Dissolving the Question of Life

falenas108

Recently, Hank Green posted a video discussing the definition of life. He offered two definitions; that life acts in a manner to achieve a goal, and that life continuously decreases internal entropy.

There are problems with these definitions. The first definition includes every machine that has a function. The second one includes, for example, a machine that constantly reshapes parts of its body into a paperclip.

Other definitions of life are equally confusing, doing things like excluding viruses because they use other cells to reproduce, despite meeting the intuitive meaning we have for life.

So, dissolve "life." Why do we care if something is alive? To decide if its life has value. Hank dances around the issue, showing that life has no inherent value by using mouthwash to kill billions of bacteria in his mouth. But, he doesn't take this to its conclusion. It doesn't matter if something is alive or not. We won't suddenly care about the well being of viruses if a new definition of life comes along tomorrow pronouncing viruses to be living. What we value is sentience.

Bugs are extremely low on the sentience scale, so we feel free to kill them. Animals that are higher on the scale, such as cats, have laws preventing any sort of mistreatment.

tl;dr: Life is an ambiguous term, use sentience to describe a being's value.

Recently, Hank Green posted a video discussing the definition of life. He offered two definitions; that life acts in a manner to achieve a goal, and that life continuously decreases internal entropy.

Other definitions of life are equally confusing, doing things like excluding viruses because they use other cells to reproduce, despite meeting the intuitive meaning we have for life.

Bugs are extremely low on the sentience scale, so we feel free to kill them. Animals that are higher on the scale, such as cats, have laws preventing any sort of mistreatment.

tl;dr: Life is an ambiguous term, use sentience to describe a being's value.

You could just call life anything that stores instructions for making more copies of itself on nucleic acids.

We could, for all the good it would do if we encounter organisms on other planets that store reproductive information on something else.

The point was to make a clearly after-the-fact definition that works, but doesn't say anything interesting. There may not be any exocritters that use some other macromolecule for their genetic material. If not, it would be a non-issue, right?

If you try to make a definition that says something interesting, I think it's got to be a whole checklist of interesting characteristics of life in order to exclude things most people wouldn't consider alive. Then you get people looking at objects that exhibit some, but not all of the characteristics and wringing their... (read more)