Replies

I had a car that was “alive” one minute and “dead” the next.. so to speak..
Turns out it only needed a “part” then it was “Alive” again..

Many look at humans exactly in this way..
Life being composed of working parts..
Of course, they conflate the mechanical process but basically its quite simple.. (to them)..

Like the bible and other religious lore presupposes..
Everyone lives forever, meaning no one really actually “dies”...
Much like my car.. even with the proper parts you still need gas..

Some call the gasoline of life .... “the Spirit”..
Why not.?.. Everything “alive” needs energy..

Thank you so much for sharing your insights, dear hosepipe!

One of the hallmarks that shows living things are not like non-living things in nature is that when you take them apart to study the pieces, you cannot put them back together again and still have a living thing.

Or put another way, in life, the whole is greater than the sum of the parts (Rosen et al).

As I have testified many times on these threads, I believe that information (successful communication) holds the answer for mathematicians/scientists (esp. physicists invited to the biology table) who must ignore theological/philosophical solutions per the principle of methodological naturalism.

Shannon's mathematical theory of communication gave rise to Information Theory, a branch of mathematics.

Like other math theories it is highly portable among science disciplines. And applied to molecular biology for pharmaceutical and cancer research, it reads like this: information is the reduction of uncertainty (Shannon entropy) in the receiver or molecular machine as it moves from a before state to an after state.

As long as an autonomous thing in nature is successfully communicating its message (DNA) that thing is alive. If it never could communicate, it is non-life. And if it no longer is communicating, it is dead.

But like betty boop pointed out earlier, making that observation would be like the CMB measurement of the expansion of space/time indicating there was a beginning of real space and real time.

It would be a theological statement at the heart because there is no physical origin for information (successful communication) in the universe.

As a whole, science is not ready to give up the Newtonian paradigm in biological research. Most still believe that living things are like non-living things, they should be able to take them apart and put them back together again, i.e. Frankenstein.