braces_for_impact

I found in enlightening and easy to understand, even for the layman, nicely done.

Chiron

Albert: "Likewise, if life is seen as I see it, as a spark that cannot be quenched, then the evidence is clear that humans and amoeba share the same spark of life in that neither of us have died. The life we presently have and may pass on before we lose it is immortal."
Well, as I see it, once you die, your spark has been quenched.

Metaphysics aside, I think most, if not all, of the cells in a human's body don't stick around for more than five years. Also, there was not nearly the same amount of "living" matter when life began as there is now, so life has come from outside of life.

Perhaps semantics, but hey.

-Chiron

Albert Cipriani

Dear Chiron,
When 1 amoeba becomes 2 amoeba and the 2 become 4 amoeba, is there more life or has the one simply followed God’s directive to Adam and Eve to “increase and multiply”? Likewise, when you were a single-celled zygote, did you have less life than when you became a multi-celled blastula? And now that you’re a trillion cells strong, do you contain more life? Converese, should you should loose a leg, would you contain less life?

I think not. What you think is probably confused since, as you say, you’d rather set “metaphysics aside.”

No doubt, you subscribe to a mechanistic numerological view of life that would have you think that more living cells = more life. Hence, your statement that there’s more life now than there was when life began. Life is not like that. It is communal and cannot be enumerated. The single flame at the tip of a match and the consequent forest fire are all one. Only a Poindexter unversed in metaphysics would count the flames as individuals. Likewise, all that is alive is one life, an expression of the one living God. – Sincerely, Albert the Traditional Catholic

Chiron

Albert: "When 1 amoeba becomes 2 amoeba and the 2 become 4 amoeba, is there more life or has the one simply followed God's directive to Adam and Eve to "increase and multiply"? Likewise, when you were a single-celled zygote, did you have less life than when you became a multi-celled blastula? And now that you're a trillion cells strong, do you contain more life? Converese, should you should loose a leg, would you contain less life?"
The simplest way to answer the first part is to look at an amoeba and its surrounding environment. If an amoeba is alive and it takes in nonliving material to create more living amoebas, then yes, there is more life now than before.
Likewise, I'd say yes, there's more life in "me" now than there was back when I was a zygote. I use quotes for the word "me" because it isn't all that clear where I stop and other stuff begins. When I breathe in oxygen and it goes into my bloodstream, is it part of me? And when I exhale carbon dioxide and water that was created from the cellular respiration, are these molecules no longer a part of me? And if an Joe Sixpack receives his identical twin's liver (who is identical in blood type, rhesus factor, etc., and just died in a duel) which is subsequently and perfectly assimilated into his body, is the liver now a part of him? What about the kidney Joe later received from someone else which, because it is somewhat incompatible with his body, forces him to take immuno-suppressant drugs for the rest of his life - is the kidney a part of Mr. Sixpack? I don't think that these questions can be answered definitively, which points to the language creating ideas and boundaries that are imaginary.

Really, the concept of "life" is very fuzzy. It seems to me (and correct me if I'm wrong) that you're operating under the assumption that there's some sort of "life energy" in all living things, which grows and shrinks to fit the amount of living material, and I think it's the language that is causing this.

You can quantify neither the amount of flame on the matchhead nor the amount in the forest fire. A flame has no real existence, sort of like a shadow. Fire is just combustion: when the materials combust, they give off enough energy to cause more combustion. The flickering, dancing, luminous entity at the end of a candle is air heated to the point of visible incandescence, rising because of its lower density, and moving because of disturbances in the air.

Going back to life, it's simply the process of long, complicated molecules creating copies of themselves: yes, I do subscribe to the mechanistic view of life, though I generally call it the scientific view of the universe, because it works for things besides life. It's like the old idea of "caloric fluid," an invisible liquid that was the essence of heat. The concept of life as metaphysical seems to me to be pataphysics.
"Life is not like that [quantum]. It is communal and cannot be enumerated." I agree that life is not quantum, but not for your reasons: I hold it to be no more correct to try to quantify the amount of life in a trillion cells than to try to define the amount of shadow those trillion cells cast.

Probably incoherently yours,
-Chiron
I'll try again some other time, when I have more.

Albert Cipriani

Dear Not-at-All-Incoherent Chiron,
You are right to some extent about our difference being semantic. Our argument is chasing its tail over our not having defined life.

But you are arguing a conclusion that is merely a restatement of your materialistic assumptions here:
You’ve equivocated material with living material. While I’ve attempted to distinguish the one from the other. Life, as a flame, can be seen as an expression of the material while not being material. That is, life piggybacks upon the material world, but is not material.

I see free will and life as synonymous in that neither of them are material yet they both express themselves materially.

For example, after a lifetime of making decisions, are you MORE free for having made them compared to a child who died after making only one decision? I think not. Likewise, the spark of life that touched off the first cell that divided into all the cells now alive has not produced any more life.

What we have now is just more iterations of the same life. Just as the dead old man was no more free than the dead child but had only exercised his freedom more times, so too, is there not more life now than before, only the multiplication through time of one life that is still one.

You wrote: Not if your spark was not really yours. If you could dispense with your individualistic time-induced illusionary view of life and self, you could see your life as a sharing in the life of the living God. Ultimately, life, free will, even sex, are just finitely real ways of expressing a single infinite reality called God. – Cheers, Albert the Traditional Catholic

Wounded King

Dear Albert,

How would you reccommend we go about entering this enlightened state? LSD? Im surprised you dont get confused and answer post which havent been made yet, what with being above the illusion of time and all.

Your argument seems to preclude the existence of an abiogenic event, or would you simply see that as gods first appearance incarnate?

TTFN,

Wounded

Albert Cipriani

Dear Wounded,
You make an excellent statement in the form of a question, Yeah, if matter could spontaneously generate itself into living matter, that would make the Living God superfluous and falsify one of my reasons for being a theist. In my metaphysics, life, freedom, and abstractions are the triune image of God. They are what we can see of the invisible God.

Matter is the surrogate mother of God (as opposed to Mary, the real Mother of God), the means through which God is delivered to our senses. Pantheists confuse the mother of God with God. Nature is not God, but the means of apprehending God.

And Nature consists of neither life, freedom, nor abstractions. Those metaphysical realities, tho intimately connected to Nature are not Nature, like how the placenta and umbilical cord is intimately connected to both the baby and its mother, is a part of them both, but really apart from them both. – Sincerely Albert the Traditional Catholic

Wounded King

I suppose it really depends of your definition of spontaneous and living matter then Albert. Do you require a non-experimental environment? Do you want a self replicating RNA/peptide or a whole unicellular organism?

It seems dreadfully perilous making these definitive statements about what would falsify your beliefs, although admirably scientific, we never know what is behind the next corner after all.

Albert Cipriani

Dear Wounded,
If some speck of matter acts as if it is alive, that is, behaves as if it were free, it would exceed my exceedingly low standards of being alive. It need not even be able to replicate, for mules can’t replicate and if you don’t think they’re alive you’ve never been kicked by one.

Having falsifiable standards of evidence is perilous only to those who have a vested interest in intellectual stagnation, of staying stuck in the swamp lands of their bias.

Yes, and whatever it is, it ought to modify our outlook. Or are scientists the only ones entitled to shamelessly change their theories with the latest evidence? There would be no shame in me loosing my faith.

Don’t get me wrong; it would be a psychological bitch, but I would get over it and be a more nimble traveler for the loss of that unnecessary baggage… if that baggage were unnecessary. Can you say the same about the potential loss of your atheistic zeitgeist? -- Sincerely, Albert the Traditional Catholic

Skydancer

Of course we can. Our Weltanschauung is evidence-based in the first place. If we turn up real evidence that some deity exists, we'll incorporate that into our outlook. So far, that hasn't actually happened - and for many of us, myself included, we started out by looking for evidence to bolster the religious beliefs we were taught as children. It was the failure of evidence that drove most us away from religion, nothing more and nothing less.