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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-no
by 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 agoWe 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 agoMy 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 agoThe 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 agoIt's not a matter of arbitrary classification in the cow case. The original definition still works. The heart has no experience. The continuum of consciousness exists solely within the heartless cow. Whether you want to call the heart "alive" is the same as the question about plants and sponges.
- cout 5y agoDo we know that the heart has no experience? What level of complexity is required for experience?
- morpheos137 5y agoExperience is not a function of a simple "level of complexity" but of structure with specific function. The idea that you reach a certain level of complexity and just get sentience as an incidental side effect of the complexity is a fallacy for multiple reasons. Sentience results from structures specifically crafted to create sentience. In the 21st century as opposed to the 12th century we know for sure that the structures that give us sentience reside entirely in the brain. We can examine the highly complex structure of the heart and compare it to the brain and see that while the heart is complex it does not have the same structure as the brain. The heart is not sentient not because it lacks sufficient "level of complexity" but rather because it lacks a specific functional form of complexity, i.e. the heart lacks information processing structures that the brain has. We can also observe things like when there is a heart transplant the recpient does not start experiencing a change in personality from an independent "sentient" donor heart. Thus there is no evidence that sentience resides outside the brain, so why assume it might? You could just as well assume that a rock has the processing power of a computer CPU but it just lacks input and output.
- User23 5y agoThat’s a truly meaty take on the Ship of Theseus[1] problem. In my mind, like so many philosophical problems, the fundamental distinguishing point is materialism vs dualism. For the materialist different matter means different ship. For the dualist the matter is just expressing an ideal. I’ve heard that in Asia there are temples that were totally destroyed and then rebuilt and everyone considers them as old as since their first building date. [1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ship_of_Theseus https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ship_of_Theseus
- BurningFrog 5y agoYou can think of insect hives (bees, ants, etc) as a single organism that happens to not be physically contiguous. The individual insects in a hive are typically 75% identical genetically.
- hahajk 5y agoAnd some might say “but the hive itself doesn’t have consciousness, or an ‘experience’”. Which is impossible for you to know, unless you are (or have been) a hive.
- BurningFrog 5y agoIf you attack the hive, it definitely defends itself. It looks for food, etc... It is popular to admire the selfless ants or bees who willingly give their lives for their society. But if you think of them as cells of an organism, that happens in every living being. When you see a hive sacrificing itself, we can talk :)
- tagami 5y agoHow similar are city and hive?
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- djokkataja 5y agoThe "possibility of recovery", as you put it, is a moving target depending on the specific situation and the technology involved. For some examples: https://www.wired.com/2014/07/revive-the-dead/ https://www.wired.com/2014/07/revive-the-dead/ The point being that as technology continues to develop in this area, our understanding of when someone is "dead" may also continue to shift. There's also the classic example of comatose people.
- TaupeRanger 5y agoDecay still gives you a hard deadline, unless you freeze the body a la cryogenics. But that's a long shot.
- mongol 5y agoI don't think we should mix in consciousness in the definition of life. It is hard enough as it is also without consciousness mixed in. Origin of life and origin of consciousness are as I see it the two major mysteries of the universe. I see them as separate.