Can things without bodies live?

Dissipating the accepted notion of what life actualy is and then claiming this new life exists is nothing more than invention, a magic trick.

Dissipating the accepted notion of what life actualy is and then claiming this new life exists is nothing more than invention, a magic trick.

So, what is the excepted notion?
Here is a bit from our trusted though not always accurate friend the Great Wiki:

1. Homeostasis: Regulation of the internal environment to maintain a constant state; for example, electrolyte concentration or sweating to reduce temperature.
   
2. Organization: Being structurally composed of one or more cells, which are the basic units of life.
   
3. Metabolism: Transformation of energy by converting chemicals and energy into cellular components (anabolism) and decomposing organic matter (catabolism). Living things require energy to maintain internal organization (homeostasis) and to produce the other phenomena associated with life.
   
4. Growth: Maintenance of a higher rate of anabolism than catabolism. A growing organism increases in size in all of its parts, rather than simply accumulating matter.
   
5. Adaptation: The ability to change over a period of time in response to the environment. This ability is fundamental to the process of evolution and is determined by the organism's heredity as well as the composition of metabolized substances, and external factors present.
   
6. Response to stimuli: A response can take many forms, from the contraction of a unicellular organism to external chemicals, to complex reactions involving all the senses of multicellular organisms. A response is often expressed by motion, for example, the leaves of a plant turning toward the sun (phototropism) and by chemotaxis.
   
7. Reproduction: The ability to produce new individual organisms, either asexually from a single parent organism, or sexually from two parent organisms.
   

As good a starting point as any it seems to me.
Is there any reason to assume a man made, or rather man instigated phenomenon or for that matter a natural phenomenon that is not wet and gooey could not exhibit all these characteristics?
The fact that we have not found or built something like this yet, other than in what we call nature, is hardly evidence of it not existing.

The OP asked whether things without bodies could live. I think they can. I think life can exist exclusively in the infosphere.

Now the next objection is undoubtedly that the infosphere is not really bodiless but requires a substrate of its own. Like silicon or carbon for instance.
But if you go there be prepared to go all the way. Because if you show me something in reality that is really bodiless I will show you something that is not subject to the normal laws governing causality. It is nice for another thread but it would be way outside the scope of this one.

You have not even begone to describe life. Life has a formula, it can self generate from the soup of life. It needs no input other than its own intention. It self sustains, it replicates and advances through it own ability and inbuilt formula. Nothing man can do can come even close. Men play magic tricks, nature is the master.

That begs the question where do we begin? Is there objectively speaking a better definition than this?
And the way I see it the only difference between life before man and life created by man's intellect is that the life we see around us got here first.
But that is a matter of chronology, not principle.

Can you give me a fundamental reason why mankind could not create entities that self sustain, replicate and advance needing no other input than their own intention?
Nature is the master, but can the student never graduate? And even continue where nature itself has left off?

If you consider, if we had a creator, then life may be another's intention. If you believe its natures invention then it has no creator. Anything that comes from man is not of nature and therefor is dependant on us as its creator. Drop a computer of on a distant planet, it wont replicate itself nor self sustain itself but the right conditions and the formula for life will self generate.

Call it what you please but it can not be classified as natural or natures life.

Lets bear in mind the original purpose of this thread which was to answer the question whether things without bodies can live. And for that purpose we seek to achieve a definition of life. And with life I mean not 'natural' or 'natures' life but just plain simply life. I believe that whatever the definition we choose to use has to be independent of the gestational history of the subject.

... autopoiesis?:

"An autopoietic machine is a machine organized (defined as a unity) as a network of processes of production (transformation and destruction) of components which: (i) through their interactions and transformations continuously regenerate and realize the network of processes (relations) that produced them; and (ii) constitute it (the machine) as a concrete unity in space in which they (the components) exist by specifying the topological domain of its realization as such a network."

... in other words, the intention of an autopoietic system is to live ...

So these machines can source the material and forge the elements , create their own energy , move as the environment changes, seek out new building materials as those provided become exhausted. Depend on no other external influences or support? They can create diversity to overcome differing environments and prophesies the future by analysis?

In fact they never need mans assistance?

Yes, that could very well qualify as a life form though I am not sure I would have used the word 'intention'

I do not think a definition of life can ever be as exact and clear-cut as we would want it unless we introduce subjective elements into it.

Then its not life as we know it, Jim..

... are you saying that life creates its own energy? ...

Yes it powers itself by absorbing material to generate heat.

... that's not a creation of energy - that's a transformation of energy from a higher grade to a lower grade ... if life could truly create it's own energy, it'd be breaking the law (the first law of thermodynamics, that is ) ...

So generating energy is impossible, is it? Generating, creating are you being semantic or trying to make a valid point? :perplexed: