We collected two caterpillars. They both turned to chrysalises. I worked yesterday with the chrysalis beside my monitor. It was one of those days where I couldn't program fast enough to keep up with my brain. I glanced at the little bug box and WHAM there was a big beautiful butterfly. It was a crazy magic trick. The butterfly had popped out without me noticing. Kim took the monarch to her class and the class let it go. The class named it "Monica Butterfinger".
I went walking and got to thinking about what life is. I semi-decided, after much deliberation, that life, the most basic form, is a thing which has a sensor and "responder". The responder can in some way change or change something given the sense. Change implies time, but here "time" only means an ordered set of elements which point to different changes. I suppose I need to say "organism" to clarify the difference between "the thing" and the attribute of life. Anyhow, also, a sensor implies an environment of some sort.
If we agree on this, then we can begin asking about "intelligent life". We can define that and find out if a venus fly trap is an intelligent life. If we get the definitions straight we can also answer the question of whether an acorn is alive - or, if dead, when it "comes to life". Again, the "when" is important because asking "when" something comes to life we have to be careful. If time is an ordered set... is it continuous or discreet etc?
Now, to back up, although it does interest me to understand what life is, I'm just as interested (or maybe more interested) in how I answered the question. I was also a bit astounded to find that wikipedia had just about the same conclusion. Here is what wikipedia said, "Life is a characteristic that distinguishes objects that have signaling and self-sustaining processes from those that do not..." My definition of life is a bit more general and maybe too general. Anyhow, it was pretty close. The point is that I have a way of categorizing and hierarchy building for defining what is what.
So, I grabbed an acorn and gave it to Kovi. I asked him to think and not answer until later. The question was, "Is the acorn alive?" A few hours later he said, "Yes. It's alive". I haven't asked how he came to the conclusion, but I'm curious to know and will ask later :)
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And then a comment to myself:
I ran across this which is almost exactly the more "general" definition of what I was thinking about. That's pretty cool.
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Latest interest (post-gigging conversation) is still on how we think about it. When we pose a question like "What is life?", "Is God a universalist?" You may see me dodging the question entirely, saying "Since God can do anything, can he make a rock that he can't lift?" The answer may seem flippant. I'll say, "Let's go gigging!". Or maybe I'll throw the tautology "Let God be God".
But I might be on to something. Here's a cut-n-paste:
In Aristotle, substances are to be clarified by stating their definition: a note expressing a larger class (the genus) followed by further notes expressing differences within the class. The substance so defined was a species. For example, the species, man, may be defined as an animal (genus) that is rational (difference). As the difference is potential within the genus; that is, an animal may or may not be rational, the difference is not identical to, and may be distinct from, the genus.So, maybe, that last paragraph could be re-stated as "if you want to think in the framework of hierarchy and classifications (something useful a lot of time), there's no bridge between life and not-life that can differentiate what is alive and what is not alive".
Applied to being (and here's where I'll add maybe life as we were talking about it) the system fails to arrive at a definition for the simple reason that no difference can be found. The species, the genus and the difference are all equally being: a being is a being that is being. The genus cannot be nothing because nothing is not a class of everything. The trivial solution that being is being added to nothing is only a tautology: being is being. There is no simpler intermediary between being and non-being that explains and classifies being.
So we end up in this rabbit hole - a 500 foot pit in Louisiana!
However! I can still say that my grandma did not make me breakfast. The flounder we caught is no longer responding to external stimuli.
The flounder we caught the first night was not the same one as we caught last night (weird, this seems profound... oooo ahhhh)
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