This is what comes of trying to define binary, all-or-nothing categories in a world of continuous variation. Any sharp boundary you try to draw between "life" and "death" is going to have exceptions. Making heavy weather out of this, instead of recognizing "life" and "death" as approximate categories that are useful for many purposes but can break down at the edges, is just muddled thinking.
If you mean "sometimes a particular animal can be on the cusp between life and death and it's therefore hard to tell which term applies", you may have a point, although for most animals (including people) observation tells us the cusp is very small.
If you mean "life" or "death" are merely mental categories that don't have existence in reality, then saying "this is alive" or "this is dead", or "this is close to life" or "this is close to death", would all be meaningless. We can't predicate a purely mental category of something and then claim that the statement has a meaning outside our minds. Nor can we say our mental categories are approximations of anything real unless we categorize based on something that really exists in the first place.
Define "wrong". Models exist because they're useful. If they're useful, are they not right? Alternatively, does it matter if they're all wrong if they're useful?
I was going to write the same thing. Life, Death, Alive, Dead - these are all terms created by humans to make sense out of the world. In reality it's about more life-like and less life-like.
I agree. I think it's telling that Bertrand Russell's History of Western Philosophy is basically entirely about how all those philosophers peddled nonsense masquerading as deep thinking. For example, here's his money quote about Kant:
"Hume, with his criticism of the concept of causality, awakened him from his dogmatic slumbers--so at least he says, but the awakening was only temporary, and he soon invented a soporific which enabled him to sleep again."
Why wouldn't seeds also be considered in the same category?
Seeds also do not change or exhibit life, and can remain in that state for years, even centuries. But then, with water, they start to grow.
Could it not be considered the same mechanism, except that as these organisms are simpler than seeds and retain their shape (ie do not grow and change) and it is possible for these microscopic creatures to revert to the initial 'seed state' then animated life repeatedly?
Seeds were also the first thing that came to my mind.
I've always found it fascinating that I could plant many spice seeds (e.g. mustard) as long as their container said "not irradiated", and they would sprout and grow just fine, several years after buying them. I.e. they are still technically alive, and can stay as such for many years, which is just amazing life resilience.
That said,
> ...except that as these organisms are simpler than seeds...
I wouldn't say any animal that can move around to be simpler than seeds. IMHO by any definition animals are a big jump up in complexity over plants.
That just means they have less selective pressure to reduce it - possibly because they are simpler. Genome size isn't correlated much without complexity. Obviously it provides an upper bound, but a lot of genes are repeats.
Large software systems also often have significant chunks of code that is only historical and/or "accidental complexity" and can be removed. But we would typically say that removing it is reducing the system's complexity, rather than that it wasn't complex.
At some level, if you are capable of being revived, I think your death was prematurely reported, defined by being revived. But, if you are not revived from a quiescent state, now or into the future, is there a functional difference between being quiescent, and being dead?
Down at the viral level, if they crystallise, they're stable. If they managed to get into rock in a crystallised state, how long would they remain stable? Do we define viruses as "not alive" now? or prions? or mitochondria?
We tend to think about life and death as metaphysical states, but life is really just a process. And death the absence of that process.
Or actually, life is a bunch of different processes. It's possible for some to stop while others continue. Some, if stopped, can be restarted again, others can't. It all depends on whether the systems supporting those processes survive is a useable state. Often they deteriorate without the metabolical processes, but some systems are stable enough to survive a long time without the processes that maintain them so the processes can be restarted.
So are you dead when the processes stop, or when the system has deteriorated to the point they can't be restarted?
I like your take. Agree that we should label something as 'alive' when there are active biological processes happening; and 'dead' in the absence of any. Also, just get rid of the idea that you're not allowed to move between the 2 extremes; or even that you can't be on some spectrum between these 2 states; (e.g. zombies)
In an abstract philosophical sense, who knows? But any real organism in the real universe has a finite limit on how long they can be quiescent, so it is fine to say that they're alive until they can no longer be revived, even if that takes hundreds of thousands of years. Death implies irreversible damage.
“Philosophers are still grappling with the idea that life and death may not be the only states of being.”
Death isn’t a state of being. It is the absence of being. When something dies, it ceases to be. It loses its identity as the thing it was. That’s why, strictly speaking, when something dies, what we are left with is not a body, as only a living thing is or has a body, but the remains of what was once alive. So, in the case of rotifers, if they are alive, either they are hibernating or suspended, or reanimation really is the instantiation of a new rotifer. I am curious what kind of metaphysics these philosophers are leaning into, or why “living thing” entails the actual function of respiration, metabolism, etc. and not just the potential for these things, for example. A rock has no potential for these, but a desiccated rotifer does. (Modern philosophy has a problem dealing with potentiality, so this is not necessarily surprising.)
“At the time, fear of excommunication or condemnation by the Roman Catholic Church for publishing scientific observations that challenged Church doctrine impacted communication about new scientific findings.”
The perennial boogeyman of the Enlightenment. Publishing scientific findings did not get you excommunicated. Indeed, fundamental to Catholicism is the recognition that reason and faith cannot contradict. If a scientific finding could or would authentically contradict Catholic doctrine, then Catholicism would be undermined and there would be no meaning to excommunication. (Some will point to the punishment of Giordano Bruno, but he wasn’t charged for his scientific findings —— he was a crackpot —— but for his heretical theology. Others will bring up Galileo, but again, he wasn’t excommunicated and the whole affair concerned a decades-long conflict of a personal or political nature that Galileo himself enjoyed provoking and which ended with a cozy house arrest in his old age at a time when Protestants were burning witches in Northern Europe.) A tiresome cliche. Frankly, I’m not sure how rehydrated rotifers and tardigrades are supposed to threaten Catholic doctrine. Because someone used the word “resurrection”? So what? Sloppy thinking.
> in the case of rotifers, if they are alive, either they are hibernating or suspended, or reanimation really is the instantiation of a new rotifer.
It is not a new rotifer. Firstly, any life is a continuation of a previous life. Tree grows from a seed, and the seed was grown on a tree. There is one likely exception of abiogenesis a few billions of years ago, but I think it will be hard to claim that roftier's reanimation is a case of abiogenesis.
Secondly, it is the same rotifer, made of the very same molecules roughly in the same places of its body. Some molecules were damaged and they are repaired, but it is the inherent property of life is the striving for homeostasis, life always do that. Cells spend ~30% of their metabolism budget on ion transport through their membranes to keep required differences in concentrations of ions between inside and outside.
But doesn't that mean that this allegedly philosophical/metaphysical question is predicated on technological advancement? I.e. by inventing a more advanced resuscitation method, people who have ceased to exist would suddenly exist again?
No, why would it? Why do you assume they've ceased to exist? Resuscitation is not recreation or re-instantiation. A person prior to resuscitation isn't dead. Rather, some function has ceased (cardiac arrest, for instance) which can, if his state persists, result in death because it will eventually cause all functions to cease and allow decay to begin.
What you have in mind is not so much a philosophical problem per se, but a medical or even a biological problem, i.e., at which point is resuscitation no longer possible even in principle? When is there no longer the potential to resuscitate? That would be the point at which the existence of something has ended.
This belief doesn't make people immune to become crackpots. I personally know one crackpot that happens to believe that the earth revolve around the sun. He believes also that 2+2=4, and it doesn't help either.
> What separates a crackpot from an eccentric person or someone with weird ideas, or is that just a crackpot?
I believe it is how a person construct their beliefs and how they defend it. I don't know enough about Giordano Bruno to claim that he was a crackpot though. All I want to say is that if Giordano Bruno shared some good ideas including some novel and good ideas of the time, it doesn't mean he was not a crackpot.
> And, is it ok to be a crackpot?
No, from the point of view of a Catholic Church of the time, it was not. And Giordano Bruno should have known that. I'm not trying to whitewash Catholic Church, just that Giordano Bruno could have predict what was coming to him and ignored it, while having some really weird ideas. I have a very little knowledge of him, but I heard of some of his ideas and I tend to think that he was a crackpot.
Thanks for your thoughtful and educational reply! I had to go do some digging on the views of the Catholic Church of the time and I hadn't realized, "crackpottery", if you will, was taken so seriously, but after researching I see the problems. Thanks again for taking the time, that was some good learnings.
To add/refine: Bruno didn't incur his punishment because of "weird ideas" or because he was a crackpot, specifically, much less for believing in heliocentrism [0][1].
> Death isn’t a state of being. It is the absence of being. When something dies, it ceases to be
Huh? What about things that were never alive? They never existed?
> strictly speaking, when something dies, what we are left with is not a body, as only a living thing is or has a body, but the remains of what was once alive
Strictly speaking, you're confidently guessing at something you don't know and have no way of knowing.
That said, thank you for introducing me to Giordano Bruno, his ideas seems very interesting and worth thinking about
>> Death isn’t a state of being. It is the absence of being. When something dies, it ceases to be
> Huh? What about things that were never alive? They never existed
No, he means that when something dies, it ceases to be what it was. When a dog dies, it's no longer a dog, but a corpse, and pretty soon will be earth. Same with a person (assuming no afterlife). He doesn't mean that a dead thing is nothing at all, only that a onetime-living thing ceases to be what it was when it dies.
>> strictly speaking, when something dies, what we are left with is not a body, as only a living thing is or has a body, but the remains of what was once alive
> Strictly speaking, you're confidently guessing at something you don't know and have no way of knowing.
Everything we observe about the difference between living animals and corpses tells us that the living body ceases to exist at death. It's a very basic observation. More systematic observation of the onetime-organism's biology or biochemistry will reveal the same thing, in more detail.
This is what comes of trying to define binary, all-or-nothing categories in a world of continuous variation. Any sharp boundary you try to draw between "life" and "death" is going to have exceptions. Making heavy weather out of this, instead of recognizing "life" and "death" as approximate categories that are useful for many purposes but can break down at the edges, is just muddled thinking.
If you mean "sometimes a particular animal can be on the cusp between life and death and it's therefore hard to tell which term applies", you may have a point, although for most animals (including people) observation tells us the cusp is very small.
If you mean "life" or "death" are merely mental categories that don't have existence in reality, then saying "this is alive" or "this is dead", or "this is close to life" or "this is close to death", would all be meaningless. We can't predicate a purely mental category of something and then claim that the statement has a meaning outside our minds. Nor can we say our mental categories are approximations of anything real unless we categorize based on something that really exists in the first place.
I believe that all categories are like that, not just binary ones. All models are wrong, it is their bug and their feature.
Define "wrong". Models exist because they're useful. If they're useful, are they not right? Alternatively, does it matter if they're all wrong if they're useful?
Exactly. A map that is 100% accurate is useless, because you might just as well use the real thing.
This!
I was going to write the same thing. Life, Death, Alive, Dead - these are all terms created by humans to make sense out of the world. In reality it's about more life-like and less life-like.
At the end of the day it is just self sustaining chemistry. Everything else is abstraction that muddies waters and invites semantical exercises.
Sounds like most of philosophy
I agree. I think it's telling that Bertrand Russell's History of Western Philosophy is basically entirely about how all those philosophers peddled nonsense masquerading as deep thinking. For example, here's his money quote about Kant:
"Hume, with his criticism of the concept of causality, awakened him from his dogmatic slumbers--so at least he says, but the awakening was only temporary, and he soon invented a soporific which enabled him to sleep again."
Why wouldn't seeds also be considered in the same category?
Seeds also do not change or exhibit life, and can remain in that state for years, even centuries. But then, with water, they start to grow.
Could it not be considered the same mechanism, except that as these organisms are simpler than seeds and retain their shape (ie do not grow and change) and it is possible for these microscopic creatures to revert to the initial 'seed state' then animated life repeatedly?
Seeds were also the first thing that came to my mind.
I've always found it fascinating that I could plant many spice seeds (e.g. mustard) as long as their container said "not irradiated", and they would sprout and grow just fine, several years after buying them. I.e. they are still technically alive, and can stay as such for many years, which is just amazing life resilience.
That said,
> ...except that as these organisms are simpler than seeds...
I wouldn't say any animal that can move around to be simpler than seeds. IMHO by any definition animals are a big jump up in complexity over plants.
Plants in general have much larger genomes than animals, and that's clearly a definition of complexity.
That just means they have less selective pressure to reduce it - possibly because they are simpler. Genome size isn't correlated much without complexity. Obviously it provides an upper bound, but a lot of genes are repeats.
Yes. You'll find that plants generally survive better after being irradiated, indicating that a lot of these genes are apparently not important.
Large software systems also often have significant chunks of code that is only historical and/or "accidental complexity" and can be removed. But we would typically say that removing it is reducing the system's complexity, rather than that it wasn't complex.
Genes are not maintained by people
Well, on any timescale, even rocks are alive. We're made out of star dust. Life is everything, it's just on different timescales, one long continuity
At some level, if you are capable of being revived, I think your death was prematurely reported, defined by being revived. But, if you are not revived from a quiescent state, now or into the future, is there a functional difference between being quiescent, and being dead?
Down at the viral level, if they crystallise, they're stable. If they managed to get into rock in a crystallised state, how long would they remain stable? Do we define viruses as "not alive" now? or prions? or mitochondria?
In my understanding, viruses are not alive, they are information gone wrong (for the recipient).
from another understanding, all life is just virus that stumbled on this one weird self replicating trick.
The weird trick that polynucleotides don’t want you to know!
Yes, canonically viruses are not alive.
Though they are close.
We tend to think about life and death as metaphysical states, but life is really just a process. And death the absence of that process.
Or actually, life is a bunch of different processes. It's possible for some to stop while others continue. Some, if stopped, can be restarted again, others can't. It all depends on whether the systems supporting those processes survive is a useable state. Often they deteriorate without the metabolical processes, but some systems are stable enough to survive a long time without the processes that maintain them so the processes can be restarted.
So are you dead when the processes stop, or when the system has deteriorated to the point they can't be restarted?
I like your take. Agree that we should label something as 'alive' when there are active biological processes happening; and 'dead' in the absence of any. Also, just get rid of the idea that you're not allowed to move between the 2 extremes; or even that you can't be on some spectrum between these 2 states; (e.g. zombies)
In an abstract philosophical sense, who knows? But any real organism in the real universe has a finite limit on how long they can be quiescent, so it is fine to say that they're alive until they can no longer be revived, even if that takes hundreds of thousands of years. Death implies irreversible damage.
Those rotifers might have inspired the 3-body problem's concept of dehydration/rehydration as a skill to survive cataclysms.
Don’t a lot of small organisms do this? Eg. “Sea monkeys” (brine shrimp)?
Tardigrades also do anhydrobiosis
Is this different than wood frogs, whose heart freezes and stops beating until it thaws again?
The World of Null-A is a book where the binary vs non binary way of thinking is a core theme
“Philosophers are still grappling with the idea that life and death may not be the only states of being.”
Death isn’t a state of being. It is the absence of being. When something dies, it ceases to be. It loses its identity as the thing it was. That’s why, strictly speaking, when something dies, what we are left with is not a body, as only a living thing is or has a body, but the remains of what was once alive. So, in the case of rotifers, if they are alive, either they are hibernating or suspended, or reanimation really is the instantiation of a new rotifer. I am curious what kind of metaphysics these philosophers are leaning into, or why “living thing” entails the actual function of respiration, metabolism, etc. and not just the potential for these things, for example. A rock has no potential for these, but a desiccated rotifer does. (Modern philosophy has a problem dealing with potentiality, so this is not necessarily surprising.)
“At the time, fear of excommunication or condemnation by the Roman Catholic Church for publishing scientific observations that challenged Church doctrine impacted communication about new scientific findings.”
The perennial boogeyman of the Enlightenment. Publishing scientific findings did not get you excommunicated. Indeed, fundamental to Catholicism is the recognition that reason and faith cannot contradict. If a scientific finding could or would authentically contradict Catholic doctrine, then Catholicism would be undermined and there would be no meaning to excommunication. (Some will point to the punishment of Giordano Bruno, but he wasn’t charged for his scientific findings —— he was a crackpot —— but for his heretical theology. Others will bring up Galileo, but again, he wasn’t excommunicated and the whole affair concerned a decades-long conflict of a personal or political nature that Galileo himself enjoyed provoking and which ended with a cozy house arrest in his old age at a time when Protestants were burning witches in Northern Europe.) A tiresome cliche. Frankly, I’m not sure how rehydrated rotifers and tardigrades are supposed to threaten Catholic doctrine. Because someone used the word “resurrection”? So what? Sloppy thinking.
> in the case of rotifers, if they are alive, either they are hibernating or suspended, or reanimation really is the instantiation of a new rotifer.
It is not a new rotifer. Firstly, any life is a continuation of a previous life. Tree grows from a seed, and the seed was grown on a tree. There is one likely exception of abiogenesis a few billions of years ago, but I think it will be hard to claim that roftier's reanimation is a case of abiogenesis.
Secondly, it is the same rotifer, made of the very same molecules roughly in the same places of its body. Some molecules were damaged and they are repaired, but it is the inherent property of life is the striving for homeostasis, life always do that. Cells spend ~30% of their metabolism budget on ion transport through their membranes to keep required differences in concentrations of ions between inside and outside.
> Death isn’t a state of being. It is the absence of being. When something dies, it ceases to be. It loses its identity as the thing it was.
How does that fit with clinical death followed by resuscitation in humans? At what point in time does a human cease to exist?
Well, if they were able to successfully resuscitate you that means that you weren't truly dead.
But doesn't that mean that this allegedly philosophical/metaphysical question is predicated on technological advancement? I.e. by inventing a more advanced resuscitation method, people who have ceased to exist would suddenly exist again?
No, why would it? Why do you assume they've ceased to exist? Resuscitation is not recreation or re-instantiation. A person prior to resuscitation isn't dead. Rather, some function has ceased (cardiac arrest, for instance) which can, if his state persists, result in death because it will eventually cause all functions to cease and allow decay to begin.
What you have in mind is not so much a philosophical problem per se, but a medical or even a biological problem, i.e., at which point is resuscitation no longer possible even in principle? When is there no longer the potential to resuscitate? That would be the point at which the existence of something has ended.
Lazarus syndrome is an interesting read.
The Jaime Reyes collection of stories? What did you take away from it?
> Giordano Bruno ... was a crackpot
Yeah. He though the earth revolved around the sun. Crazy, right?
This belief doesn't make people immune to become crackpots. I personally know one crackpot that happens to believe that the earth revolve around the sun. He believes also that 2+2=4, and it doesn't help either.
What separates a crackpot from an eccentric person or someone with weird ideas, or is that just a crackpot? And, is it ok to be a crackpot?
> What separates a crackpot from an eccentric person or someone with weird ideas, or is that just a crackpot?
I believe it is how a person construct their beliefs and how they defend it. I don't know enough about Giordano Bruno to claim that he was a crackpot though. All I want to say is that if Giordano Bruno shared some good ideas including some novel and good ideas of the time, it doesn't mean he was not a crackpot.
> And, is it ok to be a crackpot?
No, from the point of view of a Catholic Church of the time, it was not. And Giordano Bruno should have known that. I'm not trying to whitewash Catholic Church, just that Giordano Bruno could have predict what was coming to him and ignored it, while having some really weird ideas. I have a very little knowledge of him, but I heard of some of his ideas and I tend to think that he was a crackpot.
Thanks for your thoughtful and educational reply! I had to go do some digging on the views of the Catholic Church of the time and I hadn't realized, "crackpottery", if you will, was taken so seriously, but after researching I see the problems. Thanks again for taking the time, that was some good learnings.
No problem, don't mention it.
To add/refine: Bruno didn't incur his punishment because of "weird ideas" or because he was a crackpot, specifically, much less for believing in heliocentrism [0][1].
[0] https://www.newadvent.org/cathen/03016a.htm
[1] https://www.catholic.com/magazine/print-edition/how-fact-bec...
> Death isn’t a state of being. It is the absence of being. When something dies, it ceases to be
Huh? What about things that were never alive? They never existed?
> strictly speaking, when something dies, what we are left with is not a body, as only a living thing is or has a body, but the remains of what was once alive
Strictly speaking, you're confidently guessing at something you don't know and have no way of knowing.
That said, thank you for introducing me to Giordano Bruno, his ideas seems very interesting and worth thinking about
>> Death isn’t a state of being. It is the absence of being. When something dies, it ceases to be
> Huh? What about things that were never alive? They never existed
No, he means that when something dies, it ceases to be what it was. When a dog dies, it's no longer a dog, but a corpse, and pretty soon will be earth. Same with a person (assuming no afterlife). He doesn't mean that a dead thing is nothing at all, only that a onetime-living thing ceases to be what it was when it dies.
>> strictly speaking, when something dies, what we are left with is not a body, as only a living thing is or has a body, but the remains of what was once alive
> Strictly speaking, you're confidently guessing at something you don't know and have no way of knowing.
Everything we observe about the difference between living animals and corpses tells us that the living body ceases to exist at death. It's a very basic observation. More systematic observation of the onetime-organism's biology or biochemistry will reveal the same thing, in more detail.
> Huh? What about things that were never alive? They never existed?
Correct. They don't think, therefore they ain't ;)
"I think therefore I am" does not imply "anything that doesn't think doesn't exist"
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Affirming_the_consequent https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Denying_the_antecedent
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