We were discussing this very thing in my physics class. "Why weren't you discussing this in biology?" you might ask... because I'm not taking biology--and you can't make me.

My teacher came up with a pretty interesting definition, he said:

Life is the tendancy to behave improbably, and can be posessed in varying degrees.[/b]

At first the whole class was like... "What?" But he went on to explain. Think of a two-year-old. It is likely that that two-year-old spends much of its time bouncing off the walls in a way that can't be predicted, even by a pannel of the brightest scientists, philosophers, and other smart people. One might say that this two-year-old is "full of life".
Now imagine a person in a coma. Nobody would call them "full of life" in fact, they're behaving rather lifelessly, rather probably (I'm not sure that's the appropriate use of that word--as the opposite of improbably--what do you think?).
Think of a plant now, more probable (it will grow upward, and towards light) than, say... a dog, but behaving more improbably (the exact shape of this plant seems pretty much to be for the plant to decide) than say... a rock (which only responds to external forces, and respons in ways we can predict exactly... this was physics class after all).

One could argue that, by my teacher's definition, various sub-atomic-particles would be considered alive because they behave in ways that are so unlike your average "particle," flitting hither and thither without traveling the ground in between and whatnot, but still the locations where these particles are likely to appear are defined stastically, and rather rigidly at that.

Life is the tendancy to behave improbably, and can be posessed in varying degrees.[/b]

That's a good idea but I see it under a different angle:

Living organisms (for me) have to contain some type of information and structure (structure is also made of information).

Structure implies local entropy has to decrease (as more information is stored in the structure of a living organism than in a random accumulation of its ingredients).

To maintain the structure (and information) the organism has to expend energy (so the entropy of its surroundings increases as the "inside entropy" stays lower)

As the probable behaviour of a natural system would be to follow increasing entropy (loss of information + structure), then I agree that life makes a local system increase its improbability.

PS: hope this makes some sense, and that I didn't murder the english language somewhere in there... haha

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Although this would not be enough to define a living being.