Why Life Does Not Really Exist (2013)
blogs.scientificamerican.com
blogs.scientificamerican.com
I think a version of that applies here. ("Hard cases make bad definitions"?) We have a real and observable phenomenon surrounding us, and we have a name for it, 'life'. If we seek out border cases that may or may not be a part of this group of things, then that doesn't really help us describe what the main body of this thing is.
Life is not an abstract thing, it is something concrete that we see around us with cells and stuff. To some extent viruses and fire fit in the group of living things, but they're outliers. We can arbitrarily decide either that they are life, or arbitrarily decide that they are not life, if we want the word "life" to be precisely defined. But whatever we choose, it doesn't tell us anything about life.
Leveraging edge cases to form one's understanding of a concept seems to leave one more concerned with the marginal than the broader topic at hand. It's a well written article, just not how I personally aim to taxonomize these days.
From “Life on the Edge: The Coming of Age of Quantum Biology”:
Indeed, it is our view that the quest to understand this strangest of biological phenomena is often hindered by a persnickety insistence on defining it. Biologists cannot even agree on a unique definition of life itself; but that hasn’t stopped them from unraveling aspects of the cell, the double helix, photosynthesis, enzymes and a host of other living phenomena…
Another problem is our sample size is relatively small — it seems difficult to come to a definition of life when we don't know if it exists elsewhere in the universe, and if so, what that looks like. In some ways asking "how would we know we've found life elsewhere" might be the most useful approach. But we have no way to confirm or confirm our expectations at this point.
Master: “whom, may I ask, is asking?”
Or to look at it another way, a valid answer to the question would be "I am asking," or "she is asking," or "they are asking," all of which are subjects. It would be incorrect to answer "her is asking." He/she/they/who are a group, and Him/her/them/whom are a group.
There is much to say about intelligence in relation to life but best to stay on the latter for now considering this forum's apoplectic reactions to discussion on the former.
TO
Here are the observations and they are consistent with living things/solid matter/etc.
The categories are cultural; they are in your mind, not in the world.
This is not the most important thing to teach at the start of a subject, but anyone who really pushes the frontiers of understanding has to deal with it.
Is Pluto a planet? - is not a purely scientific question, it's deeply cultural as well.
Does String Theory really explain anything in the real world? - is a somewhat settled question at this point, but it was a live problem for quite a while, and it was a live problem in scientific culture as much as anything (mainly because experimentation proved to be ... difficult)
Is light a wave or a particle? Does it change it's behavior? - Probably better to say, "We have made observations consistent with both particle and wave characteristics, trying to enforce a satisfying explanation does not help scientific understanding".
"...within the scope of the human mind."
Once we humbly accept the finite nature of human intellect, the answer to the question of existence is available within the community if faith.
A great number of things we know and love don't really exist.
How can a tapeworm be considered life if it can't live outside another lifeform? How can a human be considered life if it can't live outside an atmosphere oxygenated by plants? How can a tree be considered life if it can't live outside of soil full of bacteria and worms?
For all the author's time studying lifeforms, it seems odd that they see the interdependence of life as a stumbling block to its own existence.
That being said, I do think that the author is onto something. I think that people romanticize organic life because it is mysterious and complicated and some life forms do truly special things - some people go so far as to conflate life and sentience when trying to parse the meaning of it all.
So, let's cut through the nonsense and try to distill the central thesis of the article. The author claims that life isn't a thing because the qualities that jive with our intuitive sense of what is "alive" don't neatly conform to the boundaries of our categories and labels. On the other side of that same coin, some simple organisms that exist neatly within the boundaries of the label are reducible to their component parts just like our own inorganic inventions and there remains very little mystery about how they work and where's the magic in that? And since life isn't a thing or it is a thing sometimes but it's not very special, our anchor for judging the value and specialness of our own existence dissolves and OMG emotional crisis. Aren't they a brilliant and edgy thinker.
So here's what I think we should really take away from this:
Life in the colloquial sense is mysterious and awesome. There is no reason to limit our sense of wonder to biological life. I would say that doing so is actually limiting and harmful - people build relationships with inanimate things by anthropomorphizing them all the time. I wouldn't want to lose the unique emotional appreciation that arises from seeing "magical" things through an unscientific lens.
Life in the scientific sense is a label with defined boundaries, not always agreed upon, which can and will exclude "special" things because the universe is infinitely complex and labels and categories are limiting. Seeing life through a scientific lens also forces us to reckon with the notion that simply being scientifically recognized life is not enough to make one regard something with wonder and appreciation.
Indeed, if I understand the author's intent, I think they might agree that bacteria cleanly fit the definition of biological life and are nothing more than tiny complicated self-sustaining machines, which doesn't sound very special anymore. But I would argue that they are special. And since just being life in the scientific sense doesn't seem very special now that we've mastered complex things, we're going to have to parse out why they are special with a little more precision and intent.
Bacteria are special because those simple little machines form the basis of an enormous food web, because they shape our thoughts and emotions when they live in our guts, because they simultaneously make us sick and keep us healthy, because they are some of our most ancient ancestors.
Life at the colloquial macro level is special because it's mysterious and powerful and everywhere. Life at the scientific micro level is just a subset of all the wonderful complex things in the universe with which we enjoy special relationships. Colloquial life and scientific life are two different things that must be appreciated two different ways.
After all, what benefit is this article if it is simply one machine communicating to another?
Categorization is a tool for scientists to use for comparison. It's kind of like k-nearest neighbors learning. We have to draw the line for categories somewhere initially, then we adjust where that line is over time and add more categories if needed.
So yes there is a hierarchy, but they are on the list of things that are alive.
And if I first found bacteria in Mars, I would probably dedicate my life to preserving them depending on how abundant they are.
Is there? Because we experience things that feel more profound?
>you have removed any semblance of moral consideration from the equation. And that, I think, few will accept
>what benefit is this article if it is simply one machine communicating to another
Are these arguments? What point are you making here?
>the experience each person has of living testifies against such a view. There is more to life, and to /our/ lives, than mere engineered material.
Why can't whatever experience of living you have be confined strictly within the bounds of materialism?
Even if we are open to other possibilities, many are unfalsifiable and therefore they cannot be proven. Unprovable theories have limited value. Certainly not enough to discount what can be observed when the physical brain develops and decays.
This is only true if what stops you from treating certain organisms in a certain way are these objective category distinctions (rather than the approximate ones your brain makes), but I don't think that's generally how it works. People who wish to harm others will harm others regardless, the only thing that will stop them is consequences. On the other hand, people who don't wish harm to others will not harm others regardless of whether they believe objective categories or objective morality exists.
This discounts that there are those who wish to harm others who aim to persuade others still to look the other way or even join in on the harm. If the only argument against them is that they'll face consequences, they only have to grow their numbers large enough to avoid said consequences.
To say nothing of those who'll argue against there being any consequences in the first place.
I think rather we have invented the notion of life so that we can divide the world into things that are morally relevant and things that are not. People do this all the time: my phylum is better than all the other phyla, my nation is better than all the other nations, my species is better than all the other species, my race is better than all the other races, my gender is better than the other gender (or all the other genders -- I am not trying to make this an argument about gender). We decide there is a scientific basis -- we declare this by fiat -- for ourselves having ethical privileges.
Morality does not need to be centered around preserving the privileges of the winner. We don't need the concept of life to decide what is right. For instance, there is the balance of perceived harm. If something does not have interests or a means of pursuing them, we need not concern ourselves with harming it.
In any case, deriving our ethics from reason and facts is at least as good as deriving it from distinctions of uncertain basis that happen to always work to our own benefit.