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From: sa209@utb.shv.hb.se (Claes Andersson)
Subject: Re: "What is Life?"
Message-ID: <1995Feb3.151944.7362@gdunix.gd.chalmers.se>
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Date: Fri, 3 Feb 1995 21:37:59 GMT
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shane@reservoir.win-uk.net (Shane McKee) wrote:
>Er, folks, sorry to attempt to spanner a nice thread, but I think
>we've demonstrated pretty nicely that there ain't no such discrete
>thing as 'life'. No such objective classification as 'living',
>'dead' or '50% alive'.
>
>The term 'life' and its associated buddies are constructs of
>language that we use to classify things. Joe Universe, however,
>doesn't care what we humans may define using our little words. One
>day I may use 'life' to mean one thing, and the next day something
>entirely different, but I can get my brain round it. Personally I
>don't care if someone else says I'm wrong for calling tierrans
>'alive'. It's just an adjective, to aid understanding and
>communication. If it fails in these two objectives, I'll get
>another one. Big deal!
>
>Let's try & be radical, & use language to communicate.

 It's always tempting to agree with opinions as diplomatic as yours but still, I thing
it might very well be possible to define life. When I think closer about it, I can't
imagine anything worth calling life with a high entropy! That's of course relative,
the entropy must be higher than its environments and actively maintain this unstable
state.We know very well what we intend to mean with "Life" (at least in this group,
a friend i discussed it with couldn't get of the higher levelse and asked me if I
considered a braindead human as living.. there we have two different views of it
but still, I had no problem understanding his view and he understood mine) and
it can be valuable to have a definition of it and I advocate the one I find most
applicable.

Claes Andersson. University of Bors. Sweden

