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The Grayness of the Origin of Life

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Re: The Grayness of the Origin of Life

#11

Post by jollybean »

guerrilla wrote: post #9
jollybean wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's a good thought - but worth considering that just because lines are fuzzy doesn't make them either 'arbitrary' or even 'subjective'. That a materialist perspective gives us some nice hard rules for understanding certain things, it also by definition struggles to help us understand the nature of other things, i.e. 'most important bit' which is 'life' itself, so maybe we should be thinking about that problem a li…

> That's a good thought - but worth considering that just because lines are fuzzy doesn't make them either 'arbitrary' or even 'subjective'. Interesting and plausible, but you didn't give an argument or any example for that.

For most things in the real life that we categorize, the rules that distinguish those categories can be vague. It doesn't mean those categories are not valid, or a function of 'human perception'.

We have difficulty with biological distinction, but we can still confidently categorize something as being a 'Horse' and 'Not A Horse' ... even if sometimes it's a little bit ambiguous, aka 'Kind of a Horse'.

Edit: and as for 'other ways of thinking' it very quickly goes into metaphysics so it's hard to talk about because we don't spend much time in that realm. 'Emergence' and 'Biocentrism' are interesting ideas (fields?) that sit within more or less regular bounds of science and so they're just examples of what I'm referring to.

Re: The Grayness of the Origin of Life

#12

Post by gus_massa »

TaupeRanger wrote: post #10
blurbleblurble wrote: post #5

I'm personally convinced at this point that most everyday distinctions between living and dead are arbitrary human categorizations. Even a "dead body" is teaming with life. As far as "inanimate matter" is concerned, all matter is ultimately part of a plethora of various different cycles and processes of transformation and recapitulation... even if something temporarily looks like it's static to us and our meager litt…

I think it's simpler than you're allowing. Death in animals is the absence of consciousness with no possibility of recovery. In plants and maybe-but-probably-not-sentient life, it's more complicated.

We all agree when we should say that a cow is dead, but what about sponges? You can pass a sponge through a sieve, and the isolated cells will recombine https://www.shapeoflife.org/video/sponges-time-lapse-sponge-... (Is there a better link?) Can a single cell of a sponge create a "new" sponge? Or it's just the "old" sponge? Should you wait until the last cell is dead until we can claim it's dead?

Back to cows...

You can remove the heart of a cow and keep the heart alive in a proper device, and keep the rest of the cow alive with an artificial heart. (I don't know if someone has tried this with cows, but this should be possible with the same technology for hearts transplants in humans.)

Are both parts alive? What happens if I unplug one of them? Is the heart-less-cow is the real cow? I think we all agree about this last question, but from the cellular level it's just an arbitrary classification, in spite it's useful for us.

Re: The Grayness of the Origin of Life

#14

Post by Koshkin »

NotSwift wrote: post #3

A nice article. It seems likely that we will never really know how life started. It is still very interesting to research this subject, because it might help us to learn more about the possibility of life on other planets.

> we will never really know how life started

A big bang of another sort.

Re: The Grayness of the Origin of Life

#15

Post by AprilArcus »

antattack wrote: post #8

Motor proteins look alive: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y-uuk4Pr2i8

I love this animation because it's beautiful, but I hate that it gives the impression of deliberate one-foot-in-front-of-the-other movement. In reality, when the "foot" of the motor protein is unbound, it is oscillating to and fro in a state of brownian motion until it happens to snap into place at the next (or, infrequently but inevitably, the previous) subunit. At this scale, quantum effects such as tunneling come into play, and it would be cool to visualize the organized thermodynamic chaos of the cell rather than the mechanical operation of a homunculus.

Re: The Grayness of the Origin of Life

#16

Post by AprilArcus »

NotSwift wrote: post #3

A nice article. It seems likely that we will never really know how life started. It is still very interesting to research this subject, because it might help us to learn more about the possibility of life on other planets.

I think in our lifetimes, we'll know enough about the preconditions for abiogenesis to perform experiments replicating portions of the process in vitro.

Re: The Grayness of the Origin of Life

#17

Post by slibhb »

blurbleblurble wrote: post #5

I'm personally convinced at this point that most everyday distinctions between living and dead are arbitrary human categorizations. Even a "dead body" is teaming with life. As far as "inanimate matter" is concerned, all matter is ultimately part of a plethora of various different cycles and processes of transformation and recapitulation... even if something temporarily looks like it's static to us and our meager litt…

> Just to clarify, I don't mean that these distinctions are meaningless, just that their meaning is inherently embedded in human experience.

In that case, describing the distinction as "arbitrary" seems wrong.

Re: The Grayness of the Origin of Life

#18

Post by mypalmike »

ExpiredLink wrote: post #6
NotSwift wrote: post #3

A nice article. It seems likely that we will never really know how life started. It is still very interesting to research this subject, because it might help us to learn more about the possibility of life on other planets.

From a scientific point of view we can - not just will - never know the origin of life. Of course, popular science frames it differently.

What makes it fundamentally impossible to know the origin of life? It seems we are likely to develop and refine experiments and theories that approximate the initial conditions and processes by which life took hold. Some of the details of how it happened are certainly lost to time, but it seems there's a lot of room for exploration towards a fairly valid model.

Re: The Grayness of the Origin of Life

#19

Post by shrimpx »

blurbleblurble wrote: post #5

I'm personally convinced at this point that most everyday distinctions between living and dead are arbitrary human categorizations. Even a "dead body" is teaming with life. As far as "inanimate matter" is concerned, all matter is ultimately part of a plethora of various different cycles and processes of transformation and recapitulation... even if something temporarily looks like it's static to us and our meager litt…

Why not go further and say the entirety of "our reality" is a human hallucination, as our senses are limited and our brains peculiar in how they process their inputs. That the "real reality" is an imperceptible-to-us dance of fields (even that is only as far as our theories take us).

Re: The Grayness of the Origin of Life

#20

Post by mysterydip »

gus_massa wrote: post #12
TaupeRanger wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think it's simpler than you're allowing. Death in animals is the absence of consciousness with no possibility of recovery. In plants and maybe-but-probably-not-sentient life, it's more complicated.

We all agree when we should say that a cow is dead, but what about sponges? You can pass a sponge through a sieve, and the isolated cells will recombine https://www.shapeoflife.org/video/sponges-time-lapse-sponge-... (Is there a better link?) Can a single cell of a sponge create a "new" sponge? Or it's just the "old" sponge? Should you wait until the last cell is dead until we can claim it's dead? Back to cows... You…

My favorite example of this is the planarian. You can cut its head in half and it will generate two new halves. Same with the tail. Or cut the whole thing into pieces, and each piece will regenerate the whole body.
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