Life Does Not Exist

[Nakosis]

If life doesn't exist who is the one fooling and thinking?

It just means that life doesn't exist as a fundamental property. We just take a set of other identifiable properties and label the set "life". IOW, "life" has no independent existence outside of being a label for this set of properties.

 

[Clara Tea]

​

Why is defining life so frustratingly difficult? Why have scientists and philosophers failed for centuries to find a specific physical property or set of properties that clearly separates the living from the inanimate? Because such a property does not exist. Life is a concept that we invented. On the most fundamental level, all matter that exists is an arrangement of atoms and their constituent particles. These arrangements fall onto an immense spectrum of complexity, from a single hydrogen atom to something as intricate as a brain. In trying to define life, we have drawn a line at an arbitrary level of complexity and declared that everything above that border is alive and everything below it is not. In truth, this division does not exist outside the mind. There is no threshold at which a collection of atoms suddenly becomes alive, no categorical distinction between the living and inanimate, no Frankensteinian spark. We have failed to define life because there was never anything to define in the first place.
Why Life Does Not Really Exist

What do you think?
Are we just fooling ourselves thinking that life is some special property that only an object above a certain level of complexity possesses?

If life doesn't exist, the person writing the question doesn't exist, so the question doesn't exist. That's a relief, because it would have been a difficult question to answer, and now I don't have to.

 

[Nakosis]

If life doesn't exist, the person writing the question doesn't exist, so the question doesn't exist. That's a relief, because it would have been a difficult question to answer, and now I don't have to.

Alright. Glad you settled that.

 

[PearlSeeker]

It just means that life doesn't exist as a fundamental property. We just take a set of other identifiable properties and label the set "life". IOW, "life" has no independent existence outside of being a label for this set of properties.

Looks like the old philosophical "problem of universals". Your stance is on the side of nominalism.

 

[alypius]

Are we just fooling ourselves thinking that life is some special property that only an object above a certain level of complexity possesses?

Is growth or taking in nutrition activities inherent to atoms?

 

[Hermit Philosopher]

​

Why is defining life so frustratingly difficult? Why have scientists and philosophers failed for centuries to find a specific physical property or set of properties that clearly separates the living from the inanimate? Because such a property does not exist. Life is a concept that we invented. On the most fundamental level, all matter that exists is an arrangement of atoms and their constituent particles. These arrangements fall onto an immense spectrum of complexity, from a single hydrogen atom to something as intricate as a brain. In trying to define life, we have drawn a line at an arbitrary level of complexity and declared that everything above that border is alive and everything below it is not. In truth, this division does not exist outside the mind. There is no threshold at which a collection of atoms suddenly becomes alive, no categorical distinction between the living and inanimate, no Frankensteinian spark. We have failed to define life because there was never anything to define in the first place.
Why Life Does Not Really Exist

What do you think?
Are we just fooling ourselves thinking that life is some special property that only an object above a certain level of complexity possesses?

Dear Nakosis,

“Life” is a term in language and, like all terms and languages, it is man made and used to describe and speak of something or other, within the human perspective of reality.

Like most terms, the term “life” is tricky (wether life itself is, is a different question): Man says that plants and hair and nails and skin, etc, are alive but that sand and dust and rocks are not*. But, whiles a tree is alive, a wooden table is not.

*)Cells are an interesting concept.


Humbly
Hermit

 

[Nakosis]

Is growth or taking in nutrition activities inherent to atoms?

I don't know about inherent but it is developed by large complex systems of atoms. At what point does this complexity become life?

 

[PearlSeeker]

I don't know about inherent but it is developed by large complex systems of atoms. At what point does this complexity become life?

Maybe fuzzy logic is useful here.

Fuzzy logic - Wikipedia

 

[Nakosis]

Maybe fuzzy logic is useful here.

Fuzzy logic - Wikipedia

Most of my beliefs are a matter of fuzzy logic. What is true for me exists on a scale between 0 & 1, 0 lacking any certainty and 1 being completely certain. Nothing ever reaches either extreme but lies somewhere between.

 

[PearlSeeker]

Most of my beliefs are a matter of fuzzy logic. What is true for me exists on a scale between 0 & 1, 0 lacking any certainty and 1 being completely certain. Nothing ever reaches either extreme but lies somewhere between.

We all apply fuzzy logic every day when we make statements like "he is tall", "the weather is hot", "the stake is medium"...

 

[Pudding]

It just means that life doesn't exist as a fundamental property. We just take a set of other identifiable properties and label the set "life". IOW, "life" has no independent existence outside of being a label for this set of properties.

Generally what people meant when they say "life exists", it means that "the thing" (that fit the specific common definition of the label "life") exists.

Definition of life:
1: the condition that distinguishes animals and plants from inorganic matter, including the capacity for growth, reproduction, functional activity, and continual change preceding death.
2: the existence of an individual human being or animal.

You seem to want to redefine the label "life" to mean: thing that exists as a specific unspecified fundamental property. Then you use your uncommon definition of "life" to argue with people that life doesn't exist.

Okay, you can try to make a petition to replace the common definition of life with your uncommon definition of life. If you success, then people will have to create a new label like "bubu" or anything else to mean the old discarded common definition of "life". But i doubt you can make it. So you can either invent another label to means what you means by "thing that exists as a specific unspecified fundamental property", or you can continue to use your uncommon definition of life to argue "life doesn't exist" with people who use a common definition of life.

 

[Nakosis]

Generally what people meant when they say "life exists", it means that "the thing" (that fit the specific common definition of the label "life") exists.

Definition of life:
1: the condition that distinguishes animals and plants from inorganic matter, including the capacity for growth, reproduction, functional activity, and continual change preceding death.
2: the existence of an individual human being or animal.

You seem to want to redefine the label "life" to mean: thing that exists as a specific unspecified fundamental property. Then you use your uncommon definition of "life" to argue with people that life doesn't exist.

Okay, you can try to make a petition to replace the common definition of life with your uncommon definition of life. If you success, then people will have to create a new label like "bubu" or anything else to mean the old discarded common definition of "life". But i doubt you can make it. So you can either invent another label to means what you means by "thing that exists as a specific unspecified fundamental property", or you can continue to use your uncommon definition of life to argue "life doesn't exist" with people who use a common definition of life.

I'm not arguing with the definition, just asking for clarification, what exactly is this "condition" stated in the first definition?

 

[Aupmanyav]

Are we just fooling ourselves thinking that life is some special property that only an object above a certain level of complexity possesses?

Change of level is a special property. But if life does not exist then non-life also does not exist. There are self-replicating chains of molecules in the world (I think so, I have not checked). So there is growth of non-living also.

 

[Nakosis]

Change of level is a special property. But if life does not exist then non-life also does not exist. There are self-replicating chains of molecules in the world (I think so, I have not checked).So there is growth of non-living also.

‘We are able to observe behaviour in not-yet-living systems of self-replicating molecules that start to show strong similarities with what we see in biology,’ says project coordinator Sijbren Otto, Professor of Systems Chemistry at the University of Groningen, adding ‘one of the fundamental questions our research addresses, at least in part, is how life emerged.’
CORDIS | European Commission

So non-living molecules can replicate themselves, grow and evolve.

 

[Clara Tea]

Within this, isn't it then of the utmost importance to have a definition in mind, by which a thing becomes more objectively compared versus that definition? For, as you say, without the definition, glass could be considered "liquid"- for some of its activity mirrors less viscous liquid(s), even if only observable over vast expanses of time. Your description of glass in this light reminded me of the cycle of the Earth, with the densest materials ever so slowly making their way downward - flowing, after a fashion.

At any rate - the question then becomes whether any of our definitions by which we might classify various objects or delineations of matter and energy are pertinent in a universal sense (objective). And if they are not, then saying "X exists" for just about anything all boils down to those definitions. This is not me saying that the definitions don't matter - they matter very much from our subjective viewpoint. I guess, in the end, it just doesn't make them "true." The results of the comparison against the definition, may be... but the definition itself is I think what the OP is asking more pointedly about.

Fact or Fiction?: Glass Is a (Supercooled) Liquid

The Scientific American article, above, used the same myth (that you referred to) RE: flowing glass. Some note that old window panes are thicker on the bottom, and they assume that it is due to flowing over time. This isn't true. Glass doesn't flow, even over a great time span. Windows used to be made thicker at the bottom because the weight of the window stresses the bottom more. So, the panes came with instructions to put the thicker part at the bottom. But some people didn't bother reading the instructions and they put the windows in upside-down. Surely we can't assume that the glass flowed upward due to gravity. Window panes didn't used to be made flat, but they were blown into a large sphere, and a section of those spheres was used as a window (curved, with variable thickness). At one point, I believed that glass flowed in old house windows, so I wrote about that in Wikipedia, but I was corrected by a glass expert.

Of course, window glass is just one (among thousands) of kinds of glass.

 

[Clara Tea]

‘We are able to observe behaviour in not-yet-living systems of self-replicating molecules that start to show strong similarities with what we see in biology,’ says project coordinator Sijbren Otto, Professor of Systems Chemistry at the University of Groningen, adding ‘one of the fundamental questions our research addresses, at least in part, is how life emerged.’
CORDIS | European Commission

So non-living molecules can replicate themselves, grow and evolve.

It is still unclear whether viruses are non-living self-replicating molecules or life. Perhaps the ancestors of viruses were from formerly alive material?

 

[A Vestigial Mote]

Fact or Fiction?: Glass Is a (Supercooled) Liquid

The Scientific American article, above, used the same myth (that you referred to) RE: flowing glass. Some note that old window panes are thicker on the bottom, and they assume that it is due to flowing over time. This isn't true. Glass doesn't flow, even over a great time span. Windows used to be made thicker at the bottom because the weight of the window stresses the bottom more. So, the panes came with instructions to put the thicker part at the bottom. But some people didn't bother reading the instructions and they put the windows in upside-down. Surely we can't assume that the glass flowed upward due to gravity. Window panes didn't used to be made flat, but they were blown into a large sphere, and a section of those spheres was used as a window (curved, with variable thickness). At one point, I believed that glass flowed in old house windows, so I wrote about that in Wikipedia, but I was corrected by a glass expert.

Of course, window glass is just one (among thousands) of kinds of glass.

It wasn't me who raised this point, by the way. And I likened it to the "flow" of earthly materials to and from the core. The Earth "churning" or "flowing" after a fashion. You could try and deny that one too... but I have a feeling it will be a little more difficult to debunk.

And in the end, the object of the discussion itself wasn't so important as the idea that it was being used to convey - that the delineations we make between various compositions of matter are really somewhat arbitrary except for our own uses.

 

[Spirit of Light]

Can a rock communicate? That is the difference between you and a rock. An amoeba can respond to stimuli, so can a plant. But a rock can't. That's the difference between being alive or not.

Maybe the speech of a rock is on a different frequencies than what we humans can hear?

 

[Pudding]

I'm not arguing with the definition, just asking for clarification, what exactly is this "condition" stated in the first definition?

Definition of life:
1: the condition that distinguishes animals and plants from inorganic matter, including the capacity for growth, reproduction, functional activity, and continual change preceding death.

(a) the capacity for growth: please look at (4) Living Organisms Grow.

(b) reproduction: please look at (5) The Art of Reproduction.

(c) functional activity: please look at (2) Metabolic Action, (3) Internal Environment Changes, (6) Ability to Adapt, (7) Ability to Interact, (8) The Process of Respiration, (9) Living Creatures Move.

(d) continual change preceding death: change including the death of cell, the reproduce of new cell, the increasing in size in the process of growth, that's what i can think of for now.

Another two characteristics of life please look at (1) Cells and DNA.

What Are the Ten Characteristics of Living Organisms?

All living organisms -- from small to big -- share characteristics that separate them from the divisions in nature that do not exhibit life, like rocks or soil. Living creatures have cells, DNA, the ability to convert food into energy, grow, reproduce, respire and move. These characteristics become the criteria for scientists to separate the living elements in nature from the non-living ones.

(1) Cells and DNA
All living creatures consist of cells. Organized into groups such as organelles, molecules and other multi-cellular classifications, cells can also reproduce themselves, showcase movement and display a response to certain stimuli for a scientist to consider the organism as living. Each cell carries deoxyribonucleic acid or DNA, the material made up of chromosomes that passes down genetic information which includes inherited traits of its lineages.

(2) Metabolic Action
For something to live, it must consume food and convert that food into energy for the body. All living entities employ interior chemical reactions to convert eaten food into energy through a form of digestion, and then transmit the energy extracted to the cells of the body. Plants and trees convert energy from the sun into food and absorb nutrients in the soil through their roots.

(3) Internal Environment Changes
Organisms that are alive make changes to their internal environment. Called homeostasis, this represents the actions a body takes to protect itself. For instance, when the body gets cold, it shivers to generate heat. All living organisms share this feature.

(4) Living Organisms Grow
To grow, a living organism must have cells that divide in an orderly way to create new cells. As cells grow, expand and divide, the creature becomes larger over time. Scientists use growth and development as a measure of life.

(5) The Art of Reproduction
Living organisms grow and reproduce to make more living organisms like themselves. This can occur through asexual reproduction or by producing other living organisms through sexual reproduction. The new organism’s DNA is like that of the cell it came from.

(6) Ability to Adapt
Plants, animals, people, and even microorganism that live can adapt to the world around them. Adaptability involves the traits that help a living organism survive in its environment. One such trait includes the way different animal’s coats change through the seasons to make it hard for prey or predator to be seen.

(7) Ability to Interact
A living organism will interact with another living organism -- whether it is the same type of organism, a threat or a neutral organism, there is some form of interaction between the two. For example, flowers interact with bees by releasing pollen for it to be picked up and dispersed among female plants during reproduction. Plants like the Venus flytrap interact with nature by enclosing itself over flies, lizards and other edible insects that land within its grasp.

(8) The Process of Respiration
Respiration is more than just breathing. It represents the ability of a living organism to convert energy to feed the cells, using oxygen to break down sugars and produce carbon dioxide as a by-product expelled during exhalation. All living organisms have some form of respiration, though the process may differ between them.

(9) Living Creatures Move
To classify an organism as living, it must exhibit some form of movement. Though humans and animals obviously move, other items such as plants also move though it is hard to see without a time-lapse camera. Plants move their buds or leaves toward sunlight or away from shaded areas to promote growth.

 

[Pudding]

Why do we create label? Because label generally help us converse with each other more efficiently.

For example in a hypothetical world if we discard and abandon almost every label because people think it's arbitrary to label apple apple if we can't find a fundamental property which only can found inside apple. By fundamental property, maybe it means an atom engraved with special pattern or an atom engraved with the word "apple" that can be found inside every apple but can't be found anywhere else.

Same apply to almost all other labels:
We can't label orange orange if we can't find orange-exclusive fundamental property.
We can't label banana banana if we can't find banana-exclusive fundamental property.
We can't label tofu tofu if we can't find tofu-exclusive fundamental property.
We can't label curry curry if we can't find curry-exclusive fundamental property.
We can't label house house if we can't find house-exclusive fundamental property.
We can't label Jack Jack if we can't find Jack-exclusive fundamental property.
We can't label Ferrari Ferrari if we can't find Ferrari-exclusive fundamental property.
We can't label life life if we can't find life-exclusive fundamental property.
We can't label diamond diamond if we can't find diamond-exclusive fundamental property.
We can't label butt butt if we can't find butt-exclusive fundamental property.
We can't label funny funny if we can't find funny-exclusive fundamental property.
We can't label pretty pretty if we can't find pretty-exclusive fundamental property.
We can't label Star Wars Star Wars if we can't find Star Wars-exclusive fundamental property.

Here is a conversation between Charlotte and Jack.

Charlotte: Hi, good morning.

Jack: Wrong, you can't find good-exclusive nor morning-exclusive fundamental property, can you stop arbitrarily label things with arbitrary labels please, that really bothers me. Please understand good doesn't exist, morning doesn't exist.

Charlotte: Sorry.

Charlotte: Yesterday i go watch a movie call Anaconda, i really like it.

Jack: I can't stand you anymore, how many times do i have to remind you, can you stop arbitrarily label things with arbitrary labels please, there is no yesterday-exclusive nor movie-exclusive nor anaconda-exclusive fundamental property, so you can stop stop stop stop stop using those label now, because they don't exist.

Charlotte: What about you, there is also no fundamental-exclusive nor property-exclusive nor label-exclusive nor stop stop stop stop stop-exclusive fundamental property, so why do you still using those arbitrary labels, give me a break.

Jack: So what should we do now, it's really bothers me and everyone that there's gazillions of arbitrary labels scatter in our world, we're doomed.

Charlotte: I think maybe we can abandon vocal language and instead using sign language to converse with each other? Does that help?

Jack: Not sure.

Charlotte: What about we show pictures of things what we wish to convey to each other? For example, if i want to tell you i like eating apple, then i show you picture of apple? What about if i want to say you're a dick, do i need to show you a picture of dick? That's so embarrassing. No, what are we gonna do, anyone help us please.

Jack: Maybe it's not really arbitrary to label things with label which we can't found the respective label-exclusive fundamental property at all. Hmm that's right.

Charlotte: Problem solved, yeah.