What is life? Is death real?

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This Kurzgesagt video raises a particularly interesting question. Lots of people here debate the question of whether life exists after death, whether we cease to exist, etc.. and truthfully I've had both positions at different times but I've also asked the question in the middle as well - what the heck exactly are life and death and do our ideas of what life and death are even hold as much integrity as we think?

At the end of the video the narrator says plainly that he doesn't have any answers but that they're good questions to chew on. I'd agree; they clearly don't matter in an ER or when police show up to check on a crime victim because there's a pretty crisp qualitative value of alive or dead and what needs to be done is as practical as its ever been. Still at a philosophical level it's really tough to pin down just what any of 'this' is at the cell level or beyond/below.

I was going to complain that the biological definition of life has no bearing on the philosophical question, but he got to that at the end. The problem with the biological definition of life is it's based on the external properties of something, but life as it's meaningful for the philosophical question is an internal property. Many ask how can the life exist after death if there is no brain, or in other words, how can consciousness exist without the brain? The question they are failing to ask is how can consciousness exist WITH the brain. Most psychologists say "emergence", but that's just evading the question as mathematical emergence can only explain behavior, not mind.

He seems to be pointing out a problem - ie. that 'life' and 'death' in the absolute sense is turtles all the way down. Aside from immediately practical questions such as whether a person can be resuscitated we really don't have any bottom line understanding of it aside from being able to say that we know it when we see it and we know how to irreversibly stop it quite effectively as well.

We know when the body is dead, but we can't say the mind is dead.

Jainism maintains that souls, subatomic in size, are constantly in motion through the universe. At the moment the very smallest elements of a biological union coalesces, one soul enters that very tiny union and, in it's attempt to escape that surrounding, inadvertently creates a forum where those atoms with their + and - bonding properties push outward and join together to form cells, thus, the process of life has begun.

Obviously, I'm simplifying the concept, but you can infer the meaning.

Death, in itself, is a very interesting concept, also. The cells have collapsed and can no further operate, thus the soul escapes from the body. This is death of the body, but not of the soul. The soul, which had absorbed (or shed) the karma that defined its host, is free to move on up through the universe, carrying the blueprint of the lives that came before it.

Again, Robin is simplifying this concept of transmigration of the soul.

life is an arrangement of atoms which we subjectively define.. when the atoms are no longer constituting what we describe as 'life', then that 'organism' is dead.
we are simply brief-lasting products of a patch of order and complexity in an entropic universe

Last edited by schopenhauer with a keyboard on 03 Dec 2016, 3:34 am, edited 2 times in total.

But how do we subjectively define ANYTHING without being alive?

what do you mean? we don't, obviously.

But you just claimed life is something we subjectively fine, you're blatantly contradicting yourself.

all definitions are subjective when you think about it.. but i don't think there's an objective 'thing' called life, and it's hard to see the line where something 'becomes' life.
we are complex 'arrangements' for sure, that's why we have been able to come up with these concepts like life and death, while we are what we call 'alive'. it doesn't mean they're objectively real.

That's a mysterian approach and I tend to regard mysterianism as a kind of pessimism that often gives up before anyone actually knows where the real line of permanent mystery is.

If it's not objectively real, then what is objectively real frankly doesn't matter.

not at all, sir. when did i say the nature of consciousness was undiscoverable?
on the contrary, i firmly believe that it's explainable by natural materialistic processes, even if we don't quite have all the answers yet.
you must've misunderstood my original comment in some way

sure, but then again what matters is a subjective matter in itself, lol.
i was just giving my reductionist answer to what i thought this thread was about.
life isn't really special imo, like carl sagan said it's about the way the atoms are put together, not the atoms themselves, and we're all just stardust when you think about it. similar to how a star dies, when the battery's out we're done.. that's it.

there's no such thing as death, life is only a dream. we are the imaginations of ourselves. you are the universe experiencing itself subjectively.

You seemed to pop it out there monolithically as if it both explained and answered everything. If you didn't intend it that way my apologies.

The one thing I would have to disagree with though is how much subjectivity goes into defining life. Aside from every sense arriving from the subjective and really there being no objective that isn't nested within it (which is a frustration to the topic already) we have I experiences, we know that because it's the one blunt force thing that we can't pull back. We seem to have a concept of vitality that's probably as evolved and examined in its mechanisms by our medical and biology professions to be on par with physics and chemistry, so we at least can think of several pillars of what we're willing to consider living systems and we can qualify those with a pretty good degree of confidence although there's some debate as to how much false exclusion of conscious material we might make with current thought.

Either way I do think calling our assessment of living matter or life as subjective still seems vague or misleading if you don't qualify that within a narrow or particular scope and given that I'm not sure which scope you meant.

Last edited by techstepgenr8tion on 04 Dec 2016, 10:52 am, edited 1 time in total.