What is life? Is death real?

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This is just stupid. Life is special because it matters to us, the rest of the universe doesn't matter anymore than any hypothetical universe does, it only because WE can observe the universe that we can really say it exists at all. This is one reason among many why I'm against reductionism. Carl Sagan was an astrophysicist, not a philosopher, and his idea of life is patently nonsensical.

I think most of the lines people have traditionally drawn in the sand on this topic are political first and foremost.

First we're really talking about life, not necessarily self-aware consciousness, and we don't know whether those two things are completely coupled.

Secondly we can see that single-celled organisms can have bafflingly complex behavior, some even procreate sexually rather than asexually which means they've had a pretty big hurdle of data to clear to be successful as a strain. That seems to refute the idea that complex self-interested 'behavior' needs nerve cells, or even any more cells than one. I don't know if we'd qualitatively call it consciousness at that level the way we'd think of it but it would beg the question - life at the level of single celled organisms is an epiphenomenon of what?

I think there's enough of a puzzle to be sorted out at the fundamental level to where traditional debate issues of whether or not human brains produce consciousness as an epiphenomenon might be more of a distraction than anything.

Death is inevitable. It is the logical consequence of the Second Law of Thermodynamics.

This thread will probably draw a lot of platitudes and vacuities, and I should probably be forgiving.

Part of the problem is it's a very difficult topic to comment on effectively and I'm not even sure how well I'm equipped for the task of taking it farther other than broaching the OP and attempting to clarify what its not. It's not about causes of death, it's not about whether or not consciousness lives on, it's not a theory as to whether either life or death are inevitable, it's about our lack of any constituent understanding of life or death.

So it's pretty much a mystery at this point.

If I were to give my own inane speculation just to offer at least something in trade for my criticisms of everyone else's posts:

It seems like atoms and molecules have a small proclivity to join into complex structures such as biomolecules, or at least enough proclivity to get the process going rather than just settling out in gas, liquid, or crystalline solids. Biomolecules seem to have something interesting going on and it could be degrees of potential to form into increasingly complex structures, just that we don't see complexity as necessarily causing animate life.

This is where I tend to have a lot of sympathy for panpsychism or even some of the more granular forms of idealism because it seems like there's something inherent in matter that propels this process if the right kinds of structures are assembled. I don't feel prepared to lay claim to what that drive of trajectory is, where it comes from, or to try and pin it to any particular type of quantum field because I simply don't know enough about the topic and I'm not even sure that we'd see it there. This is also partly where I also find myself having sympathies for Bernardo Kastrup's view that when you hit this wall we can say that we don't really know what matter is (other than "Aye! It's this stuff here in my hand!") and if it were a kind of data, perhaps even pre-subjective data or points of potential consciousness (if enough amalgamates) more primarily it would be irrelevant whether or not we experience it as little fireballs and chunks of ice, rock, and plasma floating in space.

In a lot of ways I suppose I can't fault people for bringing up consciousness (my apologies if I was too harsh with that - I just didn't want it to detract from the conversation about the seeming emergence of life from non-life and its subsequent disassembly back into non-life). This topic does cleave to the core of a three-fold mystery: consciousness, life, matter. Consciousness seems to really bring out the political impulse in people more than the other two although origins of life can spark that as well. When we talk about any of these three things we know what we mean in practical terms but still aren't capable of having any idea what we're talking about in absolute terms.

Really that's part of why I can't help but sense that we're at least temporarily living in a mystery but that it's a mystery worth exploring without blinkering ourselves too harshly with any hasty conclusions.

exactly. you're just re-affirming my assertion of the subjectivity of life and meaning.. so i don't get your point. of course life matters to us, if it didn't we would've probably died out long ago, but in terms of our constituents and overall significance we're not inherently different than a rock, really.
i don't get what you mean by the universe not 'mattering' any more than any hypothetical one either, i'm not disputing that.
so far i'm hearing emotion, but not much else.

"of course life matters to us, if it didn't we would've probably died out long ago," This is you completely missing the point. By life I don't mean the biological process, but the way in which the world is experienced. It is EVERYTHING. You are tackling this in the wrong direction, as if we died out long ago, then there would be NOTHING.

"but in terms of our constituents and overall significance we're not inherently different than a rock, really." And I'm saying that this is a stupid way to look at things, because as far as anything is significant, we are. Your idea of significance is just nonsensical.

"so far i'm hearing emotion, but not much else." Nope, you're just too brainwashed by materialism to realize the inherent problems with it. There is nothing I can say to you because you are so set in this rut that you completely miss the point of everything I say.

By your first paragraph, i assume you mean that without life to experience the universe, there is no universe? This is an interesting way to look at things. But; far more nonsensical than what Schopenhauer is saying about life being no more significant than a rock - i agree with him entirely on that, but that is besides the point for this paragraph. If you have the universe and take out life, you still have quarks, leptons, photons, gluons, Higgs bosons, w and z bosons, darkmatter, dark energy, other not yet confirmed or theorised particles, other stuff, and everything they're arranged in - stars, black holes, planets, etcetera. Just no life. The universe would be fine without life.

About our lack of significance. We're made of up quarks, down quarks, gluons which hold them together in the form of neutrons and protons, pions (which are a type of meson, made of quarks and antiquarks) which are exchanged between the neutrons and protons, which hold those together in atomic nuclei, electrons, and photons, which are used in most(i think most?) interactions. I'm unsure of if w and z bosons come into play with the arrangement(s) that is life. What is a rock made of? Up quarks, down quarks, gluons, you get the point. The only difference is the arrangement. And another arguement for our insignificance is hard determinism. Seeing as we are made of the afore mentioned materials, which follow certain laws, everything is predetermined - including all of our behaviour. Obviously you have quantum mechanics, which isn't deterministic, but that's irrelevant - we still have no free will. Therefore, you may conclude that we are insignificant. Of course, you can argue that because we are intelligent, we are significant, in our own little world. But in the grand scheme of things: we do not matter.

Wasn't it enough to try and answer the OP questions without bringing "significance" into it?

I found the video insufferably smug given that the vast majority of what it presented as unarguable fact was nothing of the kind.

It "will happen" that we will create entirely artificial organisms out of digital technology, and soon!

Mitochondria are dead, not alive.

Cells are "just" collections of dead things.

Rubbish!

The voice over sounded terribly confident and brimming with certainty, but almost nothing said was certain and very little of it was even likely to be true in any meaningful sense.

The obviously lacking topic was the reification of collective entities. The Gaia hypothesis is that the whole planet functions as a living thing, based on observations about biologically-mediated homeostatic processes that maintain certain gas ratios in the atmosphere over geological time.

Nations, corporations, families and tribes are often reified collective entities that unquestionably exist in a very meaningful way to people, despite the abstract nature of the concepts behind them and the truth that they are "just" collections of individuals none of which are nations, corporations, families or tribes. Despite this, people don't generally have a huge conceptual problem with the idea that collective behavior results in the emergence of higher level entities in these social spheres.

Likewise, many people have observed that ecosystems often function as large collective entities, e.g., "living forests" and recognize that the human bodies people habitually and inaccurately imagine to be discrete entities with clear boundaries really function like such collective entities. It is noted that there in the ecosystems of a single human being, there are multiple microbiomes such as the gut microbiome, oral microbiome, epidermal microbiomes in various parts of the body, etc.

All of this knowledge about how life works is glossed over in an unhelpful way in the video and stupid, simplistic thinking is encouraged in it's place, the whole irritating approach compounded with all those empty assertions...

Bah! A tale full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.

Here's what you're failing to understand: there could be potentially infinite universes made of any number of things, not just physical particles, but the only universe that matters is the one we live in, because we live in it. When we talk about the material in the universe, what we are actually talking about is our observations which we organize into a mathematical framework. We can't really say material actually exists, all we can really say is that there is patterns to our experience. So without an observer, gluons and whatever are nothing but empty relations. It's like a computer with I/O, technically processes might be going on, but functionally it's equivalent to nothing. Everything you said is just conjecture based on materialism with no proof, but consider this: if nothing in the universe is meaningful, then how is you interpretation of the universe as possessing hard materialism meaningful?

I don't see why you believe that i failed to understand that there could be infinite universes made of anything, but the only one that matters is this one. No where in my post did i mention other universes. Why? Because they don't matter in this discussion. Now that we're on the same page with that, i shall move onto the main body of your post.

"When we talk about the material in the universe, what we are actually talking about is our observations which we organize into a mathematical framework. We can't really say material actually exists, all we can really say is that there is patterns to our experience."

I completely agree with this (unless i misinterpreted what you meant). Everything we experience are observations, you don't know for certain that what you have observed is actually real or not. You can argue that nothing outside your mind exists. Solipsism.

"So without an observer, gluons and whatever are nothing but empty relations. It's like a computer with I/O, technically processes might be going on, but functionally it's equivalent to nothing."

Wether there is an observer or not doesn't affect the material (assuming it actually exists). It will still be there wether we are or not, unless it doesn't exist outside of our own mind.

"Everything you said is just conjecture based on materialism with no proof, but consider this: if nothing in the universe is meaningful, then how is you interpretation of the universe as possessing hard materialism meaningful?"

I don't see why you believe there is no evidence supporting materialism. Do you believe we're made of different things to everything else in the universe? Is that not arrogant?

How is my interpretation of the universe meaningful? It's not.

What is this grand scheme of things of which you speak?
What, in your view, is significant?

There is no rational argument for the insignificance of life, the universe or anything within it.

Significance is a pointer to nothing outside of the context of a system of minds exchanging information about value, meaning, importance, etc.

[edited to add:]
Welcome to WP! I'm glad you've found a place to discuss the things that interest you.

The universe as a whole.
Nothing.

A rational argument is an argument based on logic. Are my arguments based on illogical nonsense? Materialism is based on logic, hopefully we can both agree on that. Can materialism not be interpreted as an argument for the insignificance of life?

Another argument: you can argue that nothing outside of the mind can be known to exist for sure. All information goes through our brains, can be and is changed in some way. Fake information can be made, too. Hallucinations. If we've been in some sort of dream our entire lives, how would we know that this is fake? We would of had no experience with real life. So, if nothing can be known to exist for certain, is anything truly meaningful? Of course, i do give the benefit of the doubt, and assume that everything is real (well, not everything, only if there's hard evidence for it. For example, i don't believe that unicorns exist). But it would be irrational to simply reject the possibility of nothing existing, just because you don't like it, and because it's better for yourself and others to assume otherwise.

Edit: thank you for the welcome. It seems that there's plenty of interesting discussions here. Also; i apologise if i ever seem rude when discussing/arguing - i do not intend to be rude.

The universe isn't a scheme. Our idea of it is a scheme. It simply is.
Why? Because we made the word scheme in order to express an idea that we need to share with each other through language: the word is meant to signify "a large-scale systematic plan or arrangement for attaining some particular object or putting a particular idea into effect."


The fact that you do interpret materialism as an argument for the insignificance of life is incontrovertible evidence that such an interpretation is possible.

But while possible, it is not logical. The interpretation rests on faulty premises and misconstrued words. Materialism is not an argument for or against significance. It is not germane to a discussion about significance unless you accept as a premise that significance must be based on something immaterial.

But significance rests on nothing of the kind.

Significance is an idea that emerges from the conversation of minds mediated by language. We have a consensus understanding of what it means: that which is worthy of attention, that which we find to have some importance and also the meaning that we attach to words and events. The idea of "objective significance" may be nonsense, but the idea that some things are significant to the minds that attach importance to things is axiomatic, true by definition.



You can't even be sure that your mind exists in your brain rather than as some kind of simulation, but this isn't a rational argument for or against the significance of the thoughts or sensations being processed by that real or simulated mind. While this is an interesting line of speculation, it doesn't seem helpful in advancing the discussion.

If nothing exists in any sense, then I am not here to care and this discussion can't be happening. I'm pretty sure that reality will continue regardless of what I think about it, so I don't think trying to disprove the nonexistence of everything is a useful pursuit.

i don't see how you can say there would be nothing without something to experience it.
surely you can't mean that without observers the universe literally wouldn't exist, that makes no sense unless you somehow justify it.
it does make sense to say that without us then there MAY AS WELL not be a universe, but that's a different thing entirely.

we're only significant in our own minds.
of course significance itself is another arbitrary concept, but i mean that we're not more important than a rock in the grand scheme of things.

and no, i think you're the one that's bigoted in this case.
i am very open minded and don't take a discussion like this personally like you seem to.
i am ready to drop materialism as soon as i see evidence for anything else.
i am not 'brainwashed', it's simply the conclusion i've came to after examining the evidence.
even consciousness seems to have an electromagnetic basis and is the result of physical processes in the brain.. an emergent property that comes from the incredibly complex system that is the brain.. so complex that it's understandably hard to explain, but that doesn't mean you can jump the gun and say there's some kind of 'spirit' or something when there's no evidence for that.

If somebody told me that a tree in Siberia was felled by a snowstorm, and I see evidence of it in Doppler radar, I will believe that tree has been felled, even if I didn't see it or hear it actually happen.

Even if "love" and other emotions have a chemical basis, I still feel the full impact of these emotions, which are real to me, whatever their origin. This is because I "feel" those emotions.

Well my reply literally vanished, so time to retype it all...

"The universe isn't a scheme. Our idea of it is a scheme. It simply is.
Why? Because we made the word scheme in order to express an idea that we need to share with each other through language: the word is meant to signify "a large-scale systematic plan or arrangement for attaining some particular object or putting a particular idea into effect."

I am perfectly aware that the universe isn't a scheme.
""In the grand scheme of things" is an idiom. It means that when you put things into perspective, taking everything else into account, sometimes what has previously been considered significant isn't quite significant."

"It (materialism) is not germane to a discussion about significance unless you accept as a premise that significance must be based on something immaterial.""

I completely agree.

"We have a consensus understanding of what it (significance) means: that which is worthy of attention, that which we find to have some importance and also the meaning that we attach to words and events. The idea of "objective significance" may be nonsense, but the idea that some things are significant to the minds that attach importance to things is axiomatic, true by definition."

Once again, i completely agree. If something is important to someone, then it is significant to them, as you so eloquently stated. Is life important to me? In the grand scheme of things; no. The universe will exist without us, and we're a very small part of it. In our little world, Earth? I suppose it would be considered immoral to say that life isn't important (when only taking Earth into account). In our little world (we could possibly extend this to the solar system), i do agree that life is significant. Life is important for people's happiness. It's also important for productivity. We've also left a mark on this planet. But in the grand scheme of things, we are not significant.

"You can't even be sure that your mind exists in your brain rather than as some kind of simulation, but this isn't a rational argument for or against the significance of the thoughts or sensations being processed by that real or simulated mind."

I completely agree. The thoughts and sensations are significant in that little Earth/solar system bubble, simulation, real or nonexistent. But if it's not real, then they have zero significance in reality.

"If nothing exists in any sense, then I am not here to care and this discussion can't be happening. I'm pretty sure that reality will continue regardless of what I think about it, so I don't think trying to disprove the nonexistence of everything is a useful pursuit."

It would be quite inconvenient if people started assuming that nothing exists. Trying to disprove the nonexistence of everything isn't a useful pursuit; you can't do it.