Re: Defining Life
wenchilina wrote:My latest theory is that anything alive is perfectly balanced (or exists in the two states simultaneously) between order and chaos.
Something too ordered, for instance a crystal, isn't alive. Something too disordered (chaotic) isn't alive either, for instance a rock.
Life, then, can be seen as a superposition of order/chaos.
But, of course, such a definition of life depends on the definitions of "order" and "chaos." The risk, then, is that these terms become self-referential: something is alive because it is neither too ordered nor too chaotic, and we know it is balanced between order and chaos because we know it is alive. Despite appearances, this is not a tautology: rather, it is a form of question-begging.
To give an example: suppose we discover a
thing, previously unknown to human observation. We are not certain if it is alive or not, so we check to see how ordered or chaotic it may be. But what criteria do we use to determine its level of order or chaos? Presumably, those criteria developed by examining other beings which we are certain are either definitely alive or definitely not. Thus we may ask is the new thing more like a crystal or a bacteria, more like a rock or a rock star. Yet by determining life in this fashion, we are not using extrinsic terms (order and chaos) but rather terms that are, themselves, defined by our notion of "life."
wenchilina wrote:This leads to another theory of mine: explanations of anything are merely analogies of something else, i.e. somewhat circular or tautological and in a sense, self-referential.
This is somewhat similar to Nelson Goodman's view, stated in
Fact, Fiction, and Forecast.
