Does something exist if you have no name to call it?
What can you know about this thing that exists if it cannot be attributed designations or descriptions? If you can somehow know about it or know that it does, in fact, exist, how would you communicate it? Even if you could communicate it, what’s your incentive in undertaking the endeavor?
In short, it may exist, but how would you know for certain that it exists outside of your own perspective? Even if you and, say, a few friends saw this ‘thing’, how would you communicate the experience? Regression into uncertainty is the key to this rhetorical style I think.
That is Gorgias’ view – I am not necessarily arguing for it, though I do think there is something to it. I just think it’s cool when I see a person on this board formulate a question or statement, by his own merit, that was addressed a couple thousand years ago and is still being debated.
In my own opinion, sure. People saw flowers before they knew what to call them, but perhaps they first described them in terms they only knew up to that point.
How do YOU define Life?
And if you refuse to define it (for the usual sociopolitical reasons) does it no longer exist?
I like to agree with Freud that 85% of human beings are motivated to do things in life in order to gain access to sex where the other percentage of specific individuals that either are asexual or lack access to sex are purely motivated by power or a protected sense of self being.
Although of course there is no objective understandable universal sense of purpose being that purpose is self created and one can self create just about anything where instead there is only I think as one alluded in another thread that which a person wants to believe. ( In other circles are forced to believe or at the very least are forced to pretend in believing.)
What are the “usual sociopolitical reasons”?
The organism exists in an endless flux of molecular patterns. Passively and uncontemplatively it will while away. It is in Perfect Equilibrium.
But then comes along Mind.
The self. And as I see - the self is nothing but a survival apparatus for the organism. This self is an imaginary entity. And it looks for purpose. This self in delirium sees its self as the most important
thing that ever existed. And that it must be here for some grand scheme.
But alas that entity is more like a parasite.
You said if ‘you’ have no name to call it. Tell me where it is. Touch it. Show it to me. Look at that ‘you’ and tell me what is looking at it. You cannot separate the you from the you that looks at it because there is one you splitting itself in two giving the illusion that there are two different entities.
Without the knowledge of things, you does not exist. The you is created by projecting knowledge of something on to that something in a continuous manner. It is the movement of knowledge. If there is not the ability to mentally grasp then there is not the ability for a you , a subject, to know. If there is no activation of memory neurons the you is not there. For it is the you that uses knowledge to create a state of permanence for itself.
No one here knows a definition for “Life”???
That explains a lot of pointless arguing. I guess maybe another thread is in order.
I’m sure there are as many definitions of life as there are people (thinking things!?) on the forum.
And as already pointed out - several threads exist going way back.
As already pointed out this one starts with basic definitions (ones I’d be very happy with) and then goes on to conscious/intentional life - is quite an exhaustive thread - maybe read or revive it?
From which a starting definition by one khrone:
I would say life is anything that can reproduce itself and move without an outside force being applied.
Therefore biology would be the studying of anything that fits under the criteria of life.
(in that he includes - cellular automations - which are simulations on computer the “game of life” also very very basic biological life like viroids)
No doubt though you require some sort of self-awareness, some thinking thing as part of a definition?
kp
Much of this however also applies to an atom. I am tempted to think life distinguises itself by experience, suffering releaved into pleasure by reenforcing the structure (or if you will the harmony) of the organism. Experience not only defines but causes the ‘self’.
I find the OP and the ideas expressed in this thread testifying of an enlightened mind. Naturally then, I agree… I’d like to refer to this post and subsequent ones in a thread by krossie on aesthetics.
What has been called ‘The will to power’ is more accurately phrased as ‘the necessity of harmony’.
What we perceive as our purpose - what we extrapolate to nature, is in a more objective frame simply necessity. There is only one direction into which things move, become, organize, and that is harmony, effective, self-sustaining harmony. Entropy is only a name for that which falls out of this harmony, what a harmony isn’t able to assimilate. Entropy exists by virtue of harmony, it is only because we recognize a harmonic order that we can perceive such a thing decay, breakdown of order, structure.
The natural, necessary ways in which harmonies are formed can be learned through basic geometry. The word ‘power’ has become redundant.
Nice New Scientist article here - life complex, chaotic and wasteful like our genome?
From which:
[i]It’s the way in which genes are switched on and off, though, that has turned out to be really mind-boggling, with layer after layer of complexity emerging. Early studies suggested that gene activity was regulated mainly by transcription factors - proteins that bind to DNA, blocking or boosting the production of RNA copies of a gene and thus the amount of protein that gene produces…
Nonintelligent design…
…The list of regulatory RNAs grows longer by the day. In some cases, though, it is the act of making RNA rather than the product that matters: producing an RNA copy of one DNA strand chemically alters the proteins around which DNA is wrapped, shutting down genes on the opposite strand.
Such convoluted mechanisms might seem odd and rather wasteful, but that is just what we should expect. “You sometimes ask yourself, ‘Why on earth is biology working this way?’,” says Birney. “But from evolution’s perspective it doesn’t have to look good in a textbook, it just has to work.”
Unfortunately, it only has to work in some of us. The Byzantine complexity and non-intelligent design of our genomes means there is an awful lot that can go wrong, and all too often it does, argues John Avise of the University of California, Irvine. Splicing mistakes and errant microRNAs play a role in some cancers, for instance. On the bright side, discoveries like siRNA could lead to potent new treatments for all kinds of diseases.
What’s certain is that there is much more to discover. “The genome is the start, not the end of the process,” says Birney…[/i]
and dig this!!
pnas.org/content/107/suppl.2/8969.full
kp
most living things don’t make decisions in any meaningful sense of the word
How can a question about purpose arise from nothing known at all of the term ‘purpose‘? There would have had to have been knowledge of it first. Questions are born from already acquired existing knowledge. The assumption that there is purpose has to be present in memory before anything can be asked of it. That’s why I say that there may not be any purpose or meaning of life. Why should there be? Tell me what it is that life cannot do if the knowledge about it is not there. You are not one thing and life another, not a discrete entity surrounded by other things. And yet you cannot know what it is to be in a state of not-knowing because you know. You don’t know the reality of anything. You only know what is true for you. Knowledge is the structure of thought and thought is the dull repetition of the known. Your constant utilization of thought to give continuity to your separate self is ‘you’. There is nothing there inside you other than that.
What I’m trying to suggest is that there is no such thing as your mind and my mind. For purposes of convenience, and for want of a better and more adequate word, I can use the world mind. The world mind is the totality of man’s thoughts, feelings, and experiences passed down to us.
It is that that has created you and me, for the sole, main purpose of maintaining its status quo, its continuity. That world mind, if I may use that word, is a self-perpetuating one, and its only interest is to maintain its continuity. It can maintain its continuity only through the creation of what we call the individual minds – your mind and my mind. So without the help of that knowledge, you have no way of experiencing yourself as an entity. This so-called entity – the I, the self, the soul, the psyche, or whatever word you want to use – is created by that, and through the help of that you will be able to experience things, and so we are caught up in this vicious circle, that the knowledge gives you your experiences, and the experience strengthens and fortifies that knowledge.
Definition of Life? Description? Life is a verb, not a noun. You do it; and none of your or my descriptions or definitions will alter that simple fact.
Life is action. The ambiguity of “action” is intended. There is no one way to define “life” without regression into what constitutes life, and so on. What constitutes “life” is a matter of subjectivity – or, rather, perspective.
Absolutely. Life goes on. I’m not clear on the ‘you do it’ part though. That may imply a way of doing it as if life is not aware of itself and incapable of taking care of itself. If there is a you that does it, then we get into the question and answer ritual of how one does it. All of that could cause a disturbance. It’s true you can only talk of doing when you create a state of mind and say to yourself you are very much an extraordinary intelligent doer but that’s an imposed intelligence on an otherwise intelligently preprogrammed functioning of life. I mean there must be a sustained life already there with which there is a doing. So there may be no use in practicing a doing. Life is aware of itself, it takes care of itself and your creating a you that does life is unnecessary. What is this doing you are talking about?
You’re talking about living life not life itself. Right?
Both.
Does “life” exist outside the perception of that which is living?
Rocks are part of life but are not considered living organisms. Yet they undergo evolution, change, movement, etc. Is that, then, to be considered “life”?
Whatever your answer, I guarantee there is someone who would firmly disagree.
All romance and poetry aside, I think Jakob wins the prize.
I use very technical definitions for most things when I am trying to understand something and in this case, Wiki and I agree.
Life and intelligence are 2 concerns that people talk about a great deal yet are not given respectable definitions with which to sustain their language and understanding. Both can be measured in degrees from zero upwards.
At what point on the color frequency scale do we decide red has turned to blue? There is no exact point of significant change so we somewhat arbitrarily choose a point to distinguish for sake of communication. Intelligence has a zero point and also a variety of type. Trying to measure intelligence with a 3 digit IQ score was the notion of those who seriously lacked in what they were trying to measure. They are also the ones who couldn’t figure out what the word “life” was technically referring to.
Life also has a zero point where the entity has no quality relating to what it means to be alive. In general use, in Science, and even more technically, we call something “life” when it is relatively “self-sustaining”, or it “strategically pursues survival” (my personal definition). There is no exact significant point on a measured scale as to where something would go from non-living to living by slight increase of any particular quality. But the primary, most fundamental (albeit often boring) quality involved has always been the concern of “self-sustaining process” or “survival pursuit”.
In the OP, I had mistakenly assumed that such understanding was sufficiently common. And based on such understanding and definitions, the OP is an attempt to relate “self-sustaining processes” and “survival pursuit” with “the Purpose, sustaining self-harmony”.
Harmony == complimentary motion (processes), void of conflict.
Life == effort to sustain self-harmony.
Momentum == reluctance to be abated or deterred.
Thus any effort, given more momentum, by definition is more difficult to deter or stop. If life is the effort to sustain self-harmony, then by definition, it is more successful when it has higher momentum.
Purpose == ultimate goal or direction of intent or aim.
Thus the “purpose of life”, by our definitions, is “to sustain self-harmony” and is achieved by maximizing the momentum of the processes of life (whatever those might be).
The romance and poetry come in when focusing on each process of life. Each process has its beauty because it is serving the life and thus appreciated. ALL of the efforts that every life attempts are derived from the fundamental, or highest priority of sustaining self-harmony, but the extreme variety in appreciation confuses the issue.
People get lost with infatuation in a particular facet of life and lose sight of their very own purpose in living often because it is too easy. The body is already taking care of 95% of the processes involved. The conscious, unfortunately, must discover that it was created so as to help get that final 5% achieved. Spoiled people are vulgar to behold by those who have to struggle every moment in order to merely stay alive.
Having the conscious at least understand the purpose of its existence and the basis of all the body was trying to accomplish, is a good first step toward harmonizing the conscious with the rest of the mind and body.
I’m still not clear on how, if one is “in harmony with oneself”, that does not at once also require that one is set at a distance from oneself. Harmony is a second position. It sounds nice, of course, but I get the sense you want a more intimate metaphor. Self-harmony seems to require embracing a contradiction (which, mind you, I’m happy to do myself, but I’m suspecting you’re a cleaner thinker than that).