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What is life and how do we define it

Greenheart 7 Aug 2
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Life is knowing that you are conscious. At least for humans it is. If you are an unconscious human you might not know you are alive. Do plants know they are alive? IDK. I'm sure many animals do, but they know it in different ways than we do. The dead are even with us constantly but I'm not talking heaven, hell, or reincarnation. Earth is a giant time machine that appears to only move forward. It's just a matter of where you came in at and it's every person for themselves.

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Life is not being dead. Why is this a pressing question?

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I tried to tackle this one and just got into a mess of progressively dumber thoughts. The highlights:

This is a question that feels like it should be easy but it gets super weird when you get into it.

On a surface level, life is just, you know, organic matter with cells that can some combination of grow, change, reproduce, evolve, etc.

But if all living things have cells, which they do, and cells are made up of inorganic, decidedly not alive proteins and acids, where does that leave us?

We're just the creation of natural, incredibly small robots. There's no difference in the processes that govern us and "dead" things.

So does that make those inorganic things alive. Or are we dead? Is everything dead? Is everything alive?

My take, is that this question is irrelevant. We're this (partially alive?) subsystem of a universe experiencing itself. After that, I don't know.

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