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Wow...I thought Clinton took the prize when he stated..."it depends on what the definition of "is", is...

How can anything be "more" alive? What an absurd concept. If this idea were accurate then the opposite would have to be true..

Can something be more dead then something else...?

No. Dead is dead, if it is TRULY dead (zero is zero).

I knew you'd hate the idea Phreedm, because it does smack down the whole "we are all equal in the eye of God" thing. But there's a lot on which we disagree.

First, let me say that I heartily agree with the spirit of your article. Life qua life isn't important. I don't value the individual life of a mosquito or a germ, and I certainly value the life of a mouse or a dog much less than that of a human (which is why I have no problem supporting medical research on animals).

When you delve in deeper and deeper, you are absolutely right that there is no magical line between "alive" and "not alive", everything disappears into chemical reactions. We don't value life for itself, we value certain traits of the living. When those traits are absent or diminished, the value we place on this life disappears or is reduced. And this is all just and good.

I do feel compelled to respond to this, though:

The whole concept that "all life is sacred" has caused the abortion debate, the vegetarian movement (besides health reasons)...

I strongly disagree and think you're misinformed or indulging in some strange stereotyping. I'm sure there are some extreme vegans who think all life is sacred, and some real whackjobs that take this to the extreme of killing humans to save the lives of experimental animals. But vegetarians are as diverse as atheists and there many reasons to choose to be vegetarian that have nothing to do with "sacred" or health. For a start, there is the environmental cost of meat production, an important reason and hugely underrated. But since you understand that "life" exists on a continuum, you'd see that other animals are alive and suffer, so it's easy to build a moral reason without any "sacred" BS.


Yeah, it sounds like this is a diversion, but it isn't. Once you understand that what we value in life and what we think is good to preserve exists in varying amounts in humans, you understand that it also exists in varying quantities in other animals. While you may morally justify killing another man when threatened, you couldn't justify killing him for convenience. Similarly, you can justify killing an animal if necessary for your health and welfare, but not for your convenience, which is really what you're doing when you eat meat. Those that try to justify it, often end drawing an arbitrary line in the sand saying "these lives are valuable and worth saving and great cost, these have absolutely no value at all." You undermine your own argument.

How would we measure this? Could we actually quantify "life"?

What it means to be alive seems less important to me than what is important about the living.

Nice post Tyro - thanks for clarifying the vegetarianism thing. I wanted to touch on it, but yes I see your point.

Perhaps you are confusing "life" with "sentience" which is exactly why most of us have very little qualm in squashing a fly, a bit more squeamishness in killing a fish, a bigger problem still with killing a mouse, a strong aversion to killing a dog, absolute repulsion at killing a monkey, and a universal abhorrence at killing another human being. As an organism's intelligence and self awareness increases, or at least our perceived notions of said organism's intelligence and self awareness, so too does our inability to take that particular life increase. I think it has to do with anthropomorphic projection and our evolutionarily acquired taboo against taking human life (at least human life that we deem to be innocent-warfare is another topic).

Interesting premise, but it seems a bit problematic. You have relative aliveness, then relative consciousness. It seems relative intelligence might also fall right in place. I don't see all life as equal, but I don't see this line of thinking changing any of the raging debates.

Comment from: phreedm

Wow...I thought Clinton took the prize when he stated..."it depends on what the definition of "is", is...

Wow! You beat your previous record - the Clenis Corollary to Godwin's Law has been reached on the first comment!

And I though Ollie North took the prize when he said "all I did was lie to Congress".

Or maybe Rumsfeld did when he said "I know where the WMDs are - they're either east, west, north or south of the arbitrary spot in Iraq I'm going to mention." Or something like that.

Or maybe cheney did it when he told a united states senator to go Cheney himself on the floor of the senate.

Gee - for every off topic religiously insane retort that phreakshow spews, there's a myriad of ways to point to some Republican'ts saying something worse. Funny how that works...

How can anything be "more" alive? What an absurd concept. If this idea were accurate then the opposite would have to be true..

Can something be more dead then something else...?

Two sides of the same coin, phreakish lout. Saying something is more dead than something else vs. saying something is more alive than something else is like saying the glass is half full or half empty*. Meaningless semantics invokes to distract from the point of the conversation. Funny how that's all we get from certain phreakish quarters...

tyro: you said While you may morally justify killing another man when threatened, you couldn't justify killing him for convenience. I would agree that, theoretically, you would be correct if you had said that men shouldn't justify killing for convenience. But I would strongly disagree that that statement is historically correct - there have been wholescale pogroms (example: north american indian civilzations' destruction) of one set of humans for the sake of making life easier for another particular group of humans.

As for the topic of the post at hand, there are currently many ways to define how alive, relatively speaking, one thing is to another. I thought that was already being done, to a certain extent, in the way that species, phyla, etc. are defined and sub-defined. As in: rocks (which can grow or wither) can't move of their own volition, whereas amoeba can; therefore amoeba are higher forms of life than rocks. For the record: I am just trying to report this, not comment on it one way or the other - that's how I interpret some of the hazy recollections of biology lessons from days long gone by.

* - engineers would say that the glass was designed wrong...

D'oh! A typo when responding to tyro...

historically correct should be historically incorrect...

GJA:

that could be because most of the people involved in these raging debates refuse to see this line of thinking.

my girlfriend is at a "historically presbyterian" school, with its fair share of fundies (attracted by the mandatory bible classes no doubt) and she's been more or less yelled at for being vegetarian by peers and family members who want her to adhere to their own righteously carnivorous lifestyle.

Phreedm:

even if, as Alex points out, we stick with the biological definition of alive (reproduction, response to stimuli, metabolism) there is a grey area in the form of viruses and parasitic genes which seem to fulfill all the requirements only under certain conditions, or even RNA fragments which will reproduce in an appropriate substrate. these pseudo-organisms are sometimes classified as living organisms and sometimes as inert material, according largely to convenience. these pseudo-organisms could accurately be called "more dead" than a bacterium but "more alive" than other large organic molecules like polysacharides. I agree with dave that this miniscule gradient can be more or less properly extended up the ladder of complexity to include sentience, and I'm sure it will be when we have a more thorough understanding of exactly what sentience is and how it arises.

I really prefer the term "inert" to "dead" in biological terms.

"dead" has a lot of baggage attached to it.

Those who say all life is sacred are usually applying it to humans only because of religious principles. Or in the case of vegetarians, it is extended to other animals. But germs are life and germs are still killed to fight disease and infection, so the idea isn't thoroughly thought out. Or perhaps people don't really mean what they say.

I don't see bugs as being any less alive than humans, they just have different functions. I would say that a vegetative human is less alive qualitatively than a fully functioning one. Quantitatively, is the veggie being kept alive by machines? Then, technically it is not on the same level, if it would die w/o machinery.

Oh, how can a rock be dead if it was never alive?

Slightly Off-Topic:

Mankind triumphed in a recent 'competition' against nature when scientists succeeded in creating a new type of enzyme for a reaction for which no naturally occurring enzyme has evolved. This achievement opens the door to the development of a variety of potential applications in medicine and industry.

[snip]

The scientists found that the mutations occurring in the area surrounding the enzyme’s active site caused minor structural changes, which in turn, resulted in an increased chemical reaction rate. These mutations therefore seem to correct shortcomings in the computational design, by shedding light on what might be lacking in the original designs. Other mutations increased the flexibility of the enzymes, which helped to increase the speed of substrate release from the active site.

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2008/03/080324100050.htm

Hmmm... you would have thought that if evolution was not a valid concept, that the mutations produced would not produce a more advanced enzyme.

With all due respect, I think these distinctions concerning 'degrees' of life are philosophically devoid of meaning. How is a bug any 'less' alive than a human? How is an inert molecule suddenly not so when put into a larger organizational framework?

Perhaps the framing of the issue is the problem. Considering that the matter which composes all biological organisms is the same ubiquitous inert stuff all throughout the universe, I would venture to guess its the organization of materials and degree of consciousness (and by consciousness here I will just sub in Dan Dennett's intentional stance) arrived at due to such organization.

So the idea of quantifying 'life' might miss the point. Perhaps quantifying consciousness makes more sense. This is, in fact, what we do all the time in ethics. The majority of people seem to have little problem killing an ant, but doing the same to a person is morally and criminally repugnant. The ant is no less 'alive' but organizationally, it presents substantially less conscious behavior than a person. Why? Because the degree of consciousness determines the degree of an agents free will, aspirations, freedom, communication with other agents, etc.

Not to say an ant doesn't matter, indeed it might be a sort of chauvinism to suggest so, but there is a palpable intellectual difference between the species.

So is all life sacred? That answer is totally derivative to the metaphysical view of the questioner. An intellectually honest Xtian should necessarily say so because the belief system they subscribe to states so (its like deontological metaphysics to stretch a term) whereas an atheist, by definition, doesn't really have a set definition of the sacred... if by sacred we mean holy or set apart for worship. Humanists might have some sort of operational definition of humanity that sets us apart from other species, but not so for simple atheists proper.

To me, the idea of 'life relativity' sounds awfully scary as a way to segregate species and people to strip away their ethical status. Especially as you said Dave, "even humans can be less alive than other humans". Does that mean by logical extension that it is ok to snuff out 'less alive' people in the same way we can squash a bug? It seems to suggest so. So I believe 'life relativity' is fundamentally misguided since it presents some pretty repugnant ethical problems.

"We can ask questions as to the value of life of an orangutan vs a vegetative human."

This seems to imply an attitude towards consciousness already, since organizationally, a human and an orangutan are genetically/biologically similar. Without some definition of the term 'life' that would discriminate between the 'aliveness' of orangutans and humans, we can hardly parse the ethical value of either.

Lacking such a definition of 'life' I would venture that it is really the level of consciousness between the two (humans and non-humans, brain-dead humans and non-humans) that is at issue.

"New ethical questions arise, and old ones go away -- and I like that."

These aren't really new ethical questions. And the old stubborn ones will still be there... Sweeping seemingly intractable problems under the rug by reframing the issue is intellectually irresponsible and morally perilous.

Its an interesting line of thought, but I seriously doubt a quantification of 'life' or 'aliveness' is going to generate a satisfying criteria for ethical judgements. Plus, you would really REALLY need to untangle the glaring assumptions of consciousness (which you might argue are the end result of a process of evolution of 'higher' life forms, and therefore somehow grant more 'alive' points in the quantification) from the calculus of 'aliveness' absent in your initial premise.

Would the rock not be dead, zero? You say "just less alive". Very interesting point you make. Kind of imply's that stupid people are less "Alive". Maybe they are...I am not sure. In realizing that I know nothing I can witness anything.

G.A.

Xians have been using the "It's alive!" argument since this debate began. I would not want to redefine what "life" means. The term is already ambiguous enough and would just cause the religious nutjobs to move the rhetorical goal posts.

Zac Hunter,

Especially as you said Dave, "even humans can be less alive than other humans". Does that mean by logical extension that it is ok to snuff out 'less alive' people in the same way we can squash a bug?

I agree with you that it isn't degrees of lifiness but degrees of awareness/capacity for suffering/consciousness/whatever that is at issue, but I also agree that yes, there are some circumstances where it is as moral to kill a human as to squash a bug (though for sensitivity, I probably wouldn't quite use those terms, and probably wouldn't "squish" the human :) )

What if a person had such severe brain that she had no functioning cortex, leaving her with no personality, no memory, no thoughts, and no awareness?

Or, more commonly, what if a woman takes a day-after pill, ending the life of a single-celled zygote?

There are people who will say that both cases are immoral, but what is it about these hypothetical humans that makes them more worthy of concern than a non-human animal?

Comment from: alexatheist

and a universal abhorrence at killing another human being.

Alex...you mean some of us do.

tom - thank you for the correction.

Tyro-

"What if a person had such severe brain that she had no functioning cortex, leaving her with no personality, no memory, no thoughts, and no awareness?"

Exactly. Technically, still alive - but not conscious. I don't disagree that there are circumstances in which it is morally acceptable to end the life of a human, just that 'lifeness' is not a viable criteria.

What about old people? They are in a state of decline. Less potential life I guess. But no diminished consciousness. Whereas a baby has much less consciousness but way more potential 'lifeness'. The 'life' crieria starts to break down here.

Dave-
"No. Dead is dead, if it is TRULY dead (zero is zero).

I knew you'd hate the idea Phreedm, because it does smack down the whole "we are all equal in the eye of God" thing. But there's a lot on which we disagree."

I don't think theists, especially Xtians, view all life as equal in the eye of god. In fact, doesn't the bible promote an idea very VERY similar to yours, that humans are higher up on the value scale and have dominion over all the plants and animals? Even if you push the life criterion, you will probably end with the same ethical result as theism.

And Phreedm, the question as to the definition of 'is' while a little silly in Clinton's case, is philosophically valid. (It is worth mentioning that Bill was a philosophy major btw).

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copula

I prefer a definition of life founded in thermodynamics and information theory. My graduate advisor defined life this way:

Life is a property of an ensemble of units that share information coded in physical substrate and which, in the presence of noise, manages to keep its entropy significantly lower than the maximal entropy of the ensemble, on timescales exceeding the "natural" timescale of decay of the (information-bearing) substrate by many orders of magnitude.

In English, what he's saying is this: the universe is torn down by entropy over time. Life is the force that uses available energy to decrease local entropy, generally by building high-order information-containing structures. It has to be long timescales, because a refrigerator causes a massive local decrease in entropy ... but not forever. Eventually the fridge will break without fixing itself or making new refrigerators. Living things keep the process going indefinitely as long as something else doesn't interrupt.

In even simpler English: left to itself, most things fall apart. Life fights this by building up new stuff. Rocks erode. Seashells crumble to dust. But life makes new seashells.

Nothing else in the universe fights entropy that way, making that the defining characteristic of life.

Where my advisor defined this as a binary property (something is alive or not) I prefer it as a scalar property: "life" is the tendency and global capability of an entity to fight entropy that way, and yes something can be more or less alive. Thus, a single mammalian cell is less alive than than a full mammal, because the cell can't generally reproduce on its own without the organism, or not for long. A bacterium is as alive as a mammal, though. A virus is less alive ... it can only reproduce in very limited environments, requiring other cells. A growing crystal can be seen as a very weak form of life ... in the right combination of dissolved minerals in water, the crystal will add to its structure, reducing entropy. Fragmented bits of crystal can even nucleate new crystal growth, a primitive form of reproduction. (In fact some theorists think the first forms of life as we think of it may have arisen from semicrystalline clays that started to bond with organic molecules in ways that increased their growth rate)

In any case, while this is a useful scientific definition of life, it's not useful for the culture war sense in which you mean the word, which isn't really about "life", it's about our emotional response to certain entities. The more emotional response, the more people are concerned about them. The problem the Right has with fetuses is not that they are alive, because so is a weed or a bacterium. It's that they sympathize with them.

Phreedm exposited this howler:

Can something be more dead then something else...?

Death is not the opposite of life, it is the end of life. Only a thing that was alive can ever die. And a rock is neither dead nor alive. But something certainly can (in my opinion) be more alive than something else, as a mouse is more alive than a virus, which is more alive than a crystal, which is more alive than a lump of sandstone.

The whole concept that "all life is sacred" has caused the abortion debate, the vegetarian movement (besides health reasons)...

You seem to have a slight antipathy towards vegetarians and you misrepresented vegetarians as if minimizing suffering wasn't a reason at all for being vegetarian. Are you sure you don't have some amount of cognitive dissonance about this?

IdahoEV

I don't think your advisers definition is useful. The ""natural" timescale of decay" phrase contains as much ambiguity as any other definition offered up so far. This is perhaps why the term natural was put between quotation marks (Your's or your adviser's? It makes no difference)

It's possible to be deader than dead Dave. Consider fossilized dinosaurs, they are much deader than cryogenically frozen dinosaurs which are deader than something that has living maggots which is deader than something that just got shot in the head as some of the organs are still alive. Of course, Shivo was like a car with the engine running idle (consuming energy) but with nobody behind the wheel. In that case, the chimpanzee is more valuable than the braindead human.

.... I like this!

Or maybe the level of deadness should go....

magget infested body > cryogenic body

I don't know which one is righter.

Begin with this premise: Had you been aborted you would now be dead.

Build from there.

Okay Jesus-Ernesto, that = true

Also, if I get shot in the head I'd be dead too, so what's your point?

Actually, if I was aborted the day after, I'd be dead stem cells. That actually happened in a parallel universe you know. (not that there literally are parallel universes, or at least not without time travel, but it's something that people like to think about)

See, if I went back in time and aborted myself, then that would be a totally different universe than the one I'm in now. I wouldn't be dead, my parallel self would be dead instead, but I would still be alive. Mwahahaha!

Comment from: IdahoEv

But something certainly can (in my opinion) be more alive than something else, as a mouse is more alive than a virus

How...?

Consciousness ends when life ends. There is no memory. The universe is erased. It's as if life never existed.

I love this topic....great post from all but phreedm.....

Im no biologist but I can certainly appreciate what IdahoEv explained......

I can only add that the human brain is the best that the life I know can offer.....and with this new age of information that we find ourselves in....I think we may finally drop our superstitions and move on as the properties in the universe and our conscious will allow us

The notion that we humans have pre-eminence over the earth and all other living things is supreme arrogance. (It also comes from the Bible.)

We've been here for 3 and a half seconds of the 24 hour clock that is the history of this planet, and we act like we own the place. Small wonder we've screwed it up.

IdahoEV-

I have always thought about life that way, as a sort of bulwark against entropy. It might be tricky as a definition, but it certainly can be ascribed as a trait. That is one of life's most fascinating qualities. Probably only happens in closed systems with external power sources though.

Zac Hunter,

What about old people? They are in a state of decline. Less potential life I guess. But no diminished consciousness. Whereas a baby has much less consciousness but way more potential 'lifeness'. The 'life' crieria starts to break down here.

I'm not proposing that we go around killing people, far from it! If anything, I'm proposing that we treat other animals with more respect than they get currently.

But I think the general principle of lifiness/consciousness/whatever is still valid, even when applied to these repugnant boundary cases. Studies have found that people who are faced with food insecurity or starvation do care more for their toddlers than for newborns, so we do naturally do some moral calculus, as much as we may hate to do so.

It's not exactly an easy thing to quantify. Does a 16 year old with a broken leg have more or less value than a health 40 year old, and what sort of horrible hypothetical world are we in where we have to make these decisions? It's like a psychotic tram-ology :)

David's Silverman's post is quite disappointing in its cloudy thinking; filled with inconsistencies and categorical fallacies.

However, he and Richard D (nice name dropping, Dave) have convinced me that all life is relative, particularly amongst humans, and this ends the "abortion debate" and all others ethical issues where level of consciousness and other functional criteria don't measure up to the elites that do and, therefore, don't deserve equal protections and rights reserved for those appropriately chosen to be bonafide members of the human family.

However, I would suggest, we make the cutoff point one IQ point above Dave's.

All right then, timmy. Get in line for YOUR post-partum abortion.

Be cautious Karen, you may be addressing the "superelites" aka "supermensch" who may be making those decisions Dave seems to favor.

How would we measure this? Could we actually quantify "life"?

Human history if full of examples of societies that "quantified" life...

It is for this exact reason that unless we view ALL human life as "Sacred" or "Special", we will continue repeating histories genocides...

The fact that you can't see the wisdom in this concept is a direct result of atheisms fear of religion and its never ending quest to attempt to disprove it's value...

Not all religions consider all human life equal or sacred. And there isn't a single religion that has been 100% successful at this concept either...

thank you, phreedm.

Well said, it is chilling where thinking leads to if there is no humility and acknowledgment of a higher authority.

intellectuals debate this the SS and KGB lived it.

David's Silverman's post is quite disappointing in its cloudy thinking; filled with inconsistencies and categorical fallacies.

I agree with timmy on this one.

It's not exactly an easy thing to quantify. Does a 16 year old with a broken leg have more or less value than a health 40 year old

They have the same value. However, a brain dead 16 year old's life is less valuable than a healthy 40 year old. I would think that this was a "no brainer".

who decides what the value is.i suspect there is a boatload of older people who feel less alive but they don't want to be knocked off for the greater good.bottomline it is in everyones self interest to preserve the belief that human life is special.

david
do you object to the old eugenics laws we had.if you believe some life is less then other than you can't complain about nazi killing of disabled or the brutal treatment of russian army recruits since they will die in chechnya anyway right.

though its been attacked as irrelevent, I personally like IdahoEv's definition of life.

I remember in an ethics class we discussed what exactly it is that makes a person's life different from the "life" of a refrigerator, computer, or any other machine which creates order. we kinda went in another direction with it.

I personally think that we need to give up on finding a "true" theory of ethics and work on perfecting a "human" theory of ethics. we have ethical tendancies, that cannot be denied. any ethical theory is going to be seen through that lense. so if we're going to be using these tendancies anyway (either to approve of one ethical theory over another or to interpret a theory) why not go ahead and make them the basis of our morality?

as science unwraps the hitherto unknown secrets of how and why we engage in moral behaviors I think this will be a possibility.

It is chilling where thinking leads to if there is no humility and acknowledgment of empathy that we have for our fellow human being. If we only look through the lens of our religion and refer to writings of people who lived in a particular time and context and who, clearly, did not think twice about killing every man, woman and child of those who did not believe the same way, or to stone to death homosexuals and adulterers, then we have to ask ourselves how do we value life?

Life is Jesus Christ....Truth...Way

WHY GO TO CHURCH?

If you're spiritually alive, you're going to love this! If you're spiritually dead, you won't want to read it. If you're spiritually curious, there is still hope!

Why Go To Church?

A Church goer wrote a letter to the editor of a newspaper and complained that it made no sense to go to church every Sunday. "I've gone for 30 years now," he wrote, "and in that time I have heard something like 3,000 sermons. But for the life of me, I can't remember a single one of them. So, I think I'm wasting my time and the pastors are wasting theirs by giving sermons at all."

This started a real controversy in the "Letters to the Editor" column, much to the delight of the editor. It went on for weeks until someone wrote this clincher:

"I've been married for 30 years now. In that time my wife has cooked some 32,000 meals. But, for the life of me, I cannot recall the entire menu for a single one of those meals. But I do know this.. They all nourished me and gave me the strength I needed to do my work. If my wife had not given me these meals, I would be physically dead today. Likewise, if I had not gone to church for nourishment, I would be spiritually dead today!" When you are DOWN to nothing... God is UP to something! Faith sees the invisible, believes the incredible and receives the impossible! Thank God for our physical AND our spiritual nourishment!

"When Satan is knocking at your door, simply say, "Jesus, could you get that for me?"

Jesus love me.

Comment from: spanders

then we have to ask ourselves how do we value life?

Ah Spanders...we know how you value life. A nice long prewritten list explaining exactly at what point a "life" becomes something valuable to society...

It's always the elites of the day that decide on who is valuable and who is not...

http://www.worldnetdaily.com/index.php?fa=PAGE.view&pageId=59916

Christ is in the way

That's funny stuff. Stupid stuff too. Funny. Stupid. Funny and stupid.

If my wife had not given me these meals, I would be physically dead today.

Xians would starve if somebody did not feed them. His wife must have been an atheist.

Phreeky decided that 100s of thousands of Iraqis lives were not important. I guess xian = life.

Uh oh...this one's going to be hard to explain away...

Amazing what a little prayer can do over a "brain dead" patient...Alex, how did you know?

Everyone on this board always claims prayer doesn't work...well it did this time...

Natalie Morales: As a trauma surgeon and seeing this 21-year-old coming back to life, do you have any sort of medical explanation that you know of?

Dr. Mercer: I don't.

Natalie Morales: Were any mistakes made, or was the process rushed along in any way to declare him brain dead because the family made you aware that he was an organ donor?

Dr. Mercer: No. We didn't rush anything along. We certainly don't do that.

Pam Dunlap: We saw the test. We saw it. They followed every procedure. He was gone.

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/23768436/

Well it's nice to know that in the eyes of Phreeky we physicians can make no mistakes.

"You ask me if I have a God complex? Let me tell you something, I AM GOD!"

Alec Baldwin in the movie Malice

What a dolt.

Phreeky is suffering from a form of Stockholm Syndrome that compels him to visit atheist blogs and make religious rants. He thinks by so doing he will be granted the same power as the clergy that have abused him. I have made my diagnosis so there can be no mistake.

In response to my statement that some things can in fact be more alive than others, Phreedm writes simply:

How?

There's about seven sentences in my original post explaining exactly how, and precisely what I mean by that, and giving examples.

Don't worry, I'll wait while you read it again. (Or for the first time, seems more likely).

Amazing what a little prayer can do over a "brain dead" patient...

Yes, I think we all remember how well that worked out for Terry Schivo.

From what:

I don't think your advisers definition is useful. The ""natural" timescale of decay" phrase contains as much ambiguity as any other definition offered up so far. This is perhaps why the term natural was put between quotation marks (Your's or your adviser's? It makes no difference)

I'll definitely grant you the ambiguity. I don't think, actually, that a strict definition is possible -- it certainly isn't easy.

But it wouldn't be the first scientific or mathematical definition or axiom that used language like "long timescales" or "over times much greater than" or other such vagaries ... it makes the definitions imprecise, but not necessarily inaccurate.

What I think is interesting about my advisor's approach (and my extension to it) is that it attempts to define life by some sort of first principle, "life is that property of things that locally resist entropy", instead of simply by cataloging behaviors of known living things "um, they reproduce, they metabolize, they move ... except when they don't" etc. That's typically the best most biology texts do when trying to define life, and I find those definitions deeply unsatisfying.

Also, once you've spent a lot of time studying life from an information-theory perspective, and played around with artificial life/digital life, defining life in terms of entropy starts to make a lot of intuitive sense.

But I'm totally aware that this definition doesn't work for a lot of people, and I'm also okay with that. The definition of life is not one of those things you can easily get a lot of scientists to agree on.

Idaho

But it wouldn't be the first scientific or mathematical definition or axiom that used language like "long timescales" or "over times much greater than" or other such vagaries ... it makes the definitions imprecise, but not necessarily inaccurate.

The use of the phrase "much greater than" is not vague if that which is smaller has a useful operational definition. The problem with your advisers definition is with the word "natural". That definition of life must also give an operational definition of "natural" to be useful. Way to ambiguous.

... it makes the definitions imprecise, but not necessarily inaccurate.

I have to object to this language. Definitions are neither imprecise nor accurate. They do not measure and they do not predict.

What I think is interesting about my advisor's approach (and my extension to it) is that it attempts to define life by some sort of first principle, "life is that property of things that locally resist entropy"

Are crystals alive? Since the "natural timescale" thing is useless it would appear that the rest of the definition allows for crystals and almost anything not in a "maximal state of entropy".

Also, once you've spent a lot of time studying life from an information-theory perspective, and played around with artificial life/digital life, defining life in terms of entropy starts to make a lot of intuitive sense.

MaxEnt and IT based metrics often appear intuitively sensible to those in need of such holy grails but in my experience are just as presumptive as any other metric of complexity. The success of equilibrium thermodynamics and its connection with MaxEnt notions appears to be purely coincidental since the application of such MaxEnt ideas to nonequilibrium thermodynamics has been unsuccessful.

Maybe the zeroth law of thermodynamics would be more useful than the second in this context.

A statement of the zeroth law

When two systems are each in thermal equilibrium with a third system, the first two systems are in thermal equilibrium with each other.

This property makes it meaningful to use thermometers as the “third system” and to define a temperature scale.

What about a life_o_meter. What might substitute for "thermodynamic equilibrium" in the zeroth law? What is absolute zero on the life-o-meter?

Is it Friday?

If somebody is hyped up on caffiene, does this mean that they are more alive or a higher priority than when somebody is drunk and stoned?

If somebody is hyped up on caffiene, does this mean that they are more alive or a higher priority than when somebody is drunk and stoned?

If somebody is hyped up on caffiene, does this mean that they are more alive or a higher priority than when somebody is drunk and stoned?

If somebody is hyped up on caffiene, does this mean that they are more alive or a higher priority than when somebody is drunk and stoned?

Phreedm,

The query, "do you have any sort of...explanation," is the birth thought of virtually every supernatural supposition.

Regarding the specific recovery you mentioned: Anomalies occur.

The occasion you sited may have been accompanied by the prayers of friends. It may also have been accompanied by the sneezes of friends.

How does one know that the prayers, and not the sneezes, produced the remission?

Simple. Have the friends pray and sneeze in the company of other comatose patients and observe the outcome.

My guess is the individual in question would have recovered had there been no prayers or sneezes.

When I was a pastor, I visited a member incarcerated in the local jail. While there I was both praying and sneezing. Neither had any effect.

However, there was a pentecostalist preacher visiting the jail at the same time. Noting my sneezing he (arrogantly) grabbed my arm and began loudly praying for a miraculous healing. I thought it amusing that he praying pentecostalist also happened to be blind.

http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,341574,00.html

Police: Girl Dies After Parents Pray for Healing Instead of Seeking Medical Help

Yep phreedump: Prayer really works, eh?

Seems the parents should immediately lose custody of their other children and tried for murder.

Very distrubing from the article DeepDiver pointed out:

The girl's parents, Dale and Leilani Neumann, attributed the death to "apparently they didn't have enough faith," the police chief said.

No enough faith???? They put the fate fo their child in gawd's hands rather than taking her to the hospital. I would consider that blind faith of the hightest order.

Comment from: phreedm

Ah Spanders...we know how you value life. A nice long prewritten list explaining exactly at what point a "life" becomes something valuable to society...

...as opposed to a formulaic doctrinal handout (supposedly from the Invisible Sky Fairy, as handed down to the grifters who will exploit the sheeple is His Name, Ramen...) that explains at what point the religiously insane will determine life begins (regardless of any factual evidence to the contrary).

Nice set of double standards you gots there, jeebus boy...

It's always the elites of the day that decide on who is valuable and who is not...

...like when Putsch decided that Iraqi civilians were a small price to pay for getting all that oil, er, deposing a brutal dictator (who knows too much about shday Republican't illegalities and might actually start talking about it)?

...like when christian 'warriors' harass and beat up gays and non-christians? Or when they 'biblically discipline' their family members in violation of the law?

...like when religiously insane idiots excommunicate, intimidate, and/or physically and emotionally abuse women that they don't think are as moral as they should be?

Also: I wouldn't want to bring entropy into the life debate because I would have some seriouser issues with he religiously insane, who IMHO are increasing entropy with their illogical irrational supersitions, and then I would be forced to logically conclude that mentally deficient individuals like phreakshow are actually a lower form of life.

Comment from: ☺ Seeker ☺

When I was a pastor

I smell an Augustine....

Comment from: IdahoEv

Don't worry, I'll wait while you read it again. (Or for the first time, seems more likely).

Thank you for proving my point...

It's always the elites of the day that decide on who is valuable and who is not...

Comment from: Ren [Member]

Yes, I think we all remember how well that worked out for Terry Schivo.

How do you know prayer wasn't answered?

How do you know prayer wasn't answered?

So I am to assume that everyone was praying for her to remain brain-dead, and for her feeding tube to be removed, and for her to die from malnutrition? Riiiiiiiiiiiiiight!

If that was the case, why bother praying at all?

Comment from: phreedm

How do you know prayer wasn't answered?

How do you know it was?

How do you continue to engage in rude, uncivil behavior around here when you supposedly adhere to christian beliefs?

How is it that you feel that your are entitled to spout lies without being called in your mendacious kimchee? And then feel entitled to grill others when you are categorically unable to back up any of your fantasies?

I guess you're just too scared to try and actually respond to others who disagree with you in an honorable manner. Like the bedwetting chickenhawk drunken cokeheaded deserter you worship. being factually challenged might also have some bearing on your continued cowardice and hypocrisy.

But we'll nenver know - you're too much of a chickensh!t to respond to anything I have to say.

DD

Police: Girl Dies After Parents Pray for Healing Instead of Seeking Medical Help

Diabetic ketoacidosis has put me in intensive care a couple times when the flu pushed my sugar sky high and I must say that it is one of the worst ways a person can die. It is agonizing and drawn out and I'm sure this little girl was in fucking agony which could have been prevented with a trip to hospital. I hope these two religious fucks are tried for murder and locked away for a long time. It's one thing when an adult refuses medical treatment on religious grounds but another when a kid is denied it becasue of her parent's superstition. I am fuming right now.
Alex.

I don't know why this "value" of life thing is even being debated. This was settled over 2000 years ago:


27:3 And thy estimation shall be of the male from twenty years old even unto sixty years old, even thy estimation shall be fifty shekels of silver, after the shekel of the sanctuary.

27:4 And if it be a female, then thy estimation shall be thirty shekels.

27:5 And if it be from five years old even unto twenty years old, then thy estimation shall be of the male twenty shekels, and for the female ten shekels.

27:6 And if it be from a month old even unto five years old, then thy estimation shall be of the male five shekels of silver, and for the female thy estimation shall be three shekels of silver.

27:7 And if it be from sixty years old and above; if it be a male, then thy estimation shall be fifteen shekels, and for the female ten shekels.


So, in summary. Male life is worth more than female life. The younger you are the less you are worth, until you reach old age, when your value declines.

Hmm, one age appears to be missing here. Oh, here it is:


21:22 If men strive, and hurt a woman with child, so that her fruit depart from her, and yet no mischief follow: he shall be surely punished, according as the woman's husband will lay upon him; and he shall pay as the judges determine.

21:23 And if any mischief follow, then thou shalt give life for life,


Yes, that's it. The unborn have no value.

Sorry, but I forgot the source of these quotes. If somebody can fill me in, please do.

The only prayer that works is long prayer. Yes, the prayer must last between 25 and 30 years and continue uninterrupted. Nothing else must be done during the prayer, you must sit quietly in a dark closet. I suggest that all christians begin this prayer today. Stay home, don't go out, don't speak, just keep praying. I'm sure god will hear you one day. Until then, please leave us alone.

Police: Girl Dies After Parents Pray for Healing Instead of Seeking Medical Help

oh that poor girl.

phreedm. every time you and your religiously insane ilk tell someone that prayer is the cure for anything that ails them, you're pushing towards something like this happening again.

or do you think that her parents just didn't have enough faith to magically regulate the insulin levels of their daughters body?

Apparently, God, like natural, is arbitrarily cruel and decided to "just say 'no'".

How can anything be "more" alive? What an absurd concept. If this idea were accurate then the opposite would have to be true..

Unfortunately, I haven't read all the comments on this thread. However, I think Phreedm's comment above merits some serious discussion.

Is this not precisely how the Bible teaches children to view the world? That God is more alive than man? That man is under God's authority and judgement simply because he has more knowledge, more power, more presence, and, supposedly, more beneficence? Any thoughts?

Can something be more dead then something else...?

Perhaps I should have addressed this in my former comment, but according to the Bible, are there not varying digrees of 'deadness'? Animals have spirits, but not souls, therefore they die and that's it. Humans have both spirits and souls, therefore they die and yet live spiritually for all eternity. I'm not entirely sure where God fits in all this, but I can say that he's aways lived and cannot die. Again, any thoughts?

Begin with this premise: Had you been aborted you would now be dead.

Actually, if I had been aborted, I would not have lived and, therefore, cannot have died.

thank you, phreedm.

Well said, it is chilling where thinking leads to if there is no humility and acknowledgment of a higher authority.

I see. So God killing humans is like humans killing dogs, but humans shouldn't kill humans because that scares you. Your logic leaves much to be desired.

If you're spiritually alive, you're going to love this! If you're spiritually dead, you won't want to read it. If you're spiritually curious, there is still hope!

Actually, it was rather amusing. Congradulations on posting something completely irrelevant to the topic at hand.

Everyone on this board always claims prayer doesn't work...well it did this time...

A) I don't see where there were any prayers.
B) Cataplexy
C) When is "I don't know" ever an appropriate answer?

I also noticed that some of the topics in my comments have already been addressed. Funny how the topics were simply ignored by the trolls.

I imagine after the story of the little girl dying from prayer-failure, Phreedm will not visit this thread........ and move on to harrasing the next.

I don't see how "the ability to multiply" truly plays a part in the formula that gives one MORE LIFE than others. What if someone's had a vasectomy, or is infertile? What about women who are post-menopausal? Are they "less alive"? Maybe i misunderstood the qualifiers you mentioned. And, does this come from your brief conversation with Dawkins?

I still submit that the underlying assumption on the part of those who support the 'aliveness' criterion is an equivocation with consciousness. Every time someone admits that a 'braindead' person somehow has less 'life' value than a non-braindead person, we are talking consciousness - not some quantifiable 'life' score. This whole debate is the product of the ambiguity of the criterion in question. Sure it makes for a fun debate, but seriously, what the hell are we talking about?

It makes no sense to say that one thing is more 'alive' than another per se. All I see is a giant red herring.

I'm with Zac here, this is a debate grounded in semantics and I think quite a few of the important words being bandied about haven't been properly defined for use in the debate.

I can't follow this thread, it seems like there are a bunch of different points being argued about and they don't seem to overlap all that much.

What exactly are you guys trying to say?

I think that Dave's original post was aimed at redefining the common usage of the word "life" in such a way that the braindead "It's alive?" argument would lose appeal to those presently swayed by it. This would not necessarily be a scientific endeavor.

Was this you intent Dave?

From a scientific perspective I find the topic titillating but not useful presently. No present theory's predictive power depends upon the quantification of lifiness.

A definition is good if it is useful. That is, if the definition can be used in the construction of models that have predictive value (aka theories) then they are deemed "good". We would like to predict the behavior of what system?

From a sociological perspective I think that redefining life would be a waste of time, probably have unintended consequences, and would just cause the god-o-gaps folks to move the goal posts in response.

From the origin:

The word LIFE, then, can be defined as a formula of the ability to multiply and the level of consciousness (also relative), as well as other variables.

Hmmm. Well, hmmm. But, well, hmmm.

Assuming consciousness is equal to some ability to sense something and act in some way based on the input.

An interesting subject for sure. When my brain detects an equation it sometimes wants to plug in some values to see what might happen:

A star would rank many orders of magnitude above all other things in the part of the equation that is termed "multiply" because, a star has the energy to start the process of life and can produce multiple life forms. A star would get probably a zero for the "consciousness" component.

On Earth, there are various structures that will have relatively hugh values for "multiply" along with non-zero values for "consciousness".

Humans would have relatively low values for multiply and also relatively low values for consciousness as our senses are relatively poor.

As an example look at this relatively unconscious statement actually made by a christian (which is a parasitic form of the human).

Begin with this premise: Had you been aborted you would now be dead.

Of course if the christian wasn't a parisite it would realize that the "you" is related to experiences, thoughts and, time. That is, the "you" that reads this didn't exist at birth. "You" isn't something that is implanted, it is a collection that changes and evolves (Not necessarily in a positive or better direction, as can be witnessed in the backwardness of the christian direction.)

What about life makes it more important than nonlife? We humans have big egos, and I feel that we delude ourselves when we value living things over nonliving.

Sugar is nonliving. Our brains cannot survive without it. Our bodies are filled with symbiotic bacteria that, were they wiped out, we would waste away from lack of nutrition. Without these symbiotes the planet could not feed its human population. Is it important to classify them as "less" living if they provide such an important benefit to us as a species?

Is it important to classify things as less smart? Cockroaches are smart survivors - an individual roach can live for years.

Like religion, I've got a niggling suspicion that much of what we hairless apes believe in is pure nonsense.

Does it mean we should lay around and die or commit suicide because life has no meaning? I suppose that's up to the individual. I don't need a purpose to live except that I'm enjoying parts of it so far.

Maybe just a little bit of optimism for even the toughest cynic is plenty enough reason to go on.

I find myself agreeing most with what tyro has been saying.

I am a moral absolutist: I don't think you should do anything to anything that doesn't want you to.

That's not a completely attainable goal, of course. Sometimes it's necessary to do harm to others to avoid harm to ourselves or others. If you were stranded on a desert island with nothing to eat but other animals, you could be excused (I wouldn't go as far as justified) for killing and eating them.

Animal experimentation is rarely, if ever, necessary. In many cases, it's actually harmful to the humans it's supposed to benefit. Check out:

www.pcrm.org

im a vegan, i find it hilarious that so many people still think being vegan is extreme, and even funnier when atheists call veganism extreme, considering the amount of name calling and prejudice we recieve for our opinions. I base my veganism on the same values, common sense. I dont eat meat or dairy because we are biologically herbivorous and meat and dairy is not necessary, plus its bad for you, and of course you contribute to the intolerable suffering non human animals. As an atheist, i see other species as equal owners of this planet and we must learn to treat everything equally before we can attempt to call ourselves civilised.but thats just my opinion.