[quote name='Oberon_Command' timestamp='1341981916' post='4957889']
I'm not sure that we are. How do you get "copies of systems and processes are never perfect" from "one may not precisely measure the momentum and position of a particle at the same instant?"
I'm thinking of a number between 1 and 2. What is it? There's a pretty good chance that your guess won't be perfect. Between 1 and 1.1? Better chance, but it likely still won't be perfect. I wish I had Max Planck's book on the subject to quote from, but I don't. Surely you're being coy though, since there are plenty of Wikipedia articles related to tunneling and the no-cloning principle. [/quote]
I was not. I was pointing out that "copies of systems and processes are never perfect" is not the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle that I was taught. The Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle that I was taught is "one may not precisely measure the momentum and position of a particle at the same instant." I made the guess (which was demonstrated to be correct) that you must be presenting a statement which was deduced from the principle as opposed to the principle itself, so I was also asking that you show the logical deduction you used to arrive at the statement you were claiming was the "Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle". The wiki on quantum tunneling had two sentences that showed a connection, but I would have preferred a more in-depth derivation.
My overarching point is that using a term one party understands (via common knowledge as taught in first-year chemistry class) to mean one thing, to mean something implied by that thing is not conducive to useful communication.
life is just an interesting perpetuating chain reaction, thats all. We are just chaos manifest. A combination of base entropy such that entropy of a higher order may occur.
Perhaps the problem is that you continue to think of "life" as if it were a boolean flag. It's not. It's a continuum.
This.
I still don't get the difference between a heat generating machine and a living organism in this heat generating sense.
This has been repeatedly told: definition of life is very arbitrary. Death too. Maybe it's an urban legend, but some tractions of our guts "live" 2-3 hours (?) longer than us. We can't even be sure what part of our body is really "us" and alive. There are dead cells all over me, yet, my whole "entity" is considered to be ONE living entity. That's not an obvious thing at all.
EDIT: I don't get why my ideas that look okay in my head come off like bullshit... Maybe because my thoughts are BS. Anyhoo, who cares about what life is? I'm hungry->I eat. I'm thirsty->I drink. I love bean and potato, that's life and reality.
If you are talking about 'life' collectively, then I think the purpose is progeny (offspring: biological, material, intellectual and otherwise) and expansion of territory and influence -- we've left caves, crossed rivers, borders, and oceans, and will one day get off this rock called Earth if we aren't depleted or destroyed first.
If you are talking about 'life' in terms of an individual, I think the purpose of life is to be happy with oneself. Being happy with oneself does not necessarily mean that one is selfish, and in point of fact most people take joy and meaning in being selfless to some degree, or in bringing value or joy to others. Various doctrines make claims of judgement, punishment or reward for this life, rebirth, and other forms of afterlife. If you believe that then your happiness in this life is influenced by your goal of achieving good standing towards the 'after' and that's great -- whether that be Christian Heaven or Viking Valhalla, different means to different ends -- but as far as anyone knows for certain, this life is the one we can count on, and we should make the most of it for ourselves.
In an attempt to appreciate that there is no distinction between living matter and dirt, I've decided to subsist on silt for a week.
You could subsist on simple proteins and vitamins too. Are they living?
Or you could subsist on Amanita phalloides, They are surely living. Wait, don't do that.
Nitpicking on the definition of life offends you for some reason, but that definition is the very foundation of this whole conversation.
And the point, that there is no clear definition is also important. It doesn't mean that it can't be defined, but our knowledge is not enough I guess. For example we still haven't found life or still unable to detect life outside our planet.
The whole premise of a 'purpose to life' sets the idea that 'life' is someone 'special' but it really isn't... bunch of chemical reactions blundering around until they fail... that's all life is
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While I generally agree, I think that this statement needs some more strong proof than what we have today. We assert that life or the human "psyche" is nothing more than a series of complex physical/chemical reactions, because we can't imagine what else it could be, from a materialistic viewpoint, but is this enough to close the argument? I'm not sure. As of yet, we can't cure, for instance, schizophrenia or depression, just treat the symptoms with various degrees of success and with several unwanted and sometimes severe side-effects. Even religious people don't deny that there is a significant physical/chemical/biological component to what we call "human", but they insist that there is something "hidden", the "soul", which accounts for the apparent disrepancy between "blind" physical phenomena and the human behaviour. I disagree with them, but I do think that until we actually strongly prove that chemistry is all that is there, they can still opine that there could be an extra-physical component in a species that is capable of understanding and harnessing nature itself.
The "what is the meaning of life" question is extremely overloaded, so the answer will be vastly different depending on which sense/meaning you refer to.
If humans were created by some intelligent creature, there'd be the purpose with which it created us.
If humans came to be completely on their own, via random chemical processes, there could still be meaning to life, and that is to survive by reproducing and taking care of threats (wild animals, meters headed for Earth, etc.). On an individual level, it could be to maximize happiness/minimize pain, but that could be a direct result of evolution finding the semi-optimal way to ensure survival.
I wanted to make an observation regarding fire, which was mentioned here earlier. It does have similar properties to viruses and life forms such as humans. However, while it is easily created (humans are not so easily created... well, relatively speaking), it might not be as efficient at surviving. A wild forest fire can last a while, but it doesn't outlast animals/humans on Earth.
But consider this.
Take 3 planets: Earth, Mars, and a hypothetical Fireplanet.
The raw materials and environment conditions on Earth are conducive for humans and animal-like creatures, and fire doesn't survive as well here.
On Mars (so far) it seems the environment conditions and raw materials are not very conducive for humans/animals. However, there could be some underground worms that are very fit to survive on Mars (and happened to develop in some way).
A hypothetical Fireplanet could be made in a way that ensures the chemical reaction "fire" is a very well fit for survival, while neither humans/animals can survive there (perhaps because the fire has taken over the entire planet and killed everyone else). Oh, the Sun could be an example of such a 'planet'.
While fire might be considered a "dumb" life form, in the sense it doesn't "think", plan ahead or have feelings, nevertheless it's able to perpetuate and "survive" quite well in the form of stars. Given its inability to plan, it's unlikely fire would plan an attack on humans, but if some star had a collision course with Earth... Humans might lose just because we're so tiny.
While fire might be considered a "dumb" life form, in the sense it doesn't "think", plan ahead or have feelings, nevertheless it's able to perpetuate and "survive" quite well in the form of stars. Given its inability to plan, it's unlikely fire would plan an attack on humans, but if some star had a collision course with Earth... Humans might lose just because we're so tiny.
Stars aren't actually fire - their energy source is nuclear fusion. Fire is a purely chemical process.
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