4 ms·
Why not both?
by nikki93 9y ago
Why not both?
- naasking 9y agoThen why not the whole Earth? Why not the whole universe? Where do you draw the line? A word has to draw distinctions to be meaningful.
- nikki93 9y agoExactly.
- naasking 9y agoExactly what? "Alive" is a meaningless concept?
- carapace 9y agoGurdjieff gives a definition of "atom" as the smallest amount of something that evinces all of its properties. This is an information-theoretic view, and it allows us to speak of an "atom" of water, an "atom" of ice, and so on. The property "alive" while not meaningless cannot be limited to a set of matter/energy configurations. There is no "atom" of life. This would be moot except that you are alive. You are [part of] the life of the Universe. You can't actually fix a boundary between you and it. The Universe may not always have been alive, but when you became alive it did too.