h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

Been reading Nietsze have you? Or however you spell it!

I spell it Neechee. Saves having to look it up all the time.

az

reading the what now ?

I could look it up ...but I am really busy procrastinating...

hey az

Your life is my reality. And vice versa.

Life is the name of the game, and I wanna play the game with you

At GCSE we were taught about Mrs Gren:
Movement
Respiration
Stimulation (response to)
Growth
Reproduction
Excretion
Nourishment

Ah yes, I seem to remember them. thing is even they are not a complete definition, and there are forms of life which do not have all of them. And things which we would say were not alive that do exhibit some of them. Again it gives a rough guide but can still define living things as not an non living as living.

Course, it may be that everything is alive, but we are in the wrong timeframe to notice it!

Of course, none of this helps people like me to 'get a life' does it?

Life, is a system capible of replication either singularly, or with members of the same system, it requires nutrients, in some form to grow and perform functions necessary for replication, and as a biproduct of this produces waste, in propergating itself, its progeny have the potential for variability in comparason to the system/systems which gave rise to it, but will retain the main features of the system, such as perpensity to progpergate, requirement for some form of nutrition, need to produce waste products, grow, etc., the variability of a living system must have flexibility as described (I.E., be capible of variability), but the structure/substance, holding the information which dicates the nature of the system, must be structurally stable enough to maintain stability in a single generation, a stability that exists down subsquent generations but which shows increasing variability through loss of structure from the origional.

Gee, that sounds like fun.

az

Seemed to make sense at the time... But I made it up and its rong probably Life is like socks, tons of it about, it wears out, they don't match and they are on your feet life is what happens to allow us to drink

Well, it just struck me as funny coming directly after Ictoan's posting about 'getting a life'.

az

>>Course, it may be that everything is alive, but we are in the wrong timeframe to notice it!<<

Yes, I have seen an argument that mountains are actually alive, it's just that their timescale is beyond what we can ordinarily comprehend, so we don't notice that they are alive. I'll try and remember where I have been reading that recently.



And of course other cultures, not so hung up with the reductionist science view of the world, have been saying for a long time that everything is alive.

hi kea,

I think Terry Pratchett says something like that about mountains in Reaper Man.

az

thanks az. I haven't read any of Pratchett's novels, but maybe I heard an interview or someone quoting him?

Life is........hell - then you die.




Teuchter (The Pessimist)

Given that the ultimate meaning of Life, The Universe and Everything is 42, surely the meaning of life is 14.

This is, of course, assuming that we should give equal weighting to life as to the Universe and, indeed, Everything.

However, if life and the Universe are deemed, reasonably, to be part of Everything, then 42=2L+2U (again assuming equal weighting), which would make the meaning of life 10.5.

But, again, if life can only exist in the universe and must therefore be a consituent part, then 42=2(U-n) + 2U = 4U - 2n, where n is the portion of the Universe that is not life, ie (U-L). Therefore, I can confidently say that life is 4/3U-2U-2L. Therefore -L=4/3U-2U. If U is still granted the value of 14, then Life = nine and one-third.

QED

B

2Legs

"Life, is a system capible of replication either singularly, or with members of the same system, "

So anyone or anything that does not have the ability to reproduce is not alive? All post menopausal women are not alive? Eunuchs are not alive?

Problem here is that often these definitions are applied at a species level or higher, whereas the natural human ability to spot something that is alive works on an individual basis.

The best definition I have seen so far in my trawlings for life reads like the script for a somewhat woolly expert system (that's wooly thinking as in fuzzy logic )

Does it look like and act like something you know to be alive?
If not, Does it look like it is alive?
If not, Does it respond to stimulus? ie if you poke it doesit flinch, if you shout at it does it run away/shout back?

and so on. Hardly scientific but it does get round some of the problems above!

I would've thought that 2legs' definitions were applied at a cellular level. While a eunuch cannot reproduce, every cell in his body is continuously doing so.

On a bit of a drift, did I not read in the papers last week that eunuchs were now an extinct species, after the last certified one died recently?

B

A series of near misses that don't result in death.

Life is a sexually transmitted condition with a 100% mortality rate.

B

"I would've thought that 2legs' definitions were applied at a cellular level. While a eunuch cannot reproduce, every cell in his body is continuously doing so."

But B, in that case then yes, but I thought we were looking for a catch-all definition of life. By the above definition every constituant part of your body is alive (except hair and other dead cells,. hmm, anyway) but you (if you are unable to reproduce) are not alive. Bit of a problem eh? When you see a cow in a field and know it is alive, you don;t need to know whether it can reproduce or not. It doesn;t come into the equation, therefore that definition is spurious to my mind.

Hadn;t heard that about Eunuchs, interesting!