What exactly constitutes life?

[ronthepon]

Well! I am introducing a new concept to override the present one!!:confused: :hihi: :)

I feel that you are overriding the concept of life with that of liveliness.

 

I'm not sure if that will be useful for science. So far I have seen usefulness of the concept only in the form of Live or Dead, and never come across the need for levels of liveliness in science.

 

However, I do not assert of the fact that the concept of liveliness is a waste. It merely is not vital to science.

[skuzie]

I like hallenrm's idea of quantifying life, but ronthepon has a good concern that is has little practical uses in the realm of science. When dealing with biology we must know whether the organism is alive or not alive, it is a boolean value, no gray areas. But at the same time when a person dies does he really die at once? many of the cells in a persons body will continue to function until they starve from the lack of energy provided. Now your cells are 'alive' and you are 'alive' in the present biological terms. The terms alive/living/life I believe are not concrete terms such as 'gravity', but are more like the term 'lake', how big does a stream have to be in order to be a lake? :unlove:

 

I think that quantification would make sense at some level in science and would make things more clear when using the current living terms. Perhaps liveliness is the correct term? but I think when judging the complexity of living identities (not necessarily biological as we know them) we have to look at the amount of information the living identity encapsulates, whether information is stored as genetic nucleotides, neuron connections, or boolean bits stored on a hard drive, in the end it is all this abstract information that makes the living identity 'living'.

[ronthepon]

If you look at the problem in that way, when a person dies, many of his body fuctions cease.

 

But a lot of cells may remain alive for a number of moments.

 

In those moments, we attempt to administer the so-called life saving operations.

 

How do you define a the deadness of a man?

 

That is much more loose than defining the deadness of a cell.

 

There, I agree that livliness is needed.

[hallenrm]

I like hallenrm's idea of quantifying life, but ronthepon has a good concern that is has little practical uses in the realm of science. When dealing with biology we must know whether the organism is alive or not alive,

 

I think that quantification would make sense at some level in science and would make things more clear when using the current living terms. Perhaps liveliness is the correct term? but I think when judging the complexity of living identities (not necessarily biological as we know them) we have to look at the amount of information the living identity encapsulates, whether information is stored as genetic nucleotides, neuron connections, or boolean bits stored on a hard drive, in the end it is all this abstract information that makes the living identity 'living'.

 

To address to such concerns is on my agenda today.:)

 

About practical uses in science

 

If a method is agreed upon, by the esteemed bodies of science, to calculate the index of life (Life Index for Everything), Which itself would be a herculean task for scientists, imagine the number of thesis that can be produced in various departments of science, calculating this index for various things. I remember, scientific journal are proliferated with such papers, viz statistical mechanical calculations, measurements of specific heat, or free energy of a reaction etc. etc.

 

This index will open a new door for reporting explorations for extraterrestrial life. The reports of these explorations could be: The LIFE on Mars is calculated to be 100, while that on Venus is 150.

 

The index could be logarithmic, for atoms it could be a single digit, for molecules double digit and for (the so called living biological organism, 4-9 digits. However, the index would not remain constant throughout the lifespan of its body. It would increase as its size grows, and plummet down in case of its death!.

 

Originally posted by ronthepon:

 

How do you define a the deadness of a man?

 

That is much more loose than defining the deadness of a cell.

 

There, I agree that liveliness is needed.

 

I think I have answered your question Ron!:)

[tarak]

life is the sum of events happening before death

life is an oppurtunity

life is an experience

life is an explaination and an understanding

life is a mass*time/energy

life is between your temples

life is a catalysis

life is mass/energy*time

life matters matter life

life is the halo of the energy of consciousness springing in an observers mind

life can be understood in a subtle way through the elegantly designed post-modern scientific experiments.every living being is a self sustainable open system

[skuzie]

to calculate the index of life (Life Index for Everything), Which itself would be a herculean task for scientists

You are correct it would be a hard task indeed, suppose we take the information approach. Every cell in our body has some finite amount of information stored its its dna, let this amount be X. We know there are around 100 trillion cells in our bodies with each cell having X amount of data. Now take the number of average neuron connections an adult human posesses, suppose the data that can be stored in these connections sums up to Y. So the average humans index of life would equal to X times 100 trillion plus Y. This sum of raw data is everything that makes us who we are. I imagine that Y must be much much much greater than X times 100 trillion since the Y is where our intelligence comes from. Thus lower organisms will have very low Y or none at all if they dont have a brain. Suppose what other methods of storage containment there could also exist to store biological data? :)

 

the index would not remain constant throughout the lifespan of its body. It would increase as its size grows, and plummet down in case of its death!.

You are very correct, after all our brain develops and our bodies grow thus making us more complex, we reach a high point at some point in our lives and then its downhill as we grow old and cells die off and the brain data deteriorates and diminishes.

[HydrogenBond]

In the human body every cell has the exact same DNA. What makes them different is that certain genes associated with that cell differentiation are unpacked and active, while others, used by other cells, are packed away. The DNA only has storage equal to the number of genes on the DNA within any one cell of the body (a few acceptions have less).

 

The synapses are far more numerous. If one synapse is analogous to a bit of information, a small piece of data needs to take many synapses. As we add more and more synapses, to the central synapses associated with a piece of data, extrapolations of that data become expressed.

 

What is slick about the brain is that each synapse has many settings through the variety of neurotransmittors and other factors. This suggests being able to use the same synapses for other memory type applications. For example, if one is looking out their window at a bird singing, if they are in love they hear beautiful music. If they are having a hard time sleeping, the same bird and song become annoying noise. The two moods reflect different neuro-chemicals affecting the synapses. It would be hard to prove it is the same memory, but with everything else equal, such as visual and audio input, is seems reasonable it is just a twist on the same memory.

[Cedars]

This was an interesting read I found last week sometime and may add to the whole, what is life? question.

 

http://www.cnn.com/2006/TECH/science/06/02/red.rain/index.html

[HydrogenBond]

The cell is not technically the most basic unit of life. The mitochondia are. These little powerhouses of the cell have their own DNA and can replicate. The rest of the cell only works because of the ATP energy the mitochondria generate. The mitochondria do not need the cell as much as the cell needs the mitochondria, so it can to be alive.

[swampfox]

At its most fundamental level, life is a trajectory in phase-space; the trappings of biology and chemistry serving only as convinent exo-skeletons. We often describe life though in biological terms: metabolize, reproduce, and evolve. But those are the properties most easily observed by us and belie a deeper cause: dynamics. Those of you familiar with differential equations understand how solutions of simple equations form spirialing patterns, some form periodic orbits, and some scream off into infinity when plotted in phase space, or head to zero. Those patterns are trajectories describing the dynamics.

 

Now imagine massively more complicated dynamics and the potential for likewise complicated patterns the trajectories assume. Life on earth is an instantiation of a particular trajectory in some complicated dynamical system which by happenstance assumed the Constructor with parameters Biology and Chemistry.

 

My formulation of this view was influenced by the following:

 

"At Home in the Universe" by Stuart Kauffman

 

"Complexification" by John Casti

 

"Self-Organization in Biological Systems" by Camazine and others

 

"Signs of Life" by Sole Goodwin

 

and Catastrophe Theory of Rene' Thom