Life after death

[Esceptico]

Toaster said:

Max_Torque said:

At a purely scientific level, the issue with death is that we haven't yet been able to precisely define what life actually is!

Honestly, this is one of the unsolved scientific problems of our time.

We broadly understand the biology and bio-chemistry that makes live, er, alive, but we can't precisely define why or what.


That makes the question of "life after death" somewhat difficult, because we haven't sorted out the life bit yet...........

Science does have a pretty good definition

The biological and philosophical definitions of life

‘ A distinction must be made between various levels of thought. For a definition of life the formulation on the level of natural sciences,i.e. the biological definition, will not be the same as the philosophical expression. The biological definition is based on thephenomenon of life, the appearance, and considers the molecular structure and functions of a cell. The philosophical definition regards thebeing and it is proposed to consider life as transcendental. It is argued that there is no opposition between these definitions, but that together they can deepen our insight into the problems of matter and life.’ https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/BF015567...

Whilst this is an old academic article NASA and other research organisations would look pretty stupid if they search for life on other planets or even hostile environments in our world for signs of life if there was not a definition of what life is!

I think that “life” is one of those things that an instinctive level we know what it looks like but when trying to formulate a definition we have difficulty. I think viruses are a good example. In my view viruses are clearly life. Go to a planet where there is no other life and you won’t find viruses or anything similar. However, they don’t fit nicely into many of our definitions of life. Does that mean they are not “life” or that definitions that exclude them are just bad definitions? I favour the latter.

[Jinx]

Esceptico said:

I think that “life” is one of those things that an instinctive level we know what it looks like but when trying to formulate a definition we have difficulty. I think viruses are a good example. In my view viruses are clearly life. Go to a planet where there is no other life and you won’t find viruses or anything similar. However, they don’t fit nicely into many of our definitions of life. Does that mean they are not “life” or that definitions that exclude them are just bad definitions? I favour the latter.

They are probably as much of a distinct lifeform as the antibodies we produce to fight them. Our concepts of "complex life" need to consider we are more symbiote organisms than individuals (from our immune systems to our digestive system) and adapt our definitions accordingly.