At what level does life actually begin?

The definition of “life” really only has the purpose of satisfying our desire to answer the philosophical question “what is life?”, and doesn’t really have a practical application. Although it could perhaps have moral implications, such as the morality behind abortions, euthanasia, animal cruelty and environmental conservation, etc.

My reply will be focusing more on the technical mechanisms behind what constitutes “life”, since that is what the original post seems to be most about.

Yes, metabolism is a very vital part of the definition of “life” – hypothetically imagine that metabolism wasn’t a part of what constitutes life: life would have no purpose or direction; if our bodies never required to be sustained or repaired, we would be aimless in our existence - what goal would we have?
If you take this thought even further and think about what it must be like to be immortal (or if you had an eternal life in ‘heaven’, or if you were a god), what purpose would you have?

Although, if you consider this next thought, life still may hold meaning even without metabolism. Many spiritual figures throughout history have practiced “fasting” as a sort of spiritual meditation - some believed (and perhaps still do believe) that the act of “fasting” would make an individual feel closer to divinity. Perhaps that all originated from ancient people having the same thought experiment we are discussing! Hypothetical"immortal gods" that didn’t have to eat, sustain any sort of physical body, or possess a metabolism may have been perceived by ancient people as having the same state of mind that an individual experiences while fasting (since neither are eating food to maintain themselves). However, this doesn’t consider other innate differences between a human being and a hypothetical “immortal god” - such as the fact that a human being still suffers from physical exhaustion and needs resting time for its body to replenish itself, where as an immortal divine being would not.

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.

What compels you to try and prove that atom’s have some innate need to “satisfy” themselves with other atoms? Is it because you refuse to believe that after a certain point, matter becomes inorganic and “non-living”? Or are you perhaps trying to say that “life” itself may be innate to existence, because I may actually agree with that. Or are you saying that physically, they will actively pair up with other atoms, almost as if they were “looking for other atoms”?

For a while, scientists didn’t know whether or not viruses should really even be considered “living”.

I find what you said about the body’s of bacteria interesting, are you making the distinction between viruses and other living creatures, that viruses have bodies with a very simple atomic make-up (there is no cell wall, no mitochondria, no metabolism at all really) and their only activity generally revolves around processes which take place at an atomic level, where as other types of ‘living’ organisms have much more physical activity in their actions and processes? All viruses really do is attach themselves to the body of a host cell through a chemical reaction, and very little kinetic ‘movement’ takes place; then, protein from the virus is sort of injected into the host cell, also through a chemical reaction; this protein then hijacks the host cell’s RNA and causes it to essentially turn in to a virus factory; the cell dies and the reproduced viruses are released. This freshly born batch of viruses then bumps into new host cells merely by chance really, so there is no real major kinetic movement or physical activity taking place in a virus’s “life”.
With other living creatures, there is much more physical involvement in their “life”.

Evolution is a long term process, it’s not about what a single person decides in his life time. I really think you don’t quite get what it is about. I decide to better my life, how will that make the species I am in evolve more, it’s a process that involves a whole species not something that is about me personally or any person. I don’t even think you understand the process, it takes thousands of years for something to evolve, a decision by one person in a species is an insignificant iteration in that time scale and virtually nothing, hell if a thousand or a million people do something other it’s still a small scale. Eventually the way you behave might get encoded over a long time, but deciding not to do something isn’t going to vary biological function over a time that means anything to your evolution.

No one can decide to avoid evolution anyway.

This used to be the case, but not anymore. Ideas and knowledge can radically affect even the near future. Individuals can perform acts or develop ideas that radically change the way people live quite soon.

Does it change our genetic structure though? Does it make us evolve differently, what genes are changed by sociology?

You’re talking about cultural changes not genetic changes.

The question “At what level does life actually begin?” can not be answered, because life is just a word; there is no objective definition outside of human language dictating when “life” begins or when it ends.

There are many pseudo-lifeforms (such as prions or viruses) that can’t really be considered “living” (neither in the every day sense of the word ‘living’, nor the scientific sense). With these pseudo-lifeforms in mind, we can understand that nature has not set clear guidelines for determining “what is living”.

Perhaps you might be interested to know that some believe that life is an inevitable occurrence, innate in the mathematics of existence. You might find it interesting to look up Fibonacci sequences and learn about their role in nature:
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Golden_ratio#Nature

One piece of supporting evidence that “life” may be innate in existence are the results of the Miller–Urey experiment:
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Miller%E2% … experiment
They found that over 20 amino acids (otherwise known as “the building blocks of protein”, or as some might say “the building blocks of life”) were rather easily created by themselves out of some of Earth’s most abundant compounds (Water, Methane, Ammonia, and Hydrogen) – all they require is the application of electricity, and amino acids will form.

What tells you that you are alive now? The life being referred to here is the physical/biological life of the organism. Nothing in the life of the organism knows anything. Knowing is in intellect or what they call thought or mind. It’s funny that even though thought when it tries to say anything – when it tries to talk about, deal with, or experience the body – it cannot, because living thought is something dead.

Sure, it has been doing this for thousands of years. We have made it possible for people to live who would not have otherwise. Ideas have made it possible for people to have babies who would not have. Ideas of common humanity have made interracial mating more common. These all affect the gene pool.

I am not sure why you are limiting ideas and knowledge to sociology, though I am sure even in that discipline people have ended up affecting public policy and this affected the liklihood of certain people for example getting state funded help with getting pregnant. But science has radically affected our gene pool. Just think how much less successful certain males would be without glasses or contacts. Less success financially/educationally would likely have led to lower chances of procreating. And this is just the most blunt dead obvious kind of affects of knowledge on the gene pool

Also the testing of amniotic fluids for birth defects. and then lots of more indirect effects.

Soon we will directly affect the genes of humans. I would guess it has started already, but sooner or later it will become systematic.

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Well, no. Culture radically affects the way people procreate, what allows one to live long enough to procreate (and how many times), how many spouses one can have, how long people with disabilities live and potentially mate or if they get to live at all, what kinds of people end up being admired - which often correlates with how many children then can and do have and on and on.

See this I like better it is talking about a long term or at least progressive thing, where society eventually leads to evolutionary change and in turn this will actually lead to genetic change over time where such thoughts prevail. What I was arguing about before was an individual attitude to change, a small short term social reasoning. James was talking about harmony in a system, I think a lack of harmony as you are demonstrating is more key to evolution: we have changed by our technology: how things happen, hence who survives is a lack of harmony with the norm that leads to evolution over time. Being in harmony with nature is detrimental as the environment changes, being able to adapt is key.

I know that. I was saying that “physical/biological life of the organism” (as you put it) has no exact definition in nature. There are many “half-living” organisms out there, such as prions (which are essentially just strands of protein and nothing more).

Would you consider prions as living? If so, do you consider all miscellaneous strands of protein as “living” (since a prion is essentially just a randomly coded strand of protein that happens to be infectious)? Then if random strands of protein are “living”, would you consider amino acids themselves(the building blocks of protein) living?
Amino acids are abundant in nature and can be created from raw elements with the mere application of electricity.

Do you see what I mean now? “Life” is just a word. No where in nature does something officially become “living”. Nature doesn’t distinguish between organic and inorganic matter.

However, if you want to know when we human beings consider something to be living or not, then it is the subject of debate, but we typically consider something “living” when it begins to demonstrate either reproduction or metabolism.

I contend that Affectance Ontology actual derives from the notion of self-harmony, not the other way around; that the means for verification of affiance are the verifiable difference between self-harmonies. What defines a self-harmony, which relates to a self-valuing, is the same notion seen from the outside rather than only from the inside, is its “an entropic shell”. This has never been defined in real terms. It is because this an entropic shell is not comprehensible to a human other than at once as and in the full extent of the experience of value-bias. Thus, the naive thinker concludes that “all is love”. What really true is that in the most turbulent raptures of the heart alone can we grasp anything of the meaning of physical law.

We can not see beyond our value-bias and precisely for the reason that this bias is the substance that we are made of.
The anentropic shell is the heart of the self-harmony and it is what causes affectance.

A salute to Texas.

I don’t think James would agree to that.
He changed the term “anentropic shell” later into “anentropic shelter”, the cause, why the particle remains a particle, reluctant to ever be anything different than it is – an Affectance pile-up.

[youtube]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JypDrw4CHhw[/youtube]

Yes, James will absolutely disagree.
Ive been discussing such matters with him since early 2010.
It so happens that I just found a way of formulating with the terms he gives so as for it to make sense to me.

After all, only an affectance-infinitesimals equivalent of a particles anentropic shell could account for its affecting anything. How can it affect if it has no resistance to falling apart? It cant, logically it just can not affect without resisting, and it can’t resist without an anentropic quality to it.

To put it bluntly, affectance, resistance and anentropy are identical concepts, or three words for the same concept.
In the last words of that video thumbnail, you see that eventually the conclusion must be one of self-valuing; supporting that which supports you - James included this more than 5 years after I explained this with far more clarity and depth through self-valuing logic. The ancient hindus understood this mutually supportive aspect of the concept as dharma, a positive aggregate of rta.

These arent new concepts, it is being itself, every culture has an understanding of it. Ours is Nietzsche’s retracing of the Presocratics, amounting through among others Heidegger, Camus, even Lacan and Deleuze, and through rejecting the mistakes of Russell, Wittgenstein, Hume, Kant and Plato, in the understanding of the law of valuing. “love is the law, love under will” means valuing is the law, value under self-valuing.

It’s analytically unusually technical, as well as psychologically unusually immersive. It’s not possible to understand being without being entirely involved in ones own proper being. One can’t philosophize from the bleachers, philosophy happens on the field.

Are planets alive? They grow by consuming rocks from outer space. They reproduce when asteroids collide with them, sending pieces of planet flying into outer space, pieces which might end up being the beginnings of a new planet, or which might end up being food for existing planets. They adapt to their environment, like how the earth found a stable orbit round the sun.

I would say that our planet is alive.

:wink:

Yes, because if they are not then we’re left with the question of how life comes from planets and it’s just pushing the problem further a step.

Planets are made of atoms heavier than H and every single one in the universe came from the death of stars. When stars die, their remains coalesce into rocks which assemble into planets. So, we could say that stars engender rocks or that rocks “eat” stars, because “we are what we eat”.

Rocks engender plants because the next logical step is the use of photosythesis, so then plants engender animals since the animate is codependent to the inanimate (animals take advantage that plants can’t run). Then we could say that animals eat plants which eat rocks which eat stars which eat gas which eats subatomic particles which eat the field of energy we call spacetime, Higgs field, gluon field, whatever…

What is the mechanism to explain how the plus charge knows or is aware of the presence of the minus charge? How is that information communicated? On what medium does the information travel?

For instance, we could theorize that mass attracts space and so another particle with mass is simply going along for the ride inside the space or field that is being attracted, so the particles move toward each other, but why does a plus charge move toward a minus charge? Obviously they are aware of each other, but how? And, more importantly, how is that awareness different from our awareness?

Our awareness is simply more +/- because vision is the detection of electromagnetic waves that are produced from oscillating charge and received in the same fashion. Then all sense-perception and neurochemistry is electric, which is more +/-. Fundamentally, we are +/-, so how is our awareness different than the sum of its parts? Well, it’s just a matter of degrees, levels, gradations.

It seems to me that drawing a distinction between life and nonlife necessitates the introduction of magic to cross the bridge, as in some “property” that would have to be “bestowed” and it’s that which we call “life”. Therefore, it’s a waste of time to try to discover what we’ve merely defined to exist. Either all is alive or all is dead (mechanized), depending how you choose to look at it. To have your cake and eat it too requires a supernatural power (something that isn’t natural to the universe).

I bet the atmospheric layering of Saturn, especially its Hexagonic North Pole, is a locus of much procreativity, of which life is a type.
It seems to be a matter of resources, mobility and lightning.

Jupiter, I assume, is full of such forms of which life is one. And a shitload of moons to move the currents around and gently stir the soup, or storm in this case.
The cosmos is highly economic. Its phenomena are rarely exceptions, but that isn’t to say they don’t sense themselves alone. We do not share the senses of Jupterites
taste, vision and sound yes, both apply in a gaseous pressure system, but touch, smell work differently. They’d be more united. There would a proper sense for pressure as well, I imagine. Maybe it is better to think of transformative apparatuses than of senses.

I just figure this because life takes hold under pretty difficult situations on Earth, as a result of which it has become so beautiful and strong, as to even become master of the planet, almost. I don’t see that happening in Jupiter. Maybe thats whats going on anyway. But the bigger point is that we need to evolve to be as tough and beautiful as to be abel to live on Venus. It has both a hard surface with fluids, and an atmosphere rich in nutrients. If thats your thing, anyway. I don’t think there is as yet lifelike procreativity on Venus, I think it would be radical and very awesome and we would have noticed it. Life on Mars doesn’t make sense. Life in Mars does, in a problematic way. The universe is perfectly economic in making use of the possibility of moving itself around.

An then again maybe there is only life and lifelike procreativity on the Earth. It is surely the only type that matters to us. Earth First. How did it occur, life on Earth? Luck, which is necessity. We are the dice, God created the universe so he could play dice. Fool himself into thinking.

Perhaps thought is a condition of being of which life is but a form. That would explain the philosopher.

Since a self valuing can not stand alone, to have a self means to share a great balance with the cosmos. One can only uphold the balance, or tao, by being proper to oneself. This means to know who is proper to oneself and to whom one is proper, or can be.

Therefore life consists of two main lines: the searches for what is proper to oneself, and for who is proper to that. The quality of life is determined by the degree of accurate knowledge here. Ethics is the game with the dissonance of never having a perfect state, and because we’ve formulated it as a game that allows us to “win”, there is smoothness, philosophy, and the possibility of happiness, which is very rare phenomenon among humans, absent in many animals but common to quite a lot too, and abundant in flowers. Though there is terrible pain in some.

What we know of ourselves is only vanity. What we know of others can be quite meaningful to ourselves granted that we don’t think so, or at least aren’t aware.

Zen is the art of staring at a wall and liking it.
Why does one like it though? Because the basic condition of life, the certainty of uncertainty, is unobstructed by apparent certainties that cause dread because of their true uncertain nature shining through as death. Most humans live to remain as little conscious of this pale shine. Sages and Warriors see that the pale light is only a veil. What the coward perceives as death is really himself.

Existence is maintained through thresholds. The Pathos of Distance.

Since a self valuing can’t stand alone and thus whatever world we speak of is “one” and “united”, it is quite inevitable that there are gods, in the sense that solar systems and galaxies are likely to be quite “sentient” if not something more focused even. It is simply not viable for there to be so much inefficiency as for such great dynamic systems to not amount in consistent self-reflection on some millions of levels at once in the same time and place, which is all that consciousness is.

What we call ethics are the minor frictions in the path, and how we respond to these is called intelligence and stupidity now, goodness and malice then, and cursed and hailed as if it is all there is, whereas what we are is all that is really going on, we are already going to respond in one of several ways, and improving these known ways of responding is what we do when we hone our character, when we exist, or that is what people used to do. Now, it seems the machines have become the more meaningful entities simply because of their greater complexity. Most simple modern humans are already the functions of the greater brains that are the the chips and wires and banks that constitute the internet. Its glaringly obvious too. The worst statement I could make is that one apparently needs to become an internet philosopher to remain independent and free. Entity online is required, and it is a very complicated thing to attain and maintain self-determination online, to be an actual entity. Weird. Because you’d normally say people are more happy who don’t have to deal with that sort of thing, but the truth is they’re not. They feel backward and they are because life goes on very fast up here.

The internet.

Well I think it is the place for minds to be at the moment and some of our greatest achievements will happen because of the internet,

The balanced life is still being redefined between online and offline activities. Naturally, such balance depends on the individuals perceived reality in relation to their perceived successes on and offline. Highly social, average folks seem to be one of the two majority crowds and the other major crowd tends to be made up of the deeper thinkers who incorporate the internet into their more technical projects and thought processes.