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I'm personally convinced at this point that most everyday distinctions between living and dead are arbitrary human categorizations. Even a "dead body" is teamin

I'm personally convinced at this point that most everyday distinctions between living and dead are arbitrary human categorizations. Even a "dead body" is teaming with life. As far as "inanimate matter" is concerned, all matter is ultimately part of a plethora of various different cycles and processes of transformation and recapitulation... even if something temporarily looks like it's static to us and our meager little narrow timeframe of experience, it's not. Just to clarify, I don't mean that these distinctions are meaningless, just that their meaning is inherently embedded in human experience.

jollybean 5y ago
That's a good thought - but worth considering that just because lines are fuzzy doesn't make them either 'arbitrary' or even 'subjective'. That a materialist perspective gives us some nice hard rules for understanding certain things, it also by definition struggles to help us understand the nature of other things, i.e. 'most important bit' which is 'life' itself, so maybe we should be thinking about that problem a little bit differently. 'Emergence' seems to be a least one idea, among many.
- guerrilla 5y ago
  > That's a good thought - but worth considering that just because lines are fuzzy doesn't make them either 'arbitrary' or even 'subjective'. Interesting and plausible, but you didn't give an argument or any example for that.
  - jollybean 5y ago
    For most things in the real life that we categorize, the rules that distinguish those categories can be vague. It doesn't mean those categories are not valid, or a function of 'human perception'. We have difficulty with biological distinction, but we can still confidently categorize something as being a 'Horse' and 'Not A Horse' ... even if sometimes it's a little bit ambiguous, aka 'Kind of a Horse'. Edit: and as for 'other ways of thinking' it very quickly goes into metaphysics so it's hard to talk about because we don't spend much time in that realm. 'Emergence' and 'Biocentrism' are interesting ideas (fields?) that sit within more or less regular bounds of science and so they're just examples of what I'm referring to.
    - jounker 5y ago
      > We have difficulty with biological distinction, but we can still confidently categorize something as being a 'Horse' and 'Not A Horse' A paleontologist might disagree with you.
    - guerrilla 5y ago
      I think you'd have to define what it means for a category to be valid. The way I see it is that a category is either useful or not and whether it is or not depends on our goals which depends on what we like and want which is subjective and the judgement itself relative to such a system so designed. That's not to say they are arbitrary, because they're objectively useful or not with respect to the goal. I don't think biologists would agree with you about the horse. It's actually consider a crisis in the philosophy of biology that the concept of species is ill-defined. [1] Like I said, the resolution to me is pragmatic: the definition will depend on whether it is effective relative to some purpose. 1. https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/species/ https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/species/
      - wahern 5y ago
        We might as well just link to the basic problem statement rather than recapitulate 3000 years of philosophy: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sorites_paradox https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sorites_paradox
      - jollybean 5y ago
        A biologist would only take umbrage rhetorically, which is fine, but they'll never categorize a rock, a flower, or a human as 'a horse' so in reality it's not a problem. While 'value' is surely in the eye of the beholder ... whether or not something fits into the category is not as subjective. And frankly, the 'big question' is 'who is the beholder' - which is something that materialism is struggling to tell us.
TaupeRanger 5y ago
I think it's simpler than you're allowing. Death in animals is the absence of consciousness with no possibility of recovery. In plants and maybe-but-probably-not-sentient life, it's more complicated.
- gus_massa 5y ago
  We all agree when we should say that a cow is dead, but what about sponges? You can pass a sponge through a sieve, and the isolated cells will recombine https://www.shapeoflife.org/video/sponges-time-lapse-sponge-cells-recombining https://www.shapeoflife.org/video/sponges-time-lapse-sponge-... (Is there a better link?) Can a single cell of a sponge create a "new" sponge? Or it's just the "old" sponge? Should you wait until the last cell is dead until we can claim it's dead? Back to cows... You can remove the heart of a cow and keep the heart alive in a proper device, and keep the rest of the cow alive with an artificial heart. (I don't know if someone has tried this with cows, but this should be possible with the same technology for hearts transplants in humans.) Are both parts alive? What happens if I unplug one of them? Is the heart-less-cow is the real cow? I think we all agree about this last question, but from the cellular level it's just an arbitrary classification, in spite it's useful for us.
  - mysterydip 5y ago
    My favorite example of this is the planarian. You can cut its head in half and it will generate two new halves. Same with the tail. Or cut the whole thing into pieces, and each piece will regenerate the whole body.
    - TchoBeer 5y ago
      The hydra too. Me and a friend used to pass time doing debates, and when one of us was too tired to research or argue we'd debate about dumb stuff, and I was a stalwart "the original hydra reproduced into two offspring" much like how single celled organisms "die" when they reproduce
  - TaupeRanger 5y ago
slibhb 5y ago
> Just to clarify, I don't mean that these distinctions are meaningless, just that their meaning is inherently embedded in human experience. In that case, describing the distinction as "arbitrary" seems wrong.
shrimpx 5y ago
Why not go further and say the entirety of "our reality" is a human hallucination, as our senses are limited and our brains peculiar in how they process their inputs. That the "real reality" is an imperceptible-to-us dance of fields (even that is only as far as our theories take us).
- ReactiveJelly 5y ago
  At the risk of sounding like a hypocrite after my "Not finding souls is a victory for atheism" comment: What does that add? Do we have better models if we say we're all hallucinating the same seemingly-kind-of-objective reality? What if I'm the only human, you're all p-zombies, BUT all dogs are conscious?
  - mensetmanusman 5y ago
    We are all p-zombies, and we voted at our supper club to determine that you don’t actually exist.
  - grasshopperpurp 5y ago
    Lots of loaded words in the comments, and hallucination probably takes some of us to places that aren't helpful, but understanding the limits of our perception and understanding gives us better context. Even if we don't understand the limits, it's helpful to know that our reality and reality are separate things. If we don't know we have blind spots, we won't know to check them.
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bmitc 5y ago
Is there a consequence of your thinking? I don’t think it’s arbitrary. There’s a clear distinction between say a rock and a cell, even if you view the rock on geological timescales and the cell on biological timescales. I don’t think it’s arbitrary or even surprising that humans view things from our own vantage point in reality.
- ReactiveJelly 5y ago
  There's a negative consequence - If the line between life and non-life is blurry, that means there isn't a clear place for souls to fit in. If life can be completely explained as an emergent property of individual non-living parts, (ultimately, atoms aren't alive, even though they make up living things) then we can't tell whether souls exist in our universe or not. This isn't a big deal for science, but it's a moral victory for atheists.
  - andagainagain 5y ago
    That isn't necessarily true. All you have to do to keep the concept of external soul alive is to accept the idea of simpler souls. Maybe there isn't am irreducibly complex soul.
  - today20201014 5y ago
    I am hesitant to agree that it's a moral victory - maybe it's more of a victory about metaphysics? (also, what is a metaphysical victory? :))
    - posterboy 5y ago
      a metaphysical victory for atheists who consumes the concept of soul would be that the concept ceases, which is equivalent to its physical death in the competing theist's view, and completely unconsequential to the atheist, which only proves that atheism is at least not that bad.
  - deleted 5y ago
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mc32 5y ago
>"their meaning is inherently embedded in human experience." Not necessarily, some animals have the same perception. Some carnivores don't eat dead animals, others primarily eat carrion and they interreact differently with inanimate objects.

jollybean 5y ago

That's a good thought - but worth considering that just because lines are fuzzy doesn't make them either 'arbitrary' or even 'subjective'. That a materialist perspective gives us some nice hard rules for understanding certain things, it also by definition struggles to help us understand the nature of other things, i.e. 'most important bit' which is 'life' itself, so maybe we should be thinking about that problem a little bit differently. 'Emergence' seems to be a least one idea, among many.

guerrilla 5y ago
> That's a good thought - but worth considering that just because lines are fuzzy doesn't make them either 'arbitrary' or even 'subjective'. Interesting and plausible, but you didn't give an argument or any example for that.
- jollybean 5y ago
  For most things in the real life that we categorize, the rules that distinguish those categories can be vague. It doesn't mean those categories are not valid, or a function of 'human perception'. We have difficulty with biological distinction, but we can still confidently categorize something as being a 'Horse' and 'Not A Horse' ... even if sometimes it's a little bit ambiguous, aka 'Kind of a Horse'. Edit: and as for 'other ways of thinking' it very quickly goes into metaphysics so it's hard to talk about because we don't spend much time in that realm. 'Emergence' and 'Biocentrism' are interesting ideas (fields?) that sit within more or less regular bounds of science and so they're just examples of what I'm referring to.
  - jounker 5y ago
    > We have difficulty with biological distinction, but we can still confidently categorize something as being a 'Horse' and 'Not A Horse' A paleontologist might disagree with you.
  - guerrilla 5y ago
    I think you'd have to define what it means for a category to be valid. The way I see it is that a category is either useful or not and whether it is or not depends on our goals which depends on what we like and want which is subjective and the judgement itself relative to such a system so designed. That's not to say they are arbitrary, because they're objectively useful or not with respect to the goal. I don't think biologists would agree with you about the horse. It's actually consider a crisis in the philosophy of biology that the concept of species is ill-defined. [1] Like I said, the resolution to me is pragmatic: the definition will depend on whether it is effective relative to some purpose. 1. https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/species/ https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/species/
    - wahern 5y ago
      We might as well just link to the basic problem statement rather than recapitulate 3000 years of philosophy: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sorites_paradox https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sorites_paradox
    - jollybean 5y ago
      A biologist would only take umbrage rhetorically, which is fine, but they'll never categorize a rock, a flower, or a human as 'a horse' so in reality it's not a problem. While 'value' is surely in the eye of the beholder ... whether or not something fits into the category is not as subjective. And frankly, the 'big question' is 'who is the beholder' - which is something that materialism is struggling to tell us.

TaupeRanger 5y ago

I think it's simpler than you're allowing. Death in animals is the absence of consciousness with no possibility of recovery. In plants and maybe-but-probably-not-sentient life, it's more complicated.

gus_massa 5y ago
We all agree when we should say that a cow is dead, but what about sponges? You can pass a sponge through a sieve, and the isolated cells will recombine https://www.shapeoflife.org/video/sponges-time-lapse-sponge-cells-recombining https://www.shapeoflife.org/video/sponges-time-lapse-sponge-... (Is there a better link?) Can a single cell of a sponge create a "new" sponge? Or it's just the "old" sponge? Should you wait until the last cell is dead until we can claim it's dead? Back to cows... You can remove the heart of a cow and keep the heart alive in a proper device, and keep the rest of the cow alive with an artificial heart. (I don't know if someone has tried this with cows, but this should be possible with the same technology for hearts transplants in humans.) Are both parts alive? What happens if I unplug one of them? Is the heart-less-cow is the real cow? I think we all agree about this last question, but from the cellular level it's just an arbitrary classification, in spite it's useful for us.
- mysterydip 5y ago
  My favorite example of this is the planarian. You can cut its head in half and it will generate two new halves. Same with the tail. Or cut the whole thing into pieces, and each piece will regenerate the whole body.
  - TchoBeer 5y ago
    The hydra too. Me and a friend used to pass time doing debates, and when one of us was too tired to research or argue we'd debate about dumb stuff, and I was a stalwart "the original hydra reproduced into two offspring" much like how single celled organisms "die" when they reproduce
- TaupeRanger 5y ago

slibhb 5y ago

> Just to clarify, I don't mean that these distinctions are meaningless, just that their meaning is inherently embedded in human experience. In that case, describing the distinction as "arbitrary" seems wrong.

shrimpx 5y ago

Why not go further and say the entirety of "our reality" is a human hallucination, as our senses are limited and our brains peculiar in how they process their inputs. That the "real reality" is an imperceptible-to-us dance of fields (even that is only as far as our theories take us).

ReactiveJelly 5y ago
At the risk of sounding like a hypocrite after my "Not finding souls is a victory for atheism" comment: What does that add? Do we have better models if we say we're all hallucinating the same seemingly-kind-of-objective reality? What if I'm the only human, you're all p-zombies, BUT all dogs are conscious?
- mensetmanusman 5y ago
  We are all p-zombies, and we voted at our supper club to determine that you don’t actually exist.
- grasshopperpurp 5y ago
  Lots of loaded words in the comments, and hallucination probably takes some of us to places that aren't helpful, but understanding the limits of our perception and understanding gives us better context. Even if we don't understand the limits, it's helpful to know that our reality and reality are separate things. If we don't know we have blind spots, we won't know to check them.

deleted 5y ago

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bmitc 5y ago

Is there a consequence of your thinking? I don’t think it’s arbitrary. There’s a clear distinction between say a rock and a cell, even if you view the rock on geological timescales and the cell on biological timescales. I don’t think it’s arbitrary or even surprising that humans view things from our own vantage point in reality.

ReactiveJelly 5y ago
There's a negative consequence - If the line between life and non-life is blurry, that means there isn't a clear place for souls to fit in. If life can be completely explained as an emergent property of individual non-living parts, (ultimately, atoms aren't alive, even though they make up living things) then we can't tell whether souls exist in our universe or not. This isn't a big deal for science, but it's a moral victory for atheists.
- andagainagain 5y ago
  That isn't necessarily true. All you have to do to keep the concept of external soul alive is to accept the idea of simpler souls. Maybe there isn't am irreducibly complex soul.
- today20201014 5y ago
  I am hesitant to agree that it's a moral victory - maybe it's more of a victory about metaphysics? (also, what is a metaphysical victory? :))
  - posterboy 5y ago
    a metaphysical victory for atheists who consumes the concept of soul would be that the concept ceases, which is equivalent to its physical death in the competing theist's view, and completely unconsequential to the atheist, which only proves that atheism is at least not that bad.
- deleted 5y ago
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deleted 5y ago

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mc32 5y ago

>"their meaning is inherently embedded in human experience." Not necessarily, some animals have the same perception. Some carnivores don't eat dead animals, others primarily eat carrion and they interreact differently with inanimate objects.