Silhouette brought up the topic and I think lots of people will have a lot to say about it?
define life and death…let me look in the dictionary hold on…there has to be a genus and differencia definition
Life—The property or quality that distinguishes living organisms from dead organisms and inanimate matter, manifested in functions such as metabolism, growth, reproduction, and response to stimuli or adaptation to the environment originating from within the organism.
and
Death-- termination of the property or quality that distinguishes living organisms from dead organisms and inanimate matter, manifested in functions such as metabolism, growth, reproduction, and response to stimuli or adaptation to the environment originating from within the organism.
there you go…got to love the dictionary…no reason to get all worked up here
HaHa, if you look at a philosophical dictionary I bet you’ll get something totally different!!!
oh, the life of a PERSON and the death of a PERSON is quite different from cells though actually. personal identity is quite a big topic in philosophy, when does a person cease to be the same person as of yesterday and all that.
Yan
You cannot define one without the other
Sure you can. Life doesn’t need death to be alive.
Death needs life. Death means the once-present-now-absense of life.
Life certainly does not need death. Would you say God (no matter if he’s real or not) is not alive because he’ll never die? If God never invented death, would he still be alive?
well depends how you look at it. if you say that life and death are two qualities of one thing, they are relativistic like big and small, then without death, there is really no life, strictly speaking. if tehre is a god and he indeed never dies, then strictly speaking his existence is just necessary and I think it is quite strange to say that he is alive, he just simply exists. without the quality of small, that is if every thing, every single thing in a world is of the same size, then no notion of big and small will ever be needed or developed.
Yan
Yeah, its just dualism.
You can’t distinguish life if you don’t know what death is. You can have life without having death, although strictly speaking, as with everything, there is always a mix of the two unless the definition of one and the other is infinitely accurate under all circumstances from every perspective. Which is kind of inconceivable.
The reason I bought it up is that since there is only a loose definition, no cut off point can really be defined. Just a cut off range where the point is somewhere. Like saying that 5 is somewhere between 5.1 and 4.9. In theory its exactly half way, but try measuring exactly 5cm for example…
This goes for all dualism, for all concepts, that on some level are all interlinked. And that is why there is no real distinction between anything - we just see it that way for some random reason. Which is why everything is just one infinite everythingness. Its just when you see it on one perspective, as opposed to all perspectives (inconceivable to us), which distinguishes and conceptualises what it can perceive, that you see the whole everythingness as lots of ‘somethings’.
This is just a symptom of not perceiving everything. Just what we need to see as far as we evolved to this point in time. (Time works the same as space and all other dimensions that we’ve misperceived as being separate). So there is no pin-pointable ‘now’ either. But you know what I mean, because language works in the same way. As does logic. Etc…
To us at least. But thats all we can do and its enough, so meh shrugs.
[size=150]growth and decay[/size]
So Rafa, we are saying that a rock is not dead?
Correct.
You have to die to be dead.
Of course, that doesn’t mean it’s alive, either. Just inanimate.
Well, what do you mean by “definition”? One sort of definition is the one that violhence provided - a lexical definition. A lexical definition gives information about how the words actually are used. Its certainly important to know these, but not really philosophically interesting. I think violenhence is right.
What other forms of definition are there? Well, one form of definition is what is called “essentalist definition”. When one uses this kind of definition one asks questions like “what is life”, “what is death” etc. This kind of definition was repudiated by Popper (I try to translate this passage from Swedish. I apologize for my English): [In modern science] one begins with the definition formula and asks for a short name for that. Thus would a scientific perspective on the definition “A puppy is a young dog” be that it answers the question “What shall we call a young dog” rather than that it answers the question “What is a puppy?”. (Questions of the form “What is life?” or “What is gravitation?” have no significance within science.) The scientific definition…could be called nominalist as contrasted to the aristotelian or essentialist definition." (The Open Society and its Enemies)
So, we begin by identifying interesting properties, and then we invent a name for those properties. (These inventions are frequently called “stipulative definition”.) We do not ask “what life is” other than to learn the lexical definition.
There is however one form of definition that is somewhat similar to essentialist definition and which doesnt have all the problems that essentialist definitions have, namely what Carnap and Hempel call “explication”. To explicate a concept is to transform “a given more or less inexact concept into an exact one or, rather, in replacing the first by the second” (Logical Foundations of Probaility, p. 3) The explication should fulfill the following requirements: “Similarity to original concept, exact form, fruitfulness, simplicity” (ibid, p. 7) According to this view, one could then explicate “life” and “death”.However, I am suspcious of the attempts to explicate generally, and in particular outside the more exact sciences.
I think one must ask: Why are we so interested in matters of life and death? One reason no doubt is that these are matters of moral importance. For example, we don not want to spend resources on medical aid to dead people, and so we need a definition of “death”. But it seems to me better to identify different properties in the borderline area between life and death and then ask what value do we attach to people having these properties (brain death, permanent coma etc.)? What we then call the persons having these properties is quite irrelevant, but it seems to me unwise to name them “alive” or “dead”, for that conveys the idea that one has provided an essentialist definition. Another problem is that these words have strong emotional power. So, if you call a brain-dead patient dead, people will attach low or no value to him/her without thinking through the matter. If one has more neutral definition, people will think more deeply about whether we should attach any value to brain-dead people.
permanant coma? I like that, can you have partial fullstop??
just joking
Yan
A rock and a dead human are both inanimate matter. To say that the human is dead and the rock is not seems to me rather tautological and semantical. Granted there are still numerous chemical processes going on within a corpse (stuff like decay, growing hair, growing fingernails, etc.). To say that a human is dead but not the rock. Is that to define the current inanimate matter in terms of it’s previous alive state?
Yes. And there’s really nothing wrong with that definition. It works perfectly with how we use the word dead… we don’t call rocks dead, Marshall. We do not call t-shirts dead. We don’t call mud dead…
We call corpses dead, we call burnt plants dead, we call parties dead. What do all these things have in common? They were once alive.
The definition of death is dependent on life. Life, however, is not dependent on death… if it were, then how could you call yourself alive if you haven’t died yet?
In your opinion, what then is the definition of life and being alive, Rafa?
A painting, drawing, scupture, or representation, even a colour, may be described as, “lifeless,” or, “dead.”
Damned if I know. I know it when I see it, though.
Yes, but that’s only because someone saw the potential of life in it. It could just as easily be called “bleak” or “bland”… but instead they chose lifeless or dead. That’s not really the conventional sense of the term. It’s really more of a colloquialism.
I still think that, as stated before, it’s a form of dualism and impossible to accurately define life with out death. It’s like attempting to define good without referring to evil. You can give a million and a half qualities of life and good and another million and a half metaphors. But it’s duality binds death to it. Linguistically speaking of course.
So, are rocks alive, or dead to you?
If you’re alive, that means you’re, “Not dead”, but how do you know you’re not dead? (see, The Sixth Sense).
It really bothers me when someone says something to the effect of, “You can give all the proof or example or reason you want, but I’m going to believe what I want to anyway, and nothing will change that.”
Life is necessary; death is not. I’ve seen no “reason” to argue otherwise.
Please define life or being alive then.
Rocks are inanimate. Possesing the qualities of death. But not necessarily dead or alive.