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New Giant Viruses Further Blur the Definition of Life

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Re: New Giant Viruses Further Blur the Definition of Life

#101

Post by filoeleven »

meri_dian wrote: post #15

Here's a controversial view, but any good comments section needs a few of them: Viruses are no more "life" than bacteria are "life" or amoeba are "life" or ants are "life" or mice are "life" or humans are "life"... We're all just chemical machines, nothing more nothing less. Giving the word 'life' some special significance is misleading and confusing. In order to not confuse ourselves we should be talking about funct…

Is this not just picking a different abstraction? What is a “chemical” besides a collection of atoms? What is an “atom” except (some hand-wavey quantum stuff that I certainly don’t understand)? Why give primacy to the chemicals over the atoms or the quantum field?

We could go the other direction too, and consider it significant that we are a tiny part of a giant living body that is the planet. Does it stop there? Could we comprehend it if Earth itself was a part of some vast active living intelligent system, in the same way that we believe a bacterium or a cell cannot conceive that it is part of our own human body, seeing it simply as “the environment”?

It all gets fairly philosophical pretty quickly. I certainly don’t have any answers, but I will say that I find it a little suspicious how when we move far enough in any direction from the scale we ourselves operate on, our understanding of how things work devolves rapidly towards relatively simple deterministic or probabilistic equations, while our own life experience is rich and rooted in desires and decision-making.

Re: New Giant Viruses Further Blur the Definition of Life

#103

Post by nyc111 »

jamesrcole wrote: post #83
nyc111 wrote: post #22

I consider legal entities such as corporations to be living organisms. So I don't agree that life is limited to organisms with a visible (biological) body.

There's two crucial questions left unexplained by your comment: what do you mean by 'living', and why does a legal entity fit that notion of living?

>what do you mean by 'living', and why does a legal entity fit that notion of living?

Do I need to define "living"? I may just list some living organisms everyone agrees that they are living organisms such as animals, plants, and bacteria. Their common element to me is not that they have a visible body but their ability to make intelligent decisions to further their existence. So to me, to have a biological body is not a requirement to be alive. The only requirement is the ability to make intelligent decisions to perpetuate its existence as an organism. What I am saying is that life start as the result of an agreement between entities. Human body is the result of an agreement between the egg and the sperm. A legal entity starts as a legal entity. Why do you think corporations cannot be considered live organisms?

Re: New Giant Viruses Further Blur the Definition of Life

#104

Post by nyc111 »

kitd wrote: post #71
jacobush wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hm, you say that like it’s self evident. Don’t corporations do things alone humans couldn’t?

That's not really emergent behaviour. eg the decision making of an organisation is simply the decision making of it's personnel. Complex organisations can self-organise even though the individual parts have little understanding of their position in the structure. A better simile would be societies at large, and the changes in things like housing markets or stock markets, driven by individuals who are only guided by t…

>the decision making of an organisation is simply the decision making of it's personnel.

This is also true for animals, including humans. Most of our decisions are made by micro-organisms in our gut, by our microbiome. There are other decision-making centers as well. The self is not even aware in most cases that he/she is just applying a decision that was made for him internally.

Re: New Giant Viruses Further Blur the Definition of Life

#105

Post by nyc111 »

WJW wrote: post #35
nyc111 wrote: post #22

I consider legal entities such as corporations to be living organisms. So I don't agree that life is limited to organisms with a visible (biological) body.

In fact, corporations display many of the characteristics we typically associate with AI: perfect recall due to record keeping, ability to pay attention to many things at once, in theory immortal as long as it can keep up funding itself, can do projects that surpass the ability of any normal human to comprehend by itself, etc. It's a bit slower than we regularly imagine computer-based AI to be, of course :)

>corporations display many of the characteristics we typically associate with AI...

I agree with your comment. This is how I think about corporations too. But I'd like to mention something about the name "Artificial Intelligence". I think that Artificial Intelligence is not artificial and it is not intelligent. I define AI as the ability of an organism to make right decisions to perpetuate its existence. Not only this is not artificial it is a widespread natural process. I also use it as the definition of life. An organism that can make the right definitions to perpetuate its existence is said to be alive.

Or maybe, more generally, the ability to make decisions.

Re: New Giant Viruses Further Blur the Definition of Life

#106

Post by jamesrcole »

nyc111 wrote: post #103
jamesrcole wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's two crucial questions left unexplained by your comment: what do you mean by 'living', and why does a legal entity fit that notion of living?

>what do you mean by 'living', and why does a legal entity fit that notion of living? Do I need to define "living"? I may just list some living organisms everyone agrees that they are living organisms such as animals, plants, and bacteria. Their common element to me is not that they have a visible body but their ability to make intelligent decisions to further their existence. So to me, to have a biological body is n…

> Do I need to define "living"?...

> Their common element to me is...

Stating what you mean when you're talk of 'living', as you're doing here, is giving your definition of it.

> Why do you think corporations cannot be considered live organisms?

Did I say anything to that effect? Not in the comment you're replying to.

In another comment on this post I said that a notion of 'living' is a mental construct, not an objective phenomenon outside of ourselves.

Re: New Giant Viruses Further Blur the Definition of Life

#107

Post by nonbel »

skissane wrote: post #93
nonbel wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>"Trying to define "life" is one of the central questions of the philosophy of biology." If this is true then "philosophy of biology" is a likely a total waste of time. It is obvious that life vs non-life is an artificial categorization that humans use because it is useful to them.

Your response presumes a particular philosophical position. When you call life "an artificial categorization that humans use because it is useful to them", you are espousing the nominalist solution to the problem of the universals, and applying that to biology. Even while attacking the philosophy of biology you are actually engaging in it. Nominalism may be "obvious" to you, but it isn't obvious to everyone. Just bec…

There isn't any deeper philosophy behind what I said, it has nothing to do with how things "really are".

Just go categorize some stuff and see what happens. Is a bottle cap a "coin"? In some cases, sure that could be. In others, not at all.

Re: New Giant Viruses Further Blur the Definition of Life

#108

Post by omginternets »

woodandsteel wrote: post #100
omginternets wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Sb trying to push sb else to use a definition meets the second part of the sentence. This is post-modernism in thin disguise. Certain categorizations can be more valuable (practical, useful, just, etc) than others, in which case it's reasonable to rally for their use over other, less valueable, categorizations.

It's post-modernism only if you assume that human beings have no set, general psychological characteristics and are entirely the product of socialization. Otherwise it is pragmatism.

Huh?

It's most assuredly post-modernist because it implicitly assumes that all categories are equal in value (i.e.: that no category is better than another), and that the decision is at it's core a power-struggle (i.e.: oppressive to the loser).

This is, again, a tired and fruitless approach.

Re: New Giant Viruses Further Blur the Definition of Life

#109

Post by creep »

nonbel wrote: post #63
mgeorgoulo wrote: post #61

I bet every biology student has struggled with the introductory "what is life" chapter, full of conflicting definitions. It is so difficult to define life because there is nothing to be defined. There are complex stuff and simple stuff. We tend to call things that exhibit a certain degree of complexity "alive", but that's just a word. Can't remember who wrote the perfect definition of Biology: "The study of complex t…

Yes, I logged in to say the same. There can be mutliple definitions of life, each useful for different purposes. It is like those people trying to figure out how many types of cells there are in the human body. There is no "right" or "true" answer, only useful ones. All these categories are artificial.

I've always believed rocks are alive, if that counts.
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