What Is Life: Definition Essay

What differentiates a strand test or a mechanized system from something that is living biologically? How about when considered from the Aristotelian point of view what differentiates something living from dead, can the definition of life be defined then? Is there a correct way to define what is living versus what is not? What would be the best agreed-upon answer? When one begins to analyze the true definition of life, one must consider both the biological and philosophical aspects through the Aristotelian approach to the question in order to find the answer to the definition of life.

Upon research into defining the biological characteristics of defining what is alive, I examine The Principles of Life by Tibor Ganti. He discusses and connects to the physicist Edwin Shrödinger’s booklet What is life, Edwin asks, “What is the characteristic feature of life? When is a piece of matter said to be alive? When it goes on “doing something”, moving, exchanging material with its environment, and so forth, and that for a much longer period than we would expect an inanimate piece of matter to “keep going” under similar circumstances … It is by avoiding the rapid decay into the inert state of “equilibrium” that an organism appears so enigmatic … How does the living organism avoid decay? The obvious answer is: By eating, drinking, breathing, and (in the case of plants) assimilating. The technical term is metabolism … The essential thing in metabolism is that the organism succeeds in freeing itself from all the entropy it cannot help producing while alive (Shrodinger, 74-76)”. In this part of the text, Shrodinger is essentially saying that to be alive for a piece of matter to distinguish itself as living it must be reacting in some way with the environment, but continuously in a fashion such as a system. Most systems require processes necessary to sustain the system. As Schrodinger notes, for a piece to be living it must consume and absorb energy and matter and be able to perform other chemical processes in order to sustain the system through metabolism while something is alive. Systems by themselves are not boundless and at some point, there will be a gradual decline in disorder based on the second law of thermodynamics through entropy as it will increase in a closed system. Metabolism for a living system basically works as a way to prevent entropy and cause a way more gradual decline in the system freeing itself from entropy that a mechanical system would not be able to free itself from. Going back to the text The Principles of Life by Tibor Ganti, he notes in the text. “In contrast with manmade technologies, where the machines are based on mechanical or electronic automata, living systems are fundamentally chemical automata. They manipulate the driving energy by chemical methods (3, Ganti)”. With these aspects noted Shrodinger’s definition of life would essentially mean that a living thing would essentially be characterized as a self-sustaining system. So, we must make the assumption that Schrodinger’s definition of life although complex still doesn’t fully capture what life is. This would allow us to be able to differentiate a mechanical system from a living system based on the difference in capacities in each system the mechanical system limited to its mechanical automata and the living system it being a chemical system has the capacity to perform chemical process furthermore as Ganti noted in The Principles of Life, “…the capacity for spontaneous formation, growth, and regeneration, and above all the capacity for reproduction(3, Ganti).” These capacities are all biological characteristics that Ganti points to in a self-sustaining system but there are always outliers that prove the list wrong so can a list of these characteristics define what is to be living? In the article Nothing is truly alive by Ferris Jabr, he explains some examples of non-living self-sustaining systems, “Crystals, for example, are highly organized; they grow; and they faithfully replicate their structures, but we do not think of them as alive. Similarly, certain computer programs known as “digital organisms” can reproduce, mate and evolve, but ushering such software through the gates to the kingdom of life makes many people uncomfortable (Jabr, 2)”. So that makes us ask ourselves how can a list define what is life if it is proven wrong?

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When examining what differentiates strandbeest from something living from the Aristotelian point of view, obviously we will be reshaping how we examine what differentiates something living from something not by instead looking at the larger side or most questionable side. This text in Cambridge Online uses the Aristotelian approach in order to define life in Mark A. Bedau’s The Nature of Life for The Cambridge Companion to Life and Death, this peer-reviewed article Bedau examines, “An Aristotelian asks a different question: what is the best way to explain the characteristic phenomena of life? Explaining the phenomena of life is a large and detailed job, which includes explaining life’s familiar hallmarks, borderline cases, and puzzles. For the Aristotelian, the nature of life is revealed in the details of these explanations. The Aristotelian focuses on organisms in the natural context in which they carry out their lives, interact with their environment, cooperate with other forms of life (Dupré and O’Malley 2009), and asks what underlying processes and mechanisms generate and explain the characteristic phenomena of life” (Bedau, 13-29). This part from Bedau explains exactly what an Aristotelian will be examining in order to differentiate life. As Bedau says further on in the text there are five puzzles that we could solve from an Aristotelian point of view, the five puzzles that Bedau mentions are “Origin of life, Emergence of life, Matter, form, and function and Why so controversial?”. When using an Aristotelian approach and examining the origins of life, we ask how a system of chemical reactions going through different evolutions differs from a system going through mechanical reactions and how life transpires from non-life. When examining the puzzle of the Emergence of life, we look back at the origin of life and ask how life transpires from nonlife as Bedau says in The Nature of Life, “Life emerges from nonlife. The properties of life forms arise over time from the properties of various nonliving material components (molecules and the like). The puzzle of emergence is to explain what happens when life emerges from nonlife in a way that is consistent with the current state of science and the current philosophical approaches to emergence (Bedau and Humphreys 2008)”. When examining the Degrees of life we ask if can something be of less or higher consciousness/life and if is there a clear difference between the dead and the living based on the proposed and agreed-upon list of living characteristics. As Bedau notes in his peer-reviewed article, there are borderlines cases in the list of characteristics that don’t follow some of the differentiating characteristics that other living things do based on the list that Shrodinger composed, so it causes us to ask does the list of characteristics accurately answer what it is to be alive. Degrees of life and Emergence of life coincide with each other as they examine the cases This is another part we must consider from the Aristotelian view when explaining what happens when life emerges from life. Furthermore, Bedau then examines Matter, Form, and Function, where he says in the text when examining composition in terms of life, Bedau says, “Each individual living organism is a material object, and it will remain in existence only if it is composed of the right material components. The individual molecules in the materials are inessential; they are transitory, continually recycling with the material in the environment. What matters for life is the functional organization of those molecules. The nature of life concerns the form in which certain kinds of materials are arranged and organized (Bedau, 13-29)”. This goes back to the original biological characteristics in the definition that Edwin Shrodinger mentions in What is Life, a system requires each and every component of the system to be composed correctly and in an organized fashion to be a system for if not there will be disorder. Finally, in the last part of his Aristotelian approach in Why so controversial, Bedau answers why life is so hard to be defined by a single list or statement, he says, “There is a meta-puzzle about why the nature of life is so puzzling. Life seems to be a basic and fundamental part of the natural world, but there is no consensus about the nature of life. Any account of the nature of life should clarify why it is so controversial (Bedau, 13-29)”. This essentially means even as we dive deep into finding the true definition to define something that is living, there is still no general consensus to define it truly, that’s why the question is so hard to answer because there is no agreed-upon answer, we can examine the different characteristics and uses different approaches to define life as other philosophers and scientists have done but we can never truly come to a definite conclusion due to outliers that would contradict the definition.

Based on what I have researched and learned from reviewing these differences from physicists and philosophers alike, life cannot be defined as a set of statements or differentiating characteristics, surely it can provide a basis for finding the definition of what life is, but t. To define life, we take what Shrodinger says essentially that life is a self-sustaining system as a basis but then we examine using the Aristotelian approach that Bedau used in his examination we end up asking more than before. Although as Bedau says in Matter, Form and Function “What matters for life is the functional organization of those molecules. The nature of life concerns the form in which certain kinds of materials are arranged and organized (Bedau, 13-29)”. Bedau essentially suggests that for life to be it must be meticulously arranged in a perfect fashion to create a system of molecules that is made of all the perfect components to create something that exists. In conclusion, biological characteristics and philosophical both dive into the many sides of the definition truly asking what it is obviously there can be no true definition of life due to outliers but from reading Bedau, Shrodinger, and Tibor Ganti; my general conclusion to define life is a perfectly and meticulously assembled system that through the process of metabolism go against the process of entropy in a regular system.

Bibliography

1. Jabr, Ferris. “Why Nothing Is Truly Alive.” The New York Times, The New York Times, 12 Mar. 2014, www.nytimes.com/2014/03/13/opinion/why-nothing-is-truly-alive.html.
2. Bedau, Mark A. “The Nature of Life (Chapter 1) - The Cambridge Companion to Life and Death.” Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences, The Royal Society, doi.org/10.1017/CCO9781139149129.003.
3. Ganti, Tibor. “The Principles of Life.” Google Books, 2003, books.google.com/books?hl=en&lr=&id=pdVU8mpWNWYC&oi=fnd&pg=PA1&ots=mMKHy51J7m&sig=nZE7sZFdt942aS6arKJ-GlIt4_U#v=onepage&q&f=false.
4. Dupre, John, and Maureen O'Malley. “Varieties of Living Things: Life at the Intersection of Lineage and Metabolism.” Michigan Family Review, Michigan Publishing, University of Michigan Library, quod.lib.umich.edu/cgi/t/text/text-idx?cc=ptb%3Bc.
5. Shrodinger, Edwin. What Is Life? 1944.