Living or Dead?

So answer my question...what is a seed living or dead?

So we are agreed we dont know what life is....

Nope.sorry I do know what it is ...do you want to..that is the real question?

Where does your faith(fate) end, when are you satisfied you "know" enough?

-BaC
I am never such....

Satsified i dont know yes but does it stop me thinking what life is??? NO...I have no dogmatic belief system, im in the river of life, as i hurtle down the rapids i grab at rocks as i meander through the shallows i ponder on my surroundings at the end of the river i drown...

"I am no more alive than the air that I breathe and yet the air breathes life into me.

I am no more alive than the blood in my veins yet life is a cycle from birth to remains.

I am no more alive than that which I feel but feelings are neither alive nor real.

I am a voice in my head you see. So life, as it were, is defined by me. " ~J. Owens (Observations of the Waking World, Intro to Chapter 12 - Life as an Idea)

Some say life is just breathing..others a mere needing..shall we know what life is by dying..but the mistake is to have faith the seed of life is believing..Xris ,just now...

Yeah.. I was laughing when I first read that. Gotta love Linux.

I am a dedicated Linux user. I run Redhat on one of my servers and Ubuntu on my public computer for my friends who aren't quite as technical as I am.

Unix is happiness. Linux is a pathway to such

Actually, to be precise, it all started with a model train set.

Let's see how well you know your history.

Let me guess..the father of Newtonian something or another...

Could also state it was due to the cannon we found orbit:P


-BaC

The silicon chip or circuit board was design to trigger a model train when someone walked in the door.

Alright everyone, you took things in not the direction I intended. Obviously, life is consciousness from an individual's perspective. What I am interested in, and what I hope you can comment on, is what might constitute life in the 'external world'. Of course, we are assuming that such a world exists, but that's fine if we ackowledge the assumption. I'm really thinking about very simple organisms and their environment. Consider a bacterium; what is the essential difference between that structure and the surrounding solution? Obviously, it is a matter of complexity of organization, but is there anything else?

Alright everyone, you took things in not the direction I intended. Obviously, life is consciousness from an individual's perspective. What I am interested in, and what I hope you can comment on, is what might constitute life in the 'external world'. Of course, we are assuming that such a world exists, but that's fine if we ackowledge the assumption. I'm really thinking about very simple organisms and their environment. Consider a bacterium; what is the essential difference between that structure and the surrounding solution? Obviously, it is a matter of complexity of organization, but is there anything else?

1. Semipermeable Boundary: Check whether the system is defined by a semipermeable boundary made up of molecular components. Does the boundary enable you to discriminate between the inside and the outside of the system in relation to its relevant components? If yes, proceed to 2.
   
2. Reaction Network: Check whether the components are being produced by a network of reactions that take place within the boundary. If yes, proceed to 3.
   
3. Interdependency: Check whether 1 and 2 are interdependent: are the boundary components being produced by the internal network of reactions, and is that network regenerated by conditions due to the boundary itself? If yes, the system is autopoietic.