Since life is such a ubiquitous and fundamental concept, the definitions of it are legion. —John D. Barrow and Frank J. Tipler, The Anthropic Cosmological Principle

Words are our servants, not our masters. For different purposes we find it convenient to use words in different senses. —Richard Dawkins, The Blind Watchmaker

What is life? And why should we care? Well to begin with, we are living beings, and that fact distinguishes us from most things in the Universe. Though humans are not the only living things, we are among the few, so understanding the nature of life might be an important step toward understanding ourselves.

As Richard Dawkins points out, people define life in different ways for different purposes. For everyday situations, it seems to me that we have a common-sense set of criteria, somewhat along the lines of:

Does it look like a person or an animal? If so, is it moving? Does it respond to being spoken to or touched? Failing this, is it breathing, or is its heart beating?

Does it look like a plant? If so, does it have green leaves? If not, could it be because it is winter? . . . Etc., etc.

The question is, can anything meaningfully be done to define life that would not simply be a repetition of such everyday notions. Once upon a time, philosophers like Plato believed that things in the everyday world are imperfect reflections of perfect forms or concepts in some type of higher realm. In defining a class of objects, we would be searching for an understanding of that mystical essence that inheres in all of them.

But as David Hume said, somewhat more recently,

Nothing is more usual than for philosophers to encroach on the province of grammarians, and to engage in disputes of words, while they imagine they are handling controversies of the deepest importance and concern.

Even more recently, the logical positivists have stressed the distinction between analytic and synthetic propositions. An analytic proposition is one that is true by definition, such as saying that "men are adult male humans." Such a statement is an assertion about words. On the other hand, a synthetic proposition asserts some new truth about the world that was not inherent in the words themselves. Synthetic propositions are subject to verifiability; we can perform experiments or other observations to determine whether these propositions are true.

A third class of propositions consists of statements that are neither analytic or synthetic, and to the logical positivist, such statements are simply without sense. The logical positivists sought to expose much of traditional philosophy as meaningless discourse, a sort of neurotic disease.

Which of these three types of statements—analytic, synthetic, or meaningless—am I planning to make about life? Well, neither of the first two. Whether my statements will fall into the third category remains to be seen.

I would argue that it would be a good thing to have a workable abstract definition of life, and that such a definition need not be wholly arbitrary, but can be defensible to a degree. However, the point is not to describe some sort of metaphysical essence of life. Rather, the point is to define life so that the term can be usefully extended to situations we have never before encountered.

For example, the legal definition of "death" now has to take account of situations that have only recently been made possible by medical science. Nowadays many comatose people can be kept on life support machines for years. But are we to regard this as life, or specifically as human life, with all the ethical considerations that we attach to human life?

In the following quote, Poundstone derives the following criteria for living things from Von Neumann’s work:

(1) A living system encapsulates a complete description of itself.

(2) It avoids the paradox seemingly inherent in (1) by not trying to include a description of the description in the description.

(3) Instead, the description serves a dual role. It is a coded description of the rest of the system. At the same time, it is a sort of working model (which need not be decoded) of itself.

(4) Part of the system, a supervisory unit, "knows" about the dual role of the description and makes sure that the description is interpreted both ways during reproduction.

(5) Another part of the system, a universal constructor, can build any of a large class of objects—including the living system itself—provided that it is given the proper directions.

(6) Reproduction occurs when the supervisory system instructs the universal constructor to build a new copy of the system, including a description.

—The Recursive Universe, Chapter 11

However, it is true, as Schrodinger points out, that all life activities increase entropy, and that the body must exhaust this entropy back into the environment (primarily by radiating heat).

To summarize, what have we learned from Schrodinger?

Living things are systems with a characteristic order that persists over time.

Living things are active. (Even if an organism appears to be sitting still, processes are going on inside it.)

Living things are open systems that exchange material and energy with their environment.

Living things increase the entropy in the environment around them.



The term phantasia in the passage is apparently an untranslated Greek word for imagination.

Now, all this is true but it does not follow that our actions are uncaused, or even uncaused by input from the outside. For even in the case where we are sitting thinking, and suddenly decide to do something, the mind that is doing the thinking has been progressively modified by many inputs over the years. What does follow is that these inputs are not the complete causes of action. You put a key in a lock to open the door, but the key could have no effect unless the lock were shaped to receive it. The door opening is caused not only by the key turning, but also by all the forces that shaped the lock that receives it. Our responses are caused not just by some stimulus, but also by all the factors that have shaped us, both genetic and environmental.

Men think themselves free inasmuch as they are conscious of their volitions and desires, and never even dream, in their ignorance, of the causes which have disposed them so to wish and desire. —Benedict de Spinoza, The Ethics, Appendix to Part I, trans. R. H. M. Elwes

While the considerations in this section are helpful secondary criteria for identifying life, they are not sufficient, either individually or in combination, to finally show that something is alive. For we might be able to create some mechanism that responds to inputs in some sophisticated and indirect way. But if its responses are not such as to promote survival, such as by avoiding threats and seeking out food, then it is not really behaving in the manner characteristic of life.

Assuming that life is a matter of degree, how might we measure the degree of life in something? Following are some possible considerations:

Since we have said that living things are systems characterized by some pattern or schema, we can ask whether patterns are something that can be possessed in varying degree. A useful concept in this regard is the following:
The intensity of a process relative to a given entity . . . is a measure of how much the process simplifies the entity — how strongly the process is a pattern in the entity. It has to do with the ratio of the complexity of the process to the complexity of the entity. —Ben Goertzel, Chaotic Logic

The quality of life in a system could be proportional to the intensity of the pattern or schema that defines the order in that entity.

You could look at the percentage of variation that occurs in the system on a daily basis. How many properties are there that vary, and over how wide a range do they vary? Assuming that this variation can be quantified, how does it compare with the elements that remain constant? The quality of life could be proportional to the ratio of the constant elements to the varying elements.
You could look at the percentage of variation that occurs over the course of a lifetime. In large organisms, there is a huge amount of variation since growth begins from a tiny egg and proceeds to gradually build something much greater. Yet it seems that the basic pattern of the organism emerges fairly soon, albeit on a smaller scale and with different proportions than characterize the adult form. More significant changes occur in the insect world, where you find such things as a caterpillar changing into a butterfly. The quality of life could be proportional to the degree of constancy in an organism over the course of an entire lifetime.
Since organisms live for widely varying lengths of time, you could say that the quality of life is proportional to the average lifespan of individuals in a species.
Since organisms always die eventually, and have continuance beyond death primarily only through offspring, you could focus on the differences in the ways that various organisms reproduce. The quality of life might be proportional to the degree of resemblance between a parent and its offspring. A virus reproduces more or less exactly, as do bacteria. Most higher organisms reproduce sexually, as a result of which none of the offspring exactly resembles either parent. So this criterion would have the unfortunate effect of establishing that a virus is more alive than you and me.
You could modify the previous criterion to reflect, additionally, the number of offspring.
On a species level, you could focus on how long the species persists, or on how many other species are descended from it. It the species the origin of a major branch of the evolutionary "tree," or is it an old dead twig?

What exactly is life and what is death, so afterlife can even be defined.

Hugs,
Nanner

Hi Nanner-

Recall that according to information theorists, information, meaning the patterning of arbitrary events, as opposed to the events-in-themselves (eg: ding an sich), is the essence of entropy. Compare the work of Claude Shannon at Bell Labs.

That being true, thermodynamics deals actually with patterns and arrangements, not with their substrates. One of my doctoral studies was to demonstrate that society's development of knowledge by integrating and connecting experiences is exactly predictable as a thermodynamic effect.

Because the accretion of knowledge, which is a matter of potential states, and the accumulation of matter, which deals with extended material states, obey slightly different laws (rather like Planckian versus Bose-Einstein statistics) we tend not to associate them. Thus, we have a universe of infinite potentialities, and another one of limited finite logical limits.

These two versions of the cosmos look very similar, yet somehow they are difficult to reconcile - unless one has the insight to separate the IS-AND-MUST-BE from the MIGHT-BE.  This is complicated a bit, because the MIGHT-BE always includes the IS-&-MUST-BE.

Fortunately, Nanner, I don't have to know the answer to every question, So I'm unable to give you a specific response - maybe others can. However, I suggest that somewhere in this difference between manifestation and potentiality there might be a way to answer your question exactly.

dave

Hi Nanner, dave, Members,

:)

Thinking that perhaps this may have some relevance to the discussion:


"Life has an end.  Death has an end.  But Consciousness is endless."


- u

Nanner wrote on Feb 17^th, 2008 at 6:37am:

What exactly is life and what is death, so afterlife can even be defined. Hugs, Nanner

 Hard one to put into words.   Life is awareness and consciousness, whether talking physical life or non physical life.    

 In our separating self from Source in consciousness, we came to know another state, a temporary one that Source allowed the awareness to exist but doesn't experience Itself as a Creator consciousness though we as aspects of Source experience it and thus in a sense It does as well.  

 This other state has been called "death".   Death then is then unlife, which is unawareness and unconsiousness, not a true or eternal state of being or awareness.   Meaning for every Soul who does not choose to fully attune to Source which is as life itself, there is a splitting of their own consciousness, and in that splitting there are aspects of self that experience temporary periods of unconsciousness and unawareness.  

 An analogy: Picture "life", pure creative consciousness as an unbelievably radiant White Light.   When you shine this White Light through a prism, it seemingly breaks up into a rainbow which could be perceived to be differentiated as 7 main colors.    Temporarily the White Light seems to be lost in the sudden appearance of color, the continuity seems to be temporarily suspended.   But when we redirect that same Light, which now seems to be color, back through another prism, it becomes the original White Light again.    The White Light contains all the frequencies of what we would perceive and label as "color", but in a perfectly balanced, merged, and continuous, unbroken state of being.    This is very similar with us, and our temporary forgetfulness of The Home.    

  For us, as seeming humans, this translates to us experiencing a temporary lapse of consciousness when we "die" even though there is no true death.   The period of unconsciousness or rather break in the continuity of consciousness, depends primarily on ones overall and temporary degree of attunement to Source.   Or to use the color/rainbow, White Light, and prism analogy again...the faster you raise your inner frequencies the more you shift into ever expanded colors within that rainbow.    So what we perceive of as Violet then contains within its awareness every other experience, frequency, and awareness of all other colors slower vibrating than itself, but not in a perfectly balanced and merged state yet.   Red on the other hand, would have the most narrow focus and most limited awareness.    

Maybe this is why those who have a lot of constant red (particularly the dark, dingy, and low leaden reds) in their aura are known to be extremely selfish and self centered in tendency, attitude, and being so narrowly self focussed, they have what we could call a very unexpanded and very limited consciousness and awareness?  In these cases, the little self becomes the whole world and we see this in serial killers and the like who have no empathy whatsoever for others, and such types of people always have A LOT of these very dark and leaden reds in their aura, oft red blacks.  

So in a very real sense, one doesn't have to die physically, to be "dead" even while physically alive.   If they continue this extreme selfishness when they transition to the nonphysical potentially temporary hells, they can so break up their own consciousness bonds and experience true, absolute death which is total non existence, non self awareness of that self as being an individual.   Thankfully, this doesn't seem to happen too often.  

 But, we can, if we so choose, to fully align to, channel, and be purely At One with Source Consciousness.   If an aspect of us does that while being a "human", then what we call "physical death" will not be experienced and thus no break in the continuity of consciousness.  

Death is limited awareness, a narrow focus, and those who live life purely expand to the All perspective.   They become aware of every other aspect of the Greater self, both in their own Disk sense, and in the sense of every other Disk, and yet they still retain a sense of self and have a self awareness, they just don't choose any other mode of being and expressing than what Source itself would.  They become purely creative, purely positive, and constructive in being and expressing.   No fear whatsoever exists in such a consciousness.  

 There is the absolute or ultimate perspective, and then there is also the relative perspective wherein this is experienced to varying degrees depending on ones attunement to that Standard, the All.  

 There are some who have completed this process while focusing their consciousness in what we term the physical, which is a collective temporal illusion based on the non reality of "separation".    For these, this illusion falls away, though from our perspective they continue to exist in it.    It's more like that saying, "to be in the world, but not of it".  

 Such is the state and attunement that Yeshua came to express and the whole point behind the Resurrection, that even the experience of physical death is an illusion for a fully aware Child of the Creator.    It's quite possible that this Resurrection process even translated into our physical terms and this is possibly what "created" the shroud of Turin image (a very interesting artifact).

 Or from a less religious source and perspective, when Bob Monroe asked his Greater, Disk self to meet the most spiritually mature person living in his space/time cycle, his nonphysical consciousness and etheric body was brought to a person who was some 1800 years old and who while had "physical attributes" just like you or i do, they did not age, did not eat, did not sleep, though apparently this person occasionally liked to fly kites sometimes for fun (brings a new meaning or slant to the insult of "why don't you go fly a kite!" ;) ;D :D ).  

 Truly are such individuals "enLightened", they are pure Light, and have unlocked and released the pure Light potential that is seemingly "frozen" in what we call matter.   What is "Light", it's the same that some call "Love", and this is the active, connecting but also differentiating Creative aspect of Source.   It is the consciousness, the state, the energy of being and awareness that allows for the simultaneous existence and experience of that seeming paradoxical state of both individuality/uniqueness/difference and Oneness/sameness at the same time.  

  This came to be known, after the first Spirit Spark that had separated Itself in consciousness from its Maker, came back and remerged with Source.   This Spark became both the model, the first full Co-Creator, and its very awareness/consciousness went into the fabric of this entire Universe.    Literally and symbolically it is the creational Light of the Universe.