It's incredibly complex and yet at the same time it's a collection of simple chemical machines: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b_cp8MsnZFA Brent On 5/18/2020 5:49 AM, Tom Knight wrote:
"If you try and take a cat <https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Cat> apart to see how it works, the first thing you have on your hands is a nonworking cat. Life <https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Life> is a level of complexity that almost lies outside our vision; it is so far beyond anything we have any means of understanding <https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Understanding> that we just think of it as a different class of object, a different class of matter; 'life', something that had a mysterious essence about it, was God given, and that's the only explanation we had. The bombshell comes in 1859 when Darwin <https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Charles_Darwin> publishes On the Origin of Species. It takes a long time before we really get to grips with this and begin to understand it, because not only does it seem incredible and thoroughly demeaning to us, but it's yet another shock to our system to discover that not only are we not the centre of the Universe and we're not made by anything, but we started out as some kind of slime and got to where we are via being a monkey. It just doesn't read well.” — Douglas Adams, The Salmon of Doubt
On May 18, 2020, at 12:00 AM, Steve Witham <sw@tiac.net> wrote:
From: James Buddenhagen <jbuddenh@gmail.com> Date: 5/17/20, 11:22 AM
Perhaps alive/dead is a false dichotomy. At best it there is a line it is blurry. See: https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/are viruses-alive-2004/ Maybe seeking the key to the distinction is a remnant of vitalism, or of the ages-old bad mental habits that led people to find themselves clinging to elan vital, the non-material substance that had to exist. It was like purified wistfulness.
The probabilistic, informational, and thermodynamic definitions of life, or the more DSM-V-like lists of required features, sort of but don't really capture just what we mean.
The bad mental habit is roughly to think as if any human concept comes from heaven, and so there must be a perfect form of it.
Mathematicians can think of (e.g.) numbers as real without embarrassment because we have found workable kinds of perfection to work towards.
--Steve
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