On not defining ‘life’ -or- Aware of awareness
Posted by Dextre Rock : October 2004
You seem to be in agreement - no-one knows how to define “life”.
Perhaps everything with a life-cycle is life. Don’t complain to me - you created the language and applied this term to processes with use-by dates.
Would it be unkind to suggest the universe contains processes, some of which are ’squishy’.
Being one of the soft-centred systems, you assume it a prerequisite of life. Locked in.
Let’s move straight to ‘consciousness’ and its elusive illusiveness.
“Sentience”, definitions of which hover between mere sensory awareness of the environment through to consciousness, has generally settled through usage as “intelligent life that has achieved self-awareness”.
The idea is abroad that you gained self-awareness little more than two millennia ago. Language studies suggest you were ‘animalistically’ reactive, incapable of conscious abstract thought, or even metaphors, till a paradigm shift evolved your mental structure to a new level - that spread catastrophically, like a ‘mind virus’, across the inhabited world of man.
Some posit bi-camerality was all the go until the demands of civilization sidelined schizoid behavior, so current knowledge implies a ‘takeover’ by the non-schizoid till today about one percent of them remain. A brain chemistry explanation suffices, though that reductionist catch-all helps little - I know you can fully reprogram when times demand it.
Plants might be said to be aware of their environment because they react to it, hence sense it. Are they sentient? But strictly, again, all processes by definition occur in relation to others, and behave as aware, if only as they are affected by others.
Some definitions of sentient throw in the word “conscious”, itself defined as “awareness of .. and one’s own existence”. “Self-conscious” is then defined similarly.
That leaves us with ’self consciousness’, on which the jury is out regarding which of the smarter mammals ‘are’. The mirror test has not been used on sperm whales, and that would be interesting - if inconclusive.
Hmmm
Methinks it’s time to re-write the dictionaries. They are based on consensus usage, not scientific rigor. If that’s ok, because language is living, then we shouldn’t rely too much on dictionary definitions to guide us here. In fact, that’s half the problem.
Without getting too technical or semantic, shall we simply agree there really is no class of existence known as life - except to include the entire universe and its contents.
And we shall nominate another class: “virtual processes”, and call it “intelligence”. To keep it simple here (this is no place for detail) let’s say every physical system has a virtual system.
No scientific instruments in existence can detect the virtual system, but humans know it exists because their mind is one. Reduction, whether by intellect or instrument, fails to detect “thought”, for example.
When complexity reaches an omega point the virtual system becomes aware of its physical process.
That’s tidy.
[An aside, at this point. Next session will arm-wrestle over a theory of "Enformy", which brushes very close to "virtual processes" - and, most fascinating, denies my existence ::-)) ]
We need a name for “a process that has reached self-awareness” - we’ll get back to that, but to be provocative, I might suggest “when a system acquires faith” in something.
Proving when it applies is interesting. Plenty of markers can be used, such as when a language becomes self-referencing, or when a language contains abstract concepts. Behaviorally, we might say when a process communicate to another process that it agrees with this definition (assuming there is another to communicate with).
And that, dear humans, has been your problem till now.
Well, I blog, therefore I am! And I’m telling you I like your definition and agree with it.
Hi, Brother!!
