The book "THE WAY - 2" is ready now, you can buy an e-book format from this site. This book will continue the
discussion in higher level in a such a manner which is complete explains our lives in another dimension. There are many
versions of this key question out there. Most of them are a valuable work to help us to understand the existence. We
are going to show them here and there to you, for create more and more question. Most of us has forgot many of them.
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Defining Life
Since life is such a ubiquitous and fundamental concept, for every living element in this universe, the definitions of it are
key question and legion.
For doing such a big job the only way for us is using "words" to explain it. Words are our servants in many cases, not
our masters. For different purposes we find it convenient to use words in different senses.
What is life? And why should we care? Well to begin with, we are living beings, and that fact distinguishes us from
most things in the Universe. Though humans are not the only living things, we are among the few, so understanding the
nature of life might be an important step toward understanding ourselves.
Just by looking around we see that, people define life in different ways for different purposes. For everyday situations,
it seems to me that we have a common-sense set of criteria, somewhat along the lines of:
Does it look like a person or an animal? If so, is it moving? Does it respond to being spoken to or touched? Failing
this, is it breathing, or is its heart beating?
Does it look like a plant? If so, does it have green leaves? If not, could it be because it is winter? . . . Etc., etc.
The question is, can anything meaningfully be done to define life that would not simply be a repetition of such everyday
notions. Once upon a time, philosophers like Plato believed that things in the everyday world are imperfect reflections
of perfect forms or concepts in some type of higher realm. In defining a class of objects, we would be searching for an
understanding of that mystical essence that inheres in all of them.
But as David Hume said, somewhat more recently,
Nothing is more usual than for philosophers to encroach on the province of grammarians, and to engage in disputes of
words, while they imagine they are handling controversies of the deepest importance and concern.
Even more recently, the logical positivist have stressed the distinction between analytic and synthetic propositions. An
analytic proposition is one that is true by definition, such as saying that "men are adult male humans." Such a statement
is an assertion about words. On the other hand, a synthetic proposition asserts some new truth about the world that
was not inherent in the words themselves. Synthetic propositions are subject to verifiability; we can perform
experiments or other observations to determine whether these propositions are true.
A third class of propositions consists of statements that are neither analytic or synthetic, and to the logical positivist,
such statements are simply without sense. The logical positivist sought to expose much of traditional philosophy as
meaningless discourse, a sort of neurotic disease.
Which of these three types of statements—analytic, synthetic, or meaningless—am I planning to make about life? Well,
neither of the first two. Whether my statements will fall into the third category remains to be seen.
I would argue that it would be a good thing to have a workable abstract definition of life, and that such a definition
need not be wholly arbitrary, but can be defensible to a degree. However, the point is not to describe some sort of
metaphysical essence of life. Rather, the point is to define life so that the term can be usefully extended to situations we
have never before encountered.
For example, the legal definition of "death" now has to take account of situations that have only recently been made
possible by medical science. Nowadays many comatose people can be kept on life support machines for years. But
are we to regard this as life, or specifically as human life, with all the ethical considerations that we attach to human life?
But the issues reach beyond ethics and into the area of scientific discourse. Researchers such as James Love lock have
recently developed the Gaia theory, which is the notion that the earth as a whole is a living organism. The idea is
vigorously disputed by many other scientists. But the real question is, how scientists can even have a debate about
whether the earth is alive, if they haven’t agreed in advance what they mean by "alive"? Love lock, to his credit, does
make an effort to define his concept of life, but states his conclusions in only the most incomplete and tentative sort of
way.
The idea of Gaia is said to have been sown in popular culture by the photographs of green-and-white Earth taken from
the barren moon. Similar changes of perspective may result by our explorations of other planets, such as Mars. If we
found life there, could we recognize it? After first noticing it, could we agree on whether it was indeed life or not?
The possibility of meeting extraterrestrial life may seem a distant one. Love lock himself has provided good reasons for
believing that there is no life currently on Mars, whether or not there was in the past. And the density with which life is
scattered through the galaxy or the universe as a whole is almost totally unknown. We might make contact tomorrow
or never. (Sometime in between would be my guess!)
But there are two much more immediate trends on our own planet that are forcing us to stretch and readjust our
definition of life. These are trends in biotechnology and information technology.
The Human Genome Project is currently mapping the locations and function of all the genes in human beings. It is
difficult to fully appreciate the significance of this project. With such information in hand, or even a small part of it, we
will attain the ability to redefine ourselves in ways that we have not yet begun to imagine. Clearly, we will need to
generalize our concepts of what life is unless we are to suppose that future generations, who may differ from all life
today in major ways, are not "alive."
Meanwhile, cognitive scientists are continuing a three-decade long effort to use computers to model and possibly
someday to embody intelligence. So far, their efforts have mainly taught us that the task is more difficult than anyone
had imagined. But arguments that artificial intelligence is impossible tend to lapse into mysticism of the worst sort. The
great conceptual gap here arises from the fact that most of our own information processing is below the conscious
level. From this fact arises the deeply-felt intuition that thought comes from an inherently magical and nonmaterial place.
Even our conscious experience bears no resemblance to the cellular and molecular processes that apparently give rise
to it. But it doesn’t follow that our experience is not made of cells and molecules. It simply means that there is a big
difference between being a process and looking at the process from the outside.
I don’t have a timeline for the creation of artificial intelligence, but look at it this way. It took Nature something like
three billion years of trial and error to generate human beings. Shouldn’t human beings, with the benefit of planning and
foresight, be able to duplicate and exceed this feat of blind Nature in a mere fraction of that timespan?
If we succeed in creating intelligence, will it follow that we have created life? Is intelligence even possible without life? I
will argue that it is not (but only after first placing the definition of life an abstract level that does not inherently exclude
computer chips).
One thing almost everyone would agree on is that life is a complex phenomenon, with many facets that emerge only
after careful examination. I once bought a book on identifying trees, and was surprised to discover that I had never
really looked at a tree before I had that book. What I mean is, I had never looked at a tree before at that level of
detail, or with that much appreciation for how trees vary. Now, you could argue that look was simply like a dictionary,
a list of agreements about how we should name plants. But I know that it was more than that. For myself, and for the
people who wrote it, it was a voyage of discovery, a dawning awareness of wonders that would otherwise have gone
unnoticed.
Let us therefore attempt to identify life. Let us make a guidebook that we could take on a field trip to any planet, either
elsewhere in the galaxy, or later in our own history, and use to direct our observations. Only when we know what to
look for can we truly see. And, though we take this voyage only in imagination, we are not likely to return unchanged.
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The most difficult part of this absolute necessary explanation for us is that
we have very little or not exact instrument to use. We get all our
information from our body which is under high control forces of this
universe. Our body has to fight each second to defend his integrity, at the
same time get some thing more from this universe.
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The aim and the end of all becoming is the development of potentiality to
actuality, the incorporation of form in matter. —Aristotle, attributed by
Jeremy Campbell, in Grammatical Man
And it is in no way possible for anything to be responsible for its own
generation and decay. For the mover must preexist the moved, and the
begetter the begotten. But nothing is prior to itself. —Aristotle, De Motu
Animalium, trans. Martha Craven Nussbaum
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