alive, alive-oh?

  
Don't miss the delights of watching the Strandbeest in action. Is it alive? No, we know it isn't, but it looks as though it is, in such a lovely way.

So, what is alive, what is inanimate?

We know, usually, when an animal has died. The life has gone out of it. A body may be full of bacteria that are very much alive, but the animal itself is not. The energy processes working together to sustain what we call a life have stopped interacting. The whole system may still contain life, but it is not, itself, still alive.

We think we know the difference between living and non-living. At the time of writing, I'm living. My pen isn't.

This essay:

 http://www.nytimes.com/2014/03/13/opinion/why-nothing-is-truly-alive.html

begs to differ. It is certainly true that I am (and you are) a particular set-up of atoms and molecules, just as a lump of granite is.

Life, the writer argues, is a concept we lay over the top of things in the world, and the boundary between living and non-living seems less clear-cut than I used to think. The old teaser falls into place here: "is a virus a life form, is it a plant, an animal?"  Or is it inanimate?

I think we have to fall back on the sort of argument people often call "common sense." Or, we all know what we mean by....

We tend to recognise a kinship between the entities we call "living," they are patterns of energy in forms that we recognise and use the word "life" to describe. Crystals may also exhibit, as he argues, characteristics that are often quoted as "lving" - they are formally structured, they grow - but they are not the sort of phenomena we generally use the word "living" to refer to.

The article is, I think, only drawing attention to the intrinsic and unavoidable clumsiness of the concepts we use all the time. They are essential but not, of course, perfect. (One reason meditation is so valuable is because it allows conceptual thinking to fall away for a time.)

But there is a valuable insight in the article; if we want to feel more at one with the universe that generated us, if we want to dissolve the alientating sense of separateness from the world out there that some of us feel sometimes, it may help to know that logically, we are no more than a particular set of atoms and molecules, interacting and ever-changing. 

In one sense, we are in common with oak trees, crystals and star systems. The same stuff. The way we are organised and interact, we call "alive." The way a brick is organised, we call "inanimate." But then, is a planet alive? A star?

Ouch. Time for tea....