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Showing posts from July, 2016

No, but seriously: What is “Life”?

i) Attempts to define life in terms of humans thinking about defining life in terms of egotistical individuals, genes, species or whatnot have failed for what should be obvious reasons. Life is a natural phenomenon no different to any other. It can be regarded as an abstract concept referring to an energy exchange process rather than any given chemical, object, individual or concrete material arrangement. The temptation to define life as such has been merely a bias of the definer, of our individual consciousness taking place in an individual body. While bodies may exhibit life, as they are alive, they are not as such life itself, as life itself does not operate in any significant way on a given object: not individuals, nor species, nor size scales, chemicals nor arrangements of matter. The failure of life at any of these levels (think individual death, species extinction or even mass extinctions) does not overall hinder the process of life through time, for as long as any sin