Also we could just go by the scientific process of defining something alive or dead. If anything has all of these characteristics:
Living things are made of cells.
Living things obtain and use energy.
Living things grow and develop.
Living things reproduce.
Living things respond to their environment.
Living things adapt to their environment.
then it is considered living. But I’m sure you’ve heard of it and that is not what your looking for.
Things share properties? Even if they do, how does thins get us any closer to addressing your question, ‘What is life or living?’
In trope theory, by the way, there are no universals (like being a donkey); there are only single instances of being a ‘trope’. A trope is a particular abstract thing, not an instance of a universal property. Donkeys, for example, do not share ‘donkeyhood’ on this view; rather, each is describable as being a donkey because the relevant trope resembles certain other creatures that also possess it. On the universals account, things share a universal quality (obviously) and seem alike in virtue of that. On the trope account, there are only certain resemblances of single instances of, well, tropes.
Now, the property of being alive, or having life, or just ‘life’, on the trope account, is not to be explained in terms of things sharing a universal quality such as ‘rationality’, ‘self-perpetuation’, ‘certain biological descriptions’ (the nature of which you seem to be enquiring about); rather, it is a single property that certain things possess and resemble certain other things in this regard.
On my account, it is souls (which are themselves tropes, of course, for they are plainly particulars) that resemble one another in having certain other tropes – being rational, self-motivating, etc. – but do not share some mysterious universal, ‘life’ which alludes you and the nature of which you seek.
So to you, life is more or less a theory? Or are you the only one to possess life?
What if we talk not about a donkey, but about a set of donkeys that includes both actual ones, and otherworldly ones? Then can’t that set just be the trope consisting of the single idea of a donkey and all it’s coinstantiations?
Life is a term used to refer to an object. That object is probably a trope. That trope probably consists of an abstract particular instantiated as a member of the set of all the other instantiations of things which we use the term to refer to.
I also think that people use trope theory to try and reconcile universals and particulars, but that tropes, are for the most part, just particulars in disguise.
I think that ‘life’ is an abstract, particular property possessed by souls, which all resemble (i.e., have in common with) one another in this regard. Maybe there is only my soul in existence which perceives other ideas, including those of other tropes (abstract entities) and, then again, maybe not.
Whatever life or being alive amount to, the answer is not to be discovered in searching for some quasi Platonic Form of Life or Being Alive, as if these are universal qualities that many things can share. Rather, it is to be discovered by singling out the properties I have in virtues of which I say I live, or have life.
If I want to know what motion is, I do not look at countless things which share this universal property and then try to specify what it is that they all share. Rather, I look to myself or to another particular trope and see what this particular possesses that counts as its having motion. Then I know.
A child learns what a rabbit is by being shown one; not by being shown a whole class of entities, each of which shares the universal, ‘rabbithood’. When the child sees another rabbit, it recognises it by virtue of its resemblance to the first, not through its sharing a certain universal property with the first, and then seeks to discover what this universal is.
Makes sense?
I don’t see the distinction between the things you’re trying to distinguish.
You may be making conjectures about reality.
I’m just talking about language.
What I’m trying to say is the definition of life we have now is testable whereas Remark’s definition of life is not. Which definition is more useful?
In Remark’s definition life is described as something with a soul. Nobody knows if the soul even exists so basically anything and everything is alive and dead simultainiously.
And what was your definition again?
Can you put them right next to each other so I can decide?
Or maybe I’ll even throw out one.
Who knows?
How can we show someone life if the definition relates to something that is unobservable?
The way we as a human race describe life now is by observing an object and seeing if they have all the six characteristics.
Properties aren’t unobservable. I can observe all the this worldly instances of donkeys. I don’t have to see every instance.
I also think that I observe universals in the sense that I assign objects which share in certain properties to categories and in at least some small sense universalize something right then and there.
But deep down, where my emotions rule, I want to think that nominalism is true.
I like the idea of things being novel, and I can’t get over the fact that at the very least, all things differ in at least space, or time or both.
I’m talking about the soul. We can’t yet observe the soul. We don’t even know if it exists.
It has to exist in some possible world. It just may not be the case that it shares in the property of being actual. I think that it might be a mistake to say that any object, if necessarily unobservable, doesn’t exist. Even the forms exist, and no one can see those right? They may exist only as conceptions, and they may not qualify as “real” under a criteria that requires physical status, but they’re real in the sense that they’re objects. Objects of thought, inquiry and much discussion in the history of philosophy.
Can you define exist for me? I think we differ on the definition.
All objects exist.
All things which exist are objects.
There is no object which doesn’t exist.
Nothing that exists is not an object.
Ok, my definition of exist that I was using was any physical object.
That works great for a scientific ontology that only seeks to explain the behavior of matter itself, but there’s more to everything than just matter. If you want to really categorize everything, you’ve gotta get past physics.
I was trying to ask how can we decribe life if the object that defines life is unobservable?