According to the materialist position as I understand it, the entirety of existence is comprised of matter, energy, and the primal forces that govern (or perhaps simply describe) the behavior of said matter and energy. Within this schematic, what is life?
It's clearly not matter, since there is no difference in mass between a living creature and that same creature freshly deceased. But to say that life is energy does not seem accurate either.
I've heard it said that life is an "emergent phenomenon" that only arises under certain ideal configurations of matter and energy. But is there anything aside from philosophical presuppositon to counter the other possibility: that there is a primal "life force" which draws matter and energy into such configurations? And anyways, even if life is an "emergent phenomenon"... what is it?
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Love. Forgive. Trust. Be willing to be broken that you may be remade.
It's clearly not matter, since there is no difference in mass between a living creature and that same creature freshly deceased. But to say that life is energy does not seem accurate either.
Well, before we can begin to approach these questions, we have to dispel fallacious nonsense like this.
The totality of the state of some amount of matter is not reducible to its numerical mass. One vitally important apsect of matter is its configuration. And there are configurational differences between dead matter and living matter; indeed, this is how we medically define the term "dead."
When a doctor pronounces a death, it's not because he prayed to Jesus to see if the deceased's soul had reached Heaven yet -- it's because he ran some tests on the matter before him and compared to some baseline state.
Our tests for "alive" versus "dead" are clearly rooted firmly in the material, so what basis is there for dismissing a material analysis of life?
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A limit of time is fixed for thee
Which if thou dost not use for clearing away the clouds from thy mind
It will go and thou wilt go, never to return.
Well, before we can begin to approach these questions, we have to dispel fallacious nonsense like this.
Careless hasty wording on my part... I had in mind experiments done to "weigh the soul" which have yet to conclusively demonstrate that the merest fraction of a gram leaves a body upon death.
The totality of the state of some amount of matter is not reducible to its numerical mass. One vitally important apsect of matter is its configuration. And there are configurational differences between dead matter and living matter; indeed, this is how we medically define the term "dead."
But there are not necessarily any configurational differences between living and freshly dead matter. A recently deceased cell still has all the complex interior structures of a living cell; those structures have simply stopped functioning.
Our tests for "alive" versus "dead" are clearly rooted firmly in the material, so what basis is there for dismissing a material analysis of life?
Well, we already have analyzed what living things do, what traits they exhibit, i.e. respiration, reproduction, etc. And I suppose you could say that the ultimate task of life is simply to transmit information in specific and highly detailed ways -- ways that dwarf in complexity, by several orders of magnitude, any organizational rules imposed on matter by the electromagnetic, gravitational and nuclear forces. That still doesn't get us any close to understanding what life is, or why such an incredible organizing principle should exist at all.
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Love. Forgive. Trust. Be willing to be broken that you may be remade.
Careless hasty wording on my part... I had in mind experiments done to "weigh the soul" which have yet to conclusively demonstrate that the merest fraction of a gram leaves a body upon death.
Right, that whole thing is a bunch of idiocy in the first place. This experiment could only rule out theories of soul that expressly assigned the soul a physical mass to begin with.
But there are not necessarily any configurational differences between living and freshly dead matter. A recently deceased cell still has all the complex interior structures of a living cell; those structures have simply stopped functioning.
I am no biologist and I would be uncomfortable attempting to articulate a bright line for what makes a cell 'freshly dead' -- but I do know that it was never a mere question of counting up the structures and seeing if they are all there. For example, motility is a function of material configuration. Some configurations of matter are motile; others are not. The latter we are more apt to call dead.
Well, we already have analyzed what living things do, what traits they exhibit, i.e. respiration, reproduction, etc. And I suppose you could say that the ultimate task of life is simply to transmit information in specific and highly detailed ways -- ways that dwarf in complexity, by several orders of magnitude, any organizational rules imposed on matter by the electromagnetic, gravitational and nuclear forces.
But the rules that keep living matter organized, encode and propagate the information, enact the respiration, reproduction, and so forth are precisely the rules of the electromagnetic, gravitational, and nuclear forces. The human race has spent countless man-hours studying life in all of its complexity and we have never once found any aspect of it that is not governed rigidly by those laws.
So you must either point to something specific and say "that doesn't obey any of the laws" or you must simply acknowledge that your evaluation of the complexities at work here is hopelessly naive. Since life is governed by the laws, the laws must (and do) admit complexity of interaction on the order of the complexity of life.
That still doesn't get us any close to understanding what life is, or why such an incredible organizing principle should exist at all.
Why not? It seems like this is precisely the road you'd want to take if you want a description of what life is and some reasons why it is that way rather than some other way. The problem you seem to be encountering is that you don't actually care about what life is at all. You want something else entirely.
But the rules that keep living matter organized, encode and propagate the information, enact the respiration, reproduction, and so forth are precisely the rules of the electromagnetic, gravitational, and nuclear forces. The human race has spent countless man-hours studying life in all of its complexity and we have never once found any aspect of it that is not governed rigidly by those laws.
So you must either point to something specific and say "that doesn't obey any of the laws" or you must simply acknowledge that your evaluation of the complexities at work here is hopelessly naive. Since life is governed by the laws, the laws must (and do) admit complexity of interaction on the order of the complexity of life.
Yes, the laws do admit incredible complexity of interaction between atoms, molecules and energies. But it actually does remain an open question (despite your atheistic bias to the contrary) whether the primal forces are in themselves sufficient to initiate the sort of complex and self-sustaining organization intrinsic to life.
Why not? It seems like this is precisely the road you'd want to take if you want a description of what life is and some reasons why it is that way rather than some other way. The problem you seem to be encountering is that you don't actually care about what life is at all. You want something else entirely.
Oh, so you do know what life is then (since you have indicated that you clearly know what it's not, seeing as I want "something else entirely")? Please tell me. I mean it. For example I should like to know before we get to that point (as we inevitably will) whether self-replicating nanobots and self-sustaining A.I.s are alive or not.
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Love. Forgive. Trust. Be willing to be broken that you may be remade.
Yes, the laws do admit incredible complexity of interaction between atoms, molecules and energies. But it actually does remain an open question (despite your atheistic bias to the contrary) whether the primal forces are in themselves sufficient to initiate the sort of complex and self-sustaining organization intrinsic to life.
Goalpost movement. We were talking about the complexity of existing life; now we are talking about origins. Origins are, of course, a more open question than complexity -- but not as open as you seem to believe.
For instance, this much can be said: once you acknowledge that the laws of physics do admit of the necessary complexity for life, then you lose a great deal of circumstantial leverage that you might otherwise have used to underwrite the claim that the origins were aphysical.
Oh, so you do know what life is then (since you have indicated that you clearly know what it's not, seeing as I want "something else entirely")?
You are repeating a very bad and obnoxious mistake, which you did above and are doing again now. My replies are meant to be read in the context of a response to something you said, not as ab initio statements unto themselves. Read what you said and what I said again. You outlined a certain path of inquiry regarding life and then simply declared that path of inquiry to be pointless or irrelevant as concerns what life is. I disagreed; a person who wants to know what life is should be very interested in its observable characteristics and the underlying laws of nature from which those characteristics follow.
If you are uninterested or unmoved by that, or you don't feel as though that information is deep or profound enough for you, then you are simply asking a different question. You don't actually want to know what life is.
None of this has anything to do with my own knowledge or lack thereof -- rather, it has everything to do with how you treat the vast amount of information that is already on the table concerning life, which as far as I can tell is with an unmerited contempt and disregard.
Please tell me. I mean it. For example I should like to know before we get to that point (as we inevitably will) whether self-replicating nanobots and self-sustaining A.I.s are alive or not.
I don't see this going much further, but I'll say this much: we are self-sustaning intelligences and we are alive, ergo a self-sustaining intelligence can be alive. To call any particular intelligence "artificial" is, for lack of a better word, artificial. So yes, a self-sustaning artificial intelligence can be alive.
The point you're talking about is really a matter of debate, and probably some arbritrariness.
You ask are hypothetical self-replicating nano-bots alive. If you want to define life to be that, sure. Frankly it's a little fuzzy to us at the viral level anyway.
Let's get right to the center of the debate. I'll paint a picture by asserting several areas which are widely agreed upon. (If you don't agree with these...well...that's another debate entirely) Each assertion will paint us closer to the vague fuzzy areas as to what is alive.
-Cells are alive, in spite of no intelligence.
-self replicating prions are not considered alive.
-prokaryotic cells are alive.
-Viruses are currently not considered alive by scientists.
-complex chemical reactions which self replicate are not considered alive--transcription, translation, DNA replication, etc.
So let's look at our definitions of life so far:
1) Chemical reactions, even ones whose product is to replicate more product in and of themselves are not alive at this point in time.
2) Viruses, though capable of purposeful action, invading a cell, self-replicating, capable of usurping another cell's capabilities and reasserting themselves, containing DNA or RNA, are not considered alive at this time. (Virii are probably as close as we come to life without actually being life)
3) Internal cellular machinery is not per se considered life--for example DNA though it may have the capability of repairing itself is not currently considered alive. In other word's metabolic functions per se, are not alive.
So far with current definitions, something needs to be more 'alive' than a virus to be alive.
Based on the above, I conclude: the minimum requirements to be alive:
1) internal metabolic functions directed for purposeful maintenance of the host set of molecules in which those metabolic functions reside.
2) Capable of interacting with their external environment with some modicum of adaptive purposefulness.
==============================================================================
so to answer your question. Are self-replicating nanobots alive?
--No. Reasons? Because prions are proteins that self-replicate given material to operate on and they're not considered alive.
Because Viruses are DNA/RNA encapsulated into a protein shell, which parasitically operate on host cells for the purpose of the self replication of the virus, and they're still not considered alive by the scientific community. But viruses have no internal metabolism of their own.
However your self-replicating nanobots will be considered alive if they can interact with the environment adaptively, not just autonomously eating everything they touch.
Careless hasty wording on my part... I had in mind experiments done to "weigh the soul" which have yet to conclusively demonstrate that the merest fraction of a gram leaves a body upon death.
Scientifically, the "weight of the soul" tests are highly contentious because they were never successfully reproduced. [1]
Also of intrest: "Most notably the weighing upon death of sheep seemed to create mass for a few minutes which later disappeared."[2]
Just pulled this off your wikipedia link (bolded for emphasis):
Since there is no unequivocal definition of life, the current understanding is descriptive. Life is considered a characteristic of organisms that exhibit all or most of the following...
If what constitutes life is still, after all this time and all this science, a sort of hazy thing that is ultimately a matter of settled (for now) consensus among biologists... then who's to say we haven't adopted a very stingy and impoverished view of life?
The view on offer among the atheistically minded scientists is that our universe is on the whole dead or lifeless, with only the minutest ephemeral pocket (potentially pockets) of life. But what if life is something more of a gradient? The process of nuclear fusion at the heart of stars is self sustaining (homeostasis) and could be said to "metabolize" hydrogen into heavier and more complex elements, which are in turn the building blocks of planets prior to being the building blocks of plants and animals. So one could argue that stars are the most rudimentary and primal of life-forms.
Truly... what if we are inhabitants of a living (rather than inert or dead) universe? What would be the implications of that?
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Love. Forgive. Trust. Be willing to be broken that you may be remade.
Truly... what if we are inhabitants of a living (rather than inert or dead) universe? What would be the implications of that?
Implications flow from definitions. We can deduce that a bachelor is unmarried because to be unmarried is in the definition of the word, so in calling them that we have effectively already said he is unmarried. Similarly, if we define "living" such that the word describes the universe, we are simply describing the universe that we already know with a new word. There will be no new implications that there would not be if we described the universe another way. New information flows from new discoveries, not new terminology. If, for instance, we discovered that the universe possessed genetic material and passed it on to baby universes, that would be interesting.
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Vive, vale. Siquid novisti rectius istis,
candidus inperti; si nil, his utere mecum.
Implications flow from definitions. We can deduce that a bachelor is unmarried because to be unmarried is in the definition of the word, so in calling them that we have effectively already said he is unmarried. Similarly, if we define "living" such that the word describes the universe, we are simply describing the universe that we already know with a new word. There will be no new implications that there would not be if we described the universe another way. New information flows from new discoveries, not new terminology. If, for instance, we discovered that the universe possessed genetic material and passed it on to baby universes, that would be interesting.
It seems almost that you are saying two different things... implications certainly do flow from definitions, which is why how we define something matters tremendously in terms of how we respond to it; and our responses, in turn, matter tremendously in shaping our shared future. It is understood that calling someone "gay" and calling him a "******" both indicate a homosexual orientation, or that calling someone "cognitively disabled" and calling him "retarded" both indicate a diminished mental capacity; but the implications, in terms of how one defines the goodness and worth of a person, differ greatly.
Similarly, if we define the universe as "dead," then we call into our understanding of the cosmos all the emotional ephemera associated with death; whereas if we define the universe as "alive" we do the opposite. Surely this thought-play has practical implications, especially as we become more and more engaged with the universe beyond the bounds of our own little blue-green sphere?
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Love. Forgive. Trust. Be willing to be broken that you may be remade.
That's an effective trick for manipulating our emotions, but not for manipulating the matter that makes up the universe. If the universe as we currently know it is 'alive', then 'alive' means something quite distinct from the sense of the word used to describe living things. If we describe the universe as 'alive', we know that it's still just stars, elements, etc., and not alive in the sense that a tiger is alive; it's essentially a pleasant, emotional view that we use to express that we find the universe to be beautiful. It does not mean that we think the universe is literally a living thing like a tiger or a person or a tree is a living thing.
And yes, it has practical implications, because human emotions affect human behavior and human behavior (by definition!) affects the universe. But it doesn't have practical implications about what's out there in the world.
Whereas if, as B_S says, we discovered that the universe possessed genetic material of some kind and reproduced in some ecology of universes, it would be alive in exactly the sense that a tiger is alive and that would mean that the universe is quite different from current views of the cosmos. It wouldn't be merely an emotional statement, it would be a literal statement.
The problem with reclassification is that it causes unforeseen issues. This happened with the whole "is Pluto a planet?" event. If we changed the defintion of "planet" to include bodies like Pluto, suddenly several asteroids in the Asteroid Belt would be "planets." If we reclassified the word "planet" to mean just those 9 bodies in our own solar system, then we couldn't call extrasolar bodies "planets." It became more and more historical ad hoc reasoning to call Pluto a planet, so the logical thing was to exclude it. Much to the publics chagrin, since I met many that thought it was done "to be mean to Pluto" or something.
The same problem will come in if your redefine "life" to include the universe. This is one of the reasons the biological definition of life excludes viruses. Depending on how you would change the definition to include them, suddenly things like 'fire' will fit the definition. That would be unintuitive, and would have repercussions with other words. Would become correct to say "the boyscout murdered the camping fire." ?
How would you define "life" to include just want you want to include? It's not an easy question.
It seems almost that you are saying two different things... implications certainly do flow from definitions, which is why how we define something matters tremendously in terms of how we respond to it; and our responses, in turn, matter tremendously in shaping our shared future. It is understood that calling someone "gay" and calling him a "******" both indicate a homosexual orientation, or that calling someone "cognitively disabled" and calling him "retarded" both indicate a diminished mental capacity; but the implications, in terms of how one defines the goodness and worth of a person, differ greatly.
Similarly, if we define the universe as "dead," then we call into our understanding of the cosmos all the emotional ephemera associated with death; whereas if we define the universe as "alive" we do the opposite. Surely this thought-play has practical implications, especially as we become more and more engaged with the universe beyond the bounds of our own little blue-green sphere?
First of all, the only person here calling the universe "dead" is you. I don't think many people would call inert objects "dead", except perhaps poetically; "dead" means that a thing was once alive but at some point died.
Secondly, if you call the universe "alive" in order to encourage a certain emotional response that people feel for life on Earth, you're basically lying to them. You are taking advantage of various assumptions they have about the old definition of the word but which do not apply under the new one - for example, "living things feel pain". This is exactly the same trick that North Korea uses in calling itself a "democratic republic" - it's taken words that normally apply to admirable governments and shoehorned them into new definitions that apply to its own miserable regime, in the hopes that some of the old admiration will rub off undeservedly on it.
The best way to talk about the universe, or anything else, is with frank and commonsense language that clearly states the truth of the matter. Let people decide for themselves how they want to feel about it. Leave the attempts at emotional manipulation for the Big Brothers of the world.
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Vive, vale. Siquid novisti rectius istis,
candidus inperti; si nil, his utere mecum.
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It's clearly not matter, since there is no difference in mass between a living creature and that same creature freshly deceased. But to say that life is energy does not seem accurate either.
I've heard it said that life is an "emergent phenomenon" that only arises under certain ideal configurations of matter and energy. But is there anything aside from philosophical presuppositon to counter the other possibility: that there is a primal "life force" which draws matter and energy into such configurations? And anyways, even if life is an "emergent phenomenon"... what is it?
Well, before we can begin to approach these questions, we have to dispel fallacious nonsense like this.
The totality of the state of some amount of matter is not reducible to its numerical mass. One vitally important apsect of matter is its configuration. And there are configurational differences between dead matter and living matter; indeed, this is how we medically define the term "dead."
When a doctor pronounces a death, it's not because he prayed to Jesus to see if the deceased's soul had reached Heaven yet -- it's because he ran some tests on the matter before him and compared to some baseline state.
Our tests for "alive" versus "dead" are clearly rooted firmly in the material, so what basis is there for dismissing a material analysis of life?
Which if thou dost not use for clearing away the clouds from thy mind
It will go and thou wilt go, never to return.
Careless hasty wording on my part... I had in mind experiments done to "weigh the soul" which have yet to conclusively demonstrate that the merest fraction of a gram leaves a body upon death.
But there are not necessarily any configurational differences between living and freshly dead matter. A recently deceased cell still has all the complex interior structures of a living cell; those structures have simply stopped functioning.
Well, we already have analyzed what living things do, what traits they exhibit, i.e. respiration, reproduction, etc. And I suppose you could say that the ultimate task of life is simply to transmit information in specific and highly detailed ways -- ways that dwarf in complexity, by several orders of magnitude, any organizational rules imposed on matter by the electromagnetic, gravitational and nuclear forces. That still doesn't get us any close to understanding what life is, or why such an incredible organizing principle should exist at all.
Right, that whole thing is a bunch of idiocy in the first place. This experiment could only rule out theories of soul that expressly assigned the soul a physical mass to begin with.
I am no biologist and I would be uncomfortable attempting to articulate a bright line for what makes a cell 'freshly dead' -- but I do know that it was never a mere question of counting up the structures and seeing if they are all there. For example, motility is a function of material configuration. Some configurations of matter are motile; others are not. The latter we are more apt to call dead.
But the rules that keep living matter organized, encode and propagate the information, enact the respiration, reproduction, and so forth are precisely the rules of the electromagnetic, gravitational, and nuclear forces. The human race has spent countless man-hours studying life in all of its complexity and we have never once found any aspect of it that is not governed rigidly by those laws.
So you must either point to something specific and say "that doesn't obey any of the laws" or you must simply acknowledge that your evaluation of the complexities at work here is hopelessly naive. Since life is governed by the laws, the laws must (and do) admit complexity of interaction on the order of the complexity of life.
Why not? It seems like this is precisely the road you'd want to take if you want a description of what life is and some reasons why it is that way rather than some other way. The problem you seem to be encountering is that you don't actually care about what life is at all. You want something else entirely.
Which if thou dost not use for clearing away the clouds from thy mind
It will go and thou wilt go, never to return.
Yes, the laws do admit incredible complexity of interaction between atoms, molecules and energies. But it actually does remain an open question (despite your atheistic bias to the contrary) whether the primal forces are in themselves sufficient to initiate the sort of complex and self-sustaining organization intrinsic to life.
Oh, so you do know what life is then (since you have indicated that you clearly know what it's not, seeing as I want "something else entirely")? Please tell me. I mean it. For example I should like to know before we get to that point (as we inevitably will) whether self-replicating nanobots and self-sustaining A.I.s are alive or not.
Goalpost movement. We were talking about the complexity of existing life; now we are talking about origins. Origins are, of course, a more open question than complexity -- but not as open as you seem to believe.
For instance, this much can be said: once you acknowledge that the laws of physics do admit of the necessary complexity for life, then you lose a great deal of circumstantial leverage that you might otherwise have used to underwrite the claim that the origins were aphysical.
You are repeating a very bad and obnoxious mistake, which you did above and are doing again now. My replies are meant to be read in the context of a response to something you said, not as ab initio statements unto themselves. Read what you said and what I said again. You outlined a certain path of inquiry regarding life and then simply declared that path of inquiry to be pointless or irrelevant as concerns what life is. I disagreed; a person who wants to know what life is should be very interested in its observable characteristics and the underlying laws of nature from which those characteristics follow.
If you are uninterested or unmoved by that, or you don't feel as though that information is deep or profound enough for you, then you are simply asking a different question. You don't actually want to know what life is.
None of this has anything to do with my own knowledge or lack thereof -- rather, it has everything to do with how you treat the vast amount of information that is already on the table concerning life, which as far as I can tell is with an unmerited contempt and disregard.
I don't see this going much further, but I'll say this much: we are self-sustaning intelligences and we are alive, ergo a self-sustaining intelligence can be alive. To call any particular intelligence "artificial" is, for lack of a better word, artificial. So yes, a self-sustaning artificial intelligence can be alive.
Which if thou dost not use for clearing away the clouds from thy mind
It will go and thou wilt go, never to return.
You ask are hypothetical self-replicating nano-bots alive. If you want to define life to be that, sure. Frankly it's a little fuzzy to us at the viral level anyway.
Let's get right to the center of the debate. I'll paint a picture by asserting several areas which are widely agreed upon. (If you don't agree with these...well...that's another debate entirely) Each assertion will paint us closer to the vague fuzzy areas as to what is alive.
-Cells are alive, in spite of no intelligence.
-self replicating prions are not considered alive.
-prokaryotic cells are alive.
-Viruses are currently not considered alive by scientists.
-complex chemical reactions which self replicate are not considered alive--transcription, translation, DNA replication, etc.
So let's look at our definitions of life so far:
1) Chemical reactions, even ones whose product is to replicate more product in and of themselves are not alive at this point in time.
2) Viruses, though capable of purposeful action, invading a cell, self-replicating, capable of usurping another cell's capabilities and reasserting themselves, containing DNA or RNA, are not considered alive at this time. (Virii are probably as close as we come to life without actually being life)
3) Internal cellular machinery is not per se considered life--for example DNA though it may have the capability of repairing itself is not currently considered alive. In other word's metabolic functions per se, are not alive.
So far with current definitions, something needs to be more 'alive' than a virus to be alive.
Based on the above, I conclude: the minimum requirements to be alive:
1) internal metabolic functions directed for purposeful maintenance of the host set of molecules in which those metabolic functions reside.
2) Capable of interacting with their external environment with some modicum of adaptive purposefulness.
==============================================================================
so to answer your question. Are self-replicating nanobots alive?
--No. Reasons? Because prions are proteins that self-replicate given material to operate on and they're not considered alive.
Because Viruses are DNA/RNA encapsulated into a protein shell, which parasitically operate on host cells for the purpose of the self replication of the virus, and they're still not considered alive by the scientific community. But viruses have no internal metabolism of their own.
However your self-replicating nanobots will be considered alive if they can interact with the environment adaptively, not just autonomously eating everything they touch.
Scientifically, the "weight of the soul" tests are highly contentious because they were never successfully reproduced. [1]
Also of intrest:
"Most notably the weighing upon death of sheep seemed to create mass for a few minutes which later disappeared."[2]
Just pulled this off your wikipedia link (bolded for emphasis):
If what constitutes life is still, after all this time and all this science, a sort of hazy thing that is ultimately a matter of settled (for now) consensus among biologists... then who's to say we haven't adopted a very stingy and impoverished view of life?
The view on offer among the atheistically minded scientists is that our universe is on the whole dead or lifeless, with only the minutest ephemeral pocket (potentially pockets) of life. But what if life is something more of a gradient? The process of nuclear fusion at the heart of stars is self sustaining (homeostasis) and could be said to "metabolize" hydrogen into heavier and more complex elements, which are in turn the building blocks of planets prior to being the building blocks of plants and animals. So one could argue that stars are the most rudimentary and primal of life-forms.
Truly... what if we are inhabitants of a living (rather than inert or dead) universe? What would be the implications of that?
Implications flow from definitions. We can deduce that a bachelor is unmarried because to be unmarried is in the definition of the word, so in calling them that we have effectively already said he is unmarried. Similarly, if we define "living" such that the word describes the universe, we are simply describing the universe that we already know with a new word. There will be no new implications that there would not be if we described the universe another way. New information flows from new discoveries, not new terminology. If, for instance, we discovered that the universe possessed genetic material and passed it on to baby universes, that would be interesting.
candidus inperti; si nil, his utere mecum.
It seems almost that you are saying two different things... implications certainly do flow from definitions, which is why how we define something matters tremendously in terms of how we respond to it; and our responses, in turn, matter tremendously in shaping our shared future. It is understood that calling someone "gay" and calling him a "******" both indicate a homosexual orientation, or that calling someone "cognitively disabled" and calling him "retarded" both indicate a diminished mental capacity; but the implications, in terms of how one defines the goodness and worth of a person, differ greatly.
Similarly, if we define the universe as "dead," then we call into our understanding of the cosmos all the emotional ephemera associated with death; whereas if we define the universe as "alive" we do the opposite. Surely this thought-play has practical implications, especially as we become more and more engaged with the universe beyond the bounds of our own little blue-green sphere?
And yes, it has practical implications, because human emotions affect human behavior and human behavior (by definition!) affects the universe. But it doesn't have practical implications about what's out there in the world.
Whereas if, as B_S says, we discovered that the universe possessed genetic material of some kind and reproduced in some ecology of universes, it would be alive in exactly the sense that a tiger is alive and that would mean that the universe is quite different from current views of the cosmos. It wouldn't be merely an emotional statement, it would be a literal statement.
The same problem will come in if your redefine "life" to include the universe. This is one of the reasons the biological definition of life excludes viruses. Depending on how you would change the definition to include them, suddenly things like 'fire' will fit the definition. That would be unintuitive, and would have repercussions with other words. Would become correct to say "the boyscout murdered the camping fire." ?
How would you define "life" to include just want you want to include? It's not an easy question.
First of all, the only person here calling the universe "dead" is you. I don't think many people would call inert objects "dead", except perhaps poetically; "dead" means that a thing was once alive but at some point died.
Secondly, if you call the universe "alive" in order to encourage a certain emotional response that people feel for life on Earth, you're basically lying to them. You are taking advantage of various assumptions they have about the old definition of the word but which do not apply under the new one - for example, "living things feel pain". This is exactly the same trick that North Korea uses in calling itself a "democratic republic" - it's taken words that normally apply to admirable governments and shoehorned them into new definitions that apply to its own miserable regime, in the hopes that some of the old admiration will rub off undeservedly on it.
The best way to talk about the universe, or anything else, is with frank and commonsense language that clearly states the truth of the matter. Let people decide for themselves how they want to feel about it. Leave the attempts at emotional manipulation for the Big Brothers of the world.
candidus inperti; si nil, his utere mecum.