At what level does life actually begin?

I went and copied a definition of life from dictionary .com
Life: the condition that distinguishes organisms from inorganic objects and dead organisms, being manifested by growth through metabolism, reproduction, and the power of adaptation to environment through changes originating internally.

and I also grabbed metabolism because I hadn’t thought of this part.

Metabolism: the sum of the physical and chemical processes in an organism by which its material substance is produced, maintained, and destroyed, and by which energy is made available.

Ok, so they are trying to say that life begins at an organic level to the exclusion of the building blocks of organic matter due to those three processes.

Something became apparent to me at some point that made me question the definition of life. What I had noticed is that at very basic levels, matter still has needs. I’m no scientist and haven’t had any formal education pertaining to matter past high school and the occasional science program so I wont go any deeper than atoms. Still at the atomic level matter may be deficient in some way and in that it “needs” other atoms to be “content”. This is represented by elemental instability and it reacting with something else to “satify” itself. That is basically how organic organisms work, just on a higher level. That would be growth through Metabolism.

The power of adaptation to the environment through changes originating internally. The physical change of matter when a solid turns to liquid is an adaptation in one form of definition and the internal structure of the matter is what determined what would happen. the outside force initiated the adaptation, but it didn’t create the response.

Reproduction might be a hard one to swing tho. Maybe if you look at it as a chemical process that doesn’t have to be contained within the matter itself such as a virus. Instead of the body being the piece of matter itself, the body encompasses what is usually defined as separate. Consider the universe itself as the body and with the right introduction of things it replicates itself. Even organic life has to have external inputs to replicate itself, it doesn’t create matter.

This is just something I was thinking about, because one of the most basic rules of life is that it “needs” and I just wanted to throw it out there.

The line is really undefinable in an objective way. It’s arbitrary. Personally I don’t find there to be a meaningful distinction between life and non-life other than by definitional convenience for some utility purpose such as determining whether CPR is useful.

I think life begins when the kid is old enough to vote.

In my epistemology life isn’t an issue of either life or non-life. Life is much like intelligence. Something doesn’t either have intelligence or not. It comes in a multitude of degrees and variations in type.

The ultimate defining characteristic of life is that seeks its own survival or its “self-harmony”. And by “seek”, I mean that it, by whatever means, identifies harmful from helpful, avoids the harmful, and approaches the helpful. But this characteristic also comes in degrees of just “how alive” something is. Growth and reproduction are merely a couple of the varied methods used to more secure survival.

To say that something must be growing or reproducing in order to be called “living” is far too narrow. A person who cannot reproduce or grow any further is still alive by too many other standards. If you don’t think so, just poke some old woman in the eye and see if she reveals characteristics of being alive (first make sure she has nether mase nor gun).

A rock could be said to have a degree of intelligence or of life that happens to be near zero. Something that very quickly adapts to changes in the immediate and also eminent environment towards its own survival and even more so toward its own longevity (probability of distant survival) can be said to have a high degree of life and/or intelligence.

clearly this issue has a political aspect as extreme politicians are trying to define
life at conception and thus any abortion becomes murder.
This radical viewpoint seems to fly in the face of common sense whereas
how can a collection of cells which has no ability to survive on its own
be called “life”. This idea of life being so valuable it needs protection
at conception means that “LIFE”, all life deserves this protection and
I haven’t heard any politician on any side demand the U.S. goes
vegan. So to demand human life as to be so special as to get this
designation instead of all life seems to me as to egotistical and self centered.

Life seems to me to be the point whereas the fetus is capable of surviving on its own
without medical help. Medical advances has come so far as to bring down the date
of where a fetus can survive and thus change the game.

Now when does life began? Not at conception, but at a point much later.

Kropotkin

You appear to be guilty of your accusation.

How do you account for addiction that causes self-pain? What about suicide?

The complexity required to handle reality in today’s world often leads to misperceptions within a fragmented mind that cause it to habitually engage in self-defeating behavior. In many circles such people are actually said to be “the walking dead” because they have been identified as people who are not actually doing what life would require and are thus “not living” or “effectively dead”, yet still have autonomic fractions of their being keeping them animate. It is just a matter of where you draw the line and give up on yourself or other people.

As I said, life comes in degrees.

Would you consider such a being to be in a state of anti-life since they desire death? Would they be less alive than rocks? Would they become more alive once their heart stops beating and their brain ceases function (barring afterlife explanations that is)?

An interesting epistemological thought. Hmmm…

“Negative life”?
The word “Evil” comes to mind because it is an intentional reverse spelling of “live” so as to indicate a behavior opposed to life. I would have to say that a rock is less evil than someone trying to kill or die. The Catholics answered this one with the whole “limbo” and “purgatory” wherein the decision is made whether the person is to be counted as a living being or a "evil"ing being and thus “sent to” either Heaven or Hell. But the question is more of how to classify the state in an epistemological database.

The problem that I see is that a person in such a state is not merely a single functioning mental process. The mind is a maze of parallel processes that are partially dependent. Thus merely because one portion of a mind has chosen suicide for the entire person, the rest of the mind most probably hasn’t. If the entire mind makes such a decision, the person would just die on the spot… simply stop breathing.

But how do you classify such a fragmented state of thought?
How about, “Broken”. :mrgreen:

I couldn’t say that the entire person was in a state of negative living. So all in all, I suspect it would end up being merely a very, very complex form of a rock, going neither way with full intent rather than the rock going neither way with no intent.

If you mean to imply moral judgement (which you seem to with the religion reference), people seeking suicide generally do so to end their own suffering or seek to alleviate the burden of themselves on others. By most standards, this would not make them immoral, at least in their intent as persons. How would you reconcile this desire to help others or end their own suffering with being morally deserving of punishment?

Babies with anacephaly have just a brainstem and an open skull. It is highly questionable as to whether they would count as people and generally die within a month, but the brainstem does work enough to have them continue breathing and their heart beating. They have no memory, no ability to decide, no capacity for logic, no ability to sense or perceive and more. This makes it seem apparent that the mind is not required to breathe, circulate blood and other required bodily functions. Additionally, I highly doubt you, in your mind, use your mind to tell your body to continue breathing for every breath you take. I would venture to guess it just happens without your consent, even though you could stop it if you chose. If one chooses in their mind to hold their breath, at some point the mind would cut out to unconsciousness and the body would resume breathing on its own, then eventually the mind would return in consciousness.

For reference, I am not technically a mind/brain nor a mind/body dualist, but I do see “mind” as a useful conceptual abstraction.

I use “suicidal” or “suicide ideation”.

This still leaves the problem with the last question I asked. What about when their action leads to ceasing the functions of their brain? They have to have been said to go one way at some point through that, even if only briefly. As well, it would seem to also retroactively change all the previous directed activity that lead to death to be judged as “going that way” which seems to be a somewhat violation of causality.

Firstly, the issue wasn’t one of being right or wrong, but rather merely how to classify it. Secondly, your notion that punishment has anything to do with the Catholic assessment is in error. They speak of unavoidable consequences, not of impugning someone for doing something disfavored. God’s judgment might appear as punishment oriented to you, but from their stance, it has nothing to do with punishments but rather of what happens considering that God is controlling the situation of your life. In the case of Muslims and Judists, they actually go out and enforce what they have considered God’s will. Catholics rarely do that, but rather merely stop helping you avoid trouble if they see something needs to be done by them, “excommunication”. But I don’t think they excommunicate attempted suicides (I don’t think).

That is just an issue of semantics. Being an intelligence designer, I consider any and every algorithm used throughout a being as part of its “mind”. You are speaking more of merely the “conscious mind” or “cognitive mind” (which I spoke of separately).

That is like saying that if the governor of your State decides to kill everyone in your State, then causality has been reversed because you voted for the nut.

The fact that a part of your mind can circumvent the efforts of other parts, has nothing to do with any of this. In effect, one governing part of the person got tricked into murdering the rest of the person.

But “life began” as soon as any part of the whole was striving toward survival, very successfully or not.

Unless you’re going to argue that Catholic “hell” does not involve suffering or a deliberate withholding of pleasure, either of those things are by definition a punishment when done in response to an action as a rule.

Noted.

If someone commits suicide, they have actually gone “that way” towards death in contradiction to your statement that they aren’t going either direction. The actions leading up to it now seem suddenly like steps along that path to death merely by the fact that they actually did it.

It seems more like you’re talking about everyone voting for this governor that says they will kill everyone, but even though this prospective governor is saying that and obviously has a huge stockpile of nuclear weapons behind him that he talks about using on everyone, he’s not really advocating for killing everyone because no person could possibly do that. Then it happens. However, this analogy is about someone’s own suicide in real life which happens many times a year, so you do not get the benefit of mistaken first time naivete to explain what you are currently asserting.

If I tell you that “if you don’t come inside, you are going to suffer” and then you don’t come inside and you do suffer, is that your definition of punishment? It happened that I knew that it was about to rain. You didn’t listen. You suffered. That is all the Catholic Church has ever been saying.

I was speaking of the person in mid decision, not the one who has made the decision successfully. It is much like any government that is being taken over by one faction (much like your USA government). Until the total take over is completed, the final decision hasn’t really been made. It is “in process”.

You don’t vote for the guy who says it. You vote for the guy when he seems rational. But you don’t hear every thought he has. Once you “feel” him actually enacting the slaughter, you realize that you don’t like the decision that he made that you were not aware of and you try to prevent him… too late (again much like your new USA governance).

What an odd thing to post? Evolution has no care for harmony, it is a single thing that only seeks change if it wins. Life is a horrible thing to view in evolution, it mangles, it kills, it destroys anything that does not promote more life more efficiently, it can’t be moral it can’t have a care for anything but something that is better by an arbitrary constant we call more able to adapt. If you look at life in evolutionary terms and not without the veneer of moral human terms we call a reason, it’s “barbabric”, hostile and utterly devoid of care. Most species on Earth will die, in fact almost all of them have every species life and continuance on earth has been destroyed by the planet earth and its cycles and it keeps doing it. One extinction after another, 99%. the 50%, then 80% it kills evolution kills. This planet has produced us, and all we do is place moral value on something that has none. It does not care if you are good, evil or in between, it will kill you in a blink of time you exist, not because it cares, but because you are better suited to adapt, if you can’t you die. If that means us, as humans then we all die. The driving force of life is only to produce more life, morals are redundant. You will die soon if you cannot adapt to the plain fact that is evolution, whatever you think it matters not, you will die if you do not adapt. Earth is one of the most uncaring hostile environments you will ever see, but it is alive. Take note of that. Earth is not heaven or harmony, Earth is a stock fired sure way of seeing the complete disregard nature has for your feelings…

What do you suppose the term, “self-harmony” means?

Evolution has no intention or will of it’s own at all. It is needed because in this reality there is no such thing as a perfect creature, the universe is always changing, living things need to adapt to it in order to survive like you said yourself. The changes in creatures are totally random tho with no further meaning behind those mutations. Ultimately it is the changing universe and other living things that decide the coarse of evolution. It are living things and the surroundings (things like climate change, meteor impacts etc.) that kills species not evolution itself.

Altough species often go extinct, new species evolve from and thanks too the old ones as well, we could not be here without the epic struggles of all our ancestors who evolved from now extinct species. This process can be traced back to our first ancestor, who might be the ancestor of every living being today on earth. I think there is great glory and yes harmony in that fact.

God is an intentional being though and not a mere force of nature, yes? Catholics are saying something along the lines of “if you don’t come inside, God is going to come by and make you suffer because God doesn’t like being people outside at this particular time”. In this case “being outside at a particular time” is “suicide”. If one goes to the afterlife and finds an intentional being ordaining suffering for doing an action, is that not a punishment by that intentional being for that action?

However, it still remains that someone that does do so would not be in a middling neutral way, contra to your previous statement, and would differentiate them from a rock in some manner, even if only for one moment.

In this case, by way of analogy, you are voting for the guy openly saying he will kill everyone while showing his means to do so and just simply believing that this is not actually the case. Then he does so. Many parts of the mind aside from just intent cooperate to realize the goal of that intent in the world.

Those aren’t the only options.
God is not a “force of nature”, depending on what you are calling “nature”.
God is intentional in the sense that God doesn’t change direction and cannot be changed.
But God is NOT intentional in the sense of ignoring a situation unless someone does something naughty and then deciding to go punish that particular person.

God is The Rule that never changes and applies to all situations at all times (much like the weather in the analogy).
The Church is merely informing people of the consequences of The Rule that always applies to all things at all times (“omnipotent, omniscient, omnipresent”).

Now if you think of God as a magical person, as the Mormons do, you have a case of a punishing dictator. But that has never been what any Scripture has actually been about. They merely didn’t make that distinction because most people in those days didn’t care unless there was a dictator involved and probably couldn’t conceive of a universal “Rule” (even one of nature). That willingness to use the mindset of the common people because it yielded more coherence of society was one of the faults (out of several) that has led to today’s contentions.

I can’t translate what you are saying there.

No. Of course I’m not talking about the person who said that he was going to go kill everyone. Who would ever get into office that way?

You are not born with the notion that you are going to kill yourself. You are born with the inherent urge to attempt to stay alive. But during that process (after all of the “governors” have been placed into office (“brain has matured”)), fragmentation of decision making occurs as well as semi-isolated decision making and misinformation. That is why it is analogous to a society. Most of the people in a society have no idea at all of what their governance is thinking or planning. They are busy merely living their own lives holding “good faith” that their governors are trying to be good people (sad mistake).

By the time they discover that their governors were plotting the murder of their entire people, perhaps due to a foreign allegiance, it is too late to stop it. But that doesn’t mean that they willingly go along with it at any time. They are merely trapped.

With a suicide, the exact same scenario takes place. The vast majority of the living fragmented components within any single person very seriously objects to the intent to murder the entire body. But they have lost their right to have a vote due to the cleverness of the governor, that “conscious mind”. A little too much aspirin and the game is over. The vast majority had no say in the matter.

If China’s governance chose to annihilate all of China, they wouldn’t tell anyone. They would just arrange that it happens without any way for the people to escape (again, much like the USA governance). But don’t you think that you might see that as murder rather than a suicide? If you think in terms of the entire nation as merely a single entity, it would be suicide. But reality is that it is not merely a single entity, but a collective. Every single person is that same way, a collective effort, being governed.

So the thought is that even if the governor within a person decides to kill the entire person, it is still murder of the majority. The Catholics have been right about that (not that they handle it well). And that governor, due to the de-monolithic nature of the decision was referred to as a “demon” “possessing” the person - the exact same thing as a dictator usurping control, “taking possession”, of a nation.

That governor is not where life began for that entity (in either a person or nation) and is not the only life that gets killed in the suicide. If the governor decides to merely remove himself from life/office, then no one objects. That would be merely a dictator deciding to leave office. But that is not the same as an actual suicide or the intentional destruction of a nation.

In addition, do you consider it a justified suicide (changing of the effort to stay alive) if it was a decision based on misinformation or deceit?