What is Life? It is a question that philosophers, theologians and scientists have been trying to define and answer for a long time. You might ask why should we care? Well to begin with, we are living beings, and that fact distinguishes us from most things in the Universe. Further still, we are among the few living beings in the Universe, so understanding the nature of life might be an important step toward understanding ourselves. And no, we are not talking about the meaning of life, the purpose of life or the philosophy of life. We are talking about the concept of life itself.
The Oxford Dictionary defines life as "the condition that distinguishes animals and plants from inorganic matter, including the capacity for growth, reproduction, functional activity and continual change preceding death or the existence of an individual human being, plant or animal". NASA's working definition of life states, "life is a self-sustaining system capable of Darwinian evolution." While there are a multitude of definitions for the questions about the meaning, purpose and philosophy of life, it remains a challenge for scientists and philosophers to define life in unequivocal terms. This is difficult partly because life is a process, not a pure substance; especially "since life is such a ubiquitous and fundamental concept, the definitions of it are legion." as John D. Barrow and Frank J. Tipler espoused in The Anthropic Cosmological Principle. The nature of this problem can be understood by comparing this semantic task to the ancient Hindu story of identifying an elephant by having each of six blind men touch only the tail, the trunk, or the leg; what answer a biologist might give can differ dramatically from the answer given by a theoretical physicist, a philosopher or a theologian.
Yet none of these issues stop us from trying to define life itself and understand its meaning, purpose and philosophy. The philosophical question of the definition of life has increasing practical importance in this age of science where almost all extra-terrestrial deep space probes (including Rosetta) seem to have 1 main fundamental purpose - to find, understand and explain life as we know it. While most of these efforts continue to take to biology, chemistry or physics; for the purposes of this blog post lets try to postulate a definition of life from a philosophical standpoint.
There have been three main philosophical approaches to the problem of defining life that remain relevant today; namely Aristotle's view of life as animation; Descartes's view of life as mechanism; and Kant's view of life as organization. To briefly summarize and contrast the 3: Aristotle viewed life as any body / object / thing that is animated as a result of its soul which cannot exist by itself and has little to do with individual identity. According to him, each living being / object / thing is different because it / he / she is composed of varying compounds of form and matter. That is, different bodies / objects / things are animated by the same set of capacities, by the same (kind of) soul for each kind of object / thing / body. The soul therefore differentiated a living from a non-living thing / being. Descartes argued that the human body works like a machine and it follows the laws of physics. The pieces of the human machine, he argued, are like clockwork mechanisms. The mind or soul, on the other hand, is a non-material entity that lacks extension and motion, and does not follow the laws of physics. He went on to say, "I think, therefore I am;" that is to say that life is the object / thing / body being aware of its own being. Kant argued that all living beings / things exist in a self-organized fashion due to an internal purposiveness that accounts for the specificity of the structure of an organized being. As such, in contrast to a mere machine; organized and self-organized beings have formative force rather than just motive force; because of their soul or their being self aware. Thus life according to Kant, is an object / thing / body that has the ability to self-organize and produce within a set of process laws actualized by an external agent.
In short, these theories tell us that life is either a soul in a being / a self-aware being / a being able to self-organize and fend to keep itself alive. At the risk of being labelled as somebody who is pretty dumb, but acting smart, i posit an alternative definition for life as a unison of some aspects of the above 3 theories and more. Life is an organic being with a soul, that is self-aware, has the ability to self-organize and fend to keep itself alive in order to find and accomplish its purpose for being alive - which is to keep all other organic life going in its own way. This purpose becomes prime to all that is living and without it life doesn't exist; further this purpose doesn't come from being itself because it would mean having the ability to change the reason for its being - something no life is capable of doing. If life has died it is because it has exhausted its purpose contributing to ongoing life. A plant for example exists in order for it to multiply itself, while also providing of its produce to animal and man alike. Further it dies when it has played its part in keeping itself and other life going on - by ensuring that other life has been sustained by it in the past and will continue to be sustained by its multiplied forms in the future. A man / woman is alive in order to reproduce and also live out their lives in an attempt to keep other lives going around them. This causal action makes for the cyclical nature of life. So, in essence the purpose of life is inherent to life itself. As such, any definition of life should encompass such purpose.
Therefore, i would define life as a caused self-aware being with a soul, that has the sure ability to self-organize, produce and fend to keep itself alive with the purpose of keeping all other organic life going on; in its own way or form. This would then limit bots or humanoids as being counted for life because they do not have a soul nor an ability to produce. On the other hand, a bacterial form on a distant planet is definitely life; also the unborn fetus in the womb is also definitely life because both fulfill each of the above criteria. Hence a life as a legacy is a life that given more to the rest of life around it. Robert Frost is known to have said, "In three words I can sum up everything I've learned about life: it goes on." This truly is the essence of life - going on and hence i choose to characterize all life in this way as the on-going goings-on.
Though simplistic sounding, what do you think of the above as a philosophical definition of life?
Kant and the Unity of Reason By Angelica Nuzzo
5 comments:
Hi Sushanth....thanks for the tag and the insight you shared...What immediately caught my attention is of course the names of the philosophers ...those you mentioned and characterized are essentially grappling with the dualistic problems related to humans - mind-body issue-, and not primarily with 'life' as such (though they did say about life as part of their philosophical engagements). And there are traces of their influence on your reflection...though you did try to go beyond them with biblical flavor...
One small ironic observation, an interesting one though, is this: you started saying that you are primarily interested to understand 'life' as such, and not with the 'meaning' or 'purpose' of life...and yet ended by this strong suggestion that 'life' by its very DEFINITION is purposeful. Don't you think this is interesting and striking? It is to me..thanks again
venusa, true that Aristotle, Descartes and Kant did not primarily talk about life. however, their observations framework and philosophical method defining the human experience and life in general serves even today as the bases for most of our philosophical approach. correct me if i am wrong about this. even with what i finally concluded; i stressed on life being birthed coupled with a purpose as opposed to talking about the purpose of life itself. hence in my mind i was not contradicting my initial premise. however what is interesting for me is my finding that all life is coupled with purpose; without it there is no life in the first place. what say you?
Agree with you concerning the philosophical frameworks within which we try to work our views...no issue with that. Perhaps the limitation at times in such an exercise is that their vocabularies and the issues they are concerned with influence our thoughts... I somewhat happen to notice this in your write up too. For instance, the question of soul for defining life, the notions of cause or purpose associated with life. If life AS SUCH is what you are concerned with, then 'soul' or 'self aware' are among other things which do really come into general discussion of say plants and some kinds of animal. Also we may have to conceptually explore the questions of life to include other forms of being such as spirit or God etc. What I am trying to say is, at the end, your focus narrows down to anthropocentric perspective, much in the line of those philosophers. I am not suggesting that your approach has problems but that there are traces of the influence of those thinkers in your work.
Concerning "purpose", to be sure, I am not trying to say that you have contradicted yourself. Not at all. Read through my lines carefully. I only thought (and agree with you) that it's interesting and striking in that life cannot be fully understood without also including the idea of purpose. If I may add one more, your notion of 'purpose' comes very close to Aristotelian definition and classification of "cause" or "causality".
totally agree that there are traces of what they are saying. in fact as i myself pointed out in the post, what i am proposing is a union of some facets of the work of these 3 put together to give a more holistic picture. i am essentially building on those same concepts put together. but i believe my focus is more biocentric than anthropocentric.
interestingly some thinkers seem to be talking about the need to stop trying to define life as it is not possible to do so; since life is not a natural kind (case to the point - DEFINING ‘LIFE’ by CAROL E. CLELAND and CHRISTOPHER F. CHYBA). also that other forms of life or being cannot be talked about since they are not empirically provable. that changes the dynamics of the whole discussion on life itself.
cause / causality is an interesting paradigm. i recognize that what i term purpose coupled with life is close to Aristotle's observations on cause / causality. but as you said, it is striking to think about the implications of a definition of life because of the it being based on such cause / causality.
pretty intersting whaaat is life manga fellow ? Life is something that needs to be lived :-)
Just kidding ! nice read thanks you for the insight, and very good observations.
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