21–30 of 79 posts
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'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.
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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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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.
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 don’t think it’s arbitrary. There’s a clear distinction between say a rock and a cell, even if you view the rock on geological timescales and the cell on biological timescales. I don’t think it’s arbitrary or even surprising that humans view things from our own vantage point in reality.
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.
The point being that as technology continues to develop in this area, our understanding of when someone is "dead" may also continue to shift.
There's also the classic example of comatose people.
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…
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…
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> 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 fo…
A paleontologist might disagree with you.
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…
The individual insects in a hive are typically 75% identical genetically.