3 ms·
This is a fun thought experiment, but our working definition of life is something along the lines of heritable metabolizing, which dreaming doesn't so obviously
by gavmor 2y ago
This is a fun thought experiment, but our working definition of life is something along the lines of heritable metabolizing, which dreaming doesn't so obviously serve.
- davisp 2y agoA wild tangent but reading “heritable metabolizing” really hit me on the “are viruses alive” question. I’ve been around enough biotech to have considered the differences between plasmids and viruses versus archaea, bacteria, and eukaryotes. I’ve always considered “heritable change” as the base definition of “life”. As in, “life” is progeny resemble their parent(s)? Or “heritable change”. “Heritable metabolizing” quite nicely captures that difference between the levels of single molecule “life” and singular/multicellular “life”. Apologies for the random aside, it was just one of those random “I have a vague idea of why mitochondria are important, but I don’t see them as fundamental” parts of my “What is life?” definition being refined.
- mncharity 2y ago> “heritable change” as the base definition of “life” I years ago saw a research talk by someone doing, IIRC, regional-sized evolutionary-time-duration multi-scale ecosystem simulation - they made the same call.
- mncharity 2y ago> heritable metabolizing That's a really nice phrase - thank you. Hmm, searches for `"heritable metabolizing"` have like no hits, *bolism only a few.
- gavmor 2y agoFor a broader definition, I'll refer you to Dr. Michael Wong, astrobiologist and planetary scientist at the Carnegie Institution for Science's Earth & Planets Laboratory: https://pca.st/episode/40b841c8-6f31-4bbb-88e0-c834ae319ee4 https://pca.st/episode/40b841c8-6f31-4bbb-88e0-c834ae319ee4