Is life nothing more than a chemical reaction

We Never Know · Mar 15, 2023

The title says it all...

Is life nothing more than a chemical reaction?

Love, hate, empathy, consciousness, etc.

Shadow Wolf · Mar 15, 2023

That's certainly possible.

Heyo · Mar 15, 2023

According to most definitions of life, yes.
Protozoa are alive, do they love, hate, have empathy or consciousness?

ChristineM · Mar 15, 2023

So.it seems.

Eddi · Mar 15, 2023

This is how I see it:

Mind = brain = chemical reactions

So yes, one's experience of everything is an elaborate system of chemical reactions

TagliatelliMonster · Mar 15, 2023

I like how Neil deGrass Tyson once formulated it:

At bottom, life is just the extreme expression of complex chemistry

Revoltingest · Mar 15, 2023

Yes.
But this "chemistry" is so much more than chemistry
because it employs highly organized electrical systems.

Father Heathen · Mar 15, 2023

How does knowing the components or process behind something make that thing any less significant?

Audie · Mar 20, 2023

Life is just a four letter word

We Never Know · Mar 20, 2023

Who said it does? Oh.. Your are assuming again.

Father Heathen · Mar 21, 2023

YOU did. YOU said "nothing more".

JDMS · Mar 21, 2023

I believe so, and I think it's quite beautiful myself. I think many feel the same way!

mikkel_the_dane · Mar 21, 2023

No, it is not. Let me show you the limit of scientific reductionism, because that is what is assumed in your question.
You can't show or understand the meaning of your question by looking at chemical reactions and other scientific facts in your brain.

Twilight Hue · Mar 21, 2023

I think so. Everything we experience involves chemical reactions.

We are essentially reactive matter.

PureX · Mar 21, 2023

Is an airplane nothing more than a collection of aluminum and steel shaped bits? I feel sad for anyone that cannot see that it is so much more then that. That it's value and wonder resides in the existential possibilities it generates, that had not existed, before. Not in it's source.

Twilight Hue · Mar 21, 2023

It's amazing how atoms work.

We Never Know · Mar 21, 2023

That's what it is. Its nothing more than a chemical reaction.

Btw..

"How does knowing the components or process behind something make that thing any less significant?"

Do you feel they same about evolution? Abiogenisis? Should we stop studying them.

mikkel_the_dane · Mar 21, 2023

Now if you can take a brain and study it from the outside with science and claim you can do the same doing that as when you use the word "fell" as you do first person subjectively I will listen to you.
So when you start communicate only stating the chemical make-up of your brain and that say the same as the words you use now, you then have a point.

Colt · Mar 21, 2023

No, we are spiritual beings having a material experience. This first world is part of our experiential training. IMOP

mikkel_the_dane · Mar 21, 2023

What does IMOP mean?

Is life nothing more than a chemical reaction

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