SageNonions - I don’t know with total certainty that I am more evolved than a rock (the only thing I know with total certainty, that I feel no doubt about, is that I exist), in fact I could be a rock in a virtuality machine who is under the illusion that I am a human being. However, I don’t need total certainty to live my life. I will operate on the basis of what appears to be the case, and what seems to work best, until my experience changes, or till someone can convince me otherwise.
Life is interesting linguistcally. When we say “life is good”, we mean to say something about the human condition or some junk. But yet we say Bacteria are alive and Bacteria aren’t that impressive. So there is some unwarented emotional reaction when you say something like, “A rock is Alive.”
Beyond linguistics weather we want to call something like a solar system alive or not is an interesting question. I tend to think the proper way to do this is to look at the mathimatical models. Most defintions of life say nothing about carbon or even material existance. So it makes sense to think that a mathimatical (or theoretical) model of something will be alive if that if and only if that thing is alive. Also it makes sense to think that if the model is taken through some transformations that perseve the original properties than the new transformed model would be alive. So a way to try to prove then if a solar system is alive would be to model it in completion and then try to transform it into the model of a cell with property-preseveing transformations.
Death is not a choice
“Life” is usually used so that one cant say that the entity called “rock” can be said to be alive. That is a linguistic fact, and not a very interesting one, I think.
Sage, thank you for your perspective on thinking. I think I might have gone as far as contradicting myself with the “plants think” perspective. The thinking human mind is a universal reaction just as the plants reaction to lean toward the sun. Plants may very well think. Also, I would imagine all separate entities in this universe part of the great whole. So in essence, the living human may be something like a quasi-replicator like the human heart…
Please explain to me exactly how you do that.
Precisely. Your assertion is unfounded.
i like to think everything and innatimate objects, such as mr.rock are of the highest beings, they are completely de-tatched from everything and nothing can affect them, not even death. to me a rock is the one of the most alive things on earth and also the wisest
cheers whitelotus, you’re not wrong either but it keeps me happy.
Well that is a much more interesting question about the pack of wolves isn’t it. I mean is a wolf anything more than a well orcisitrated community of microbe? Why can we give the property of life to that community and not the community of those communities.