Albert Cipriani

Dear Tronvillain,
You wrote:


This begs the question of what life is. The hidden assumption is that life is based upon matter. The Catholic view is that life is not necessarily based upon matter. Hence, a non-material God and His angles exist as LIVING beings.

If the common denominator of life is not matter, I think it must be free will. Those material or immaterial entities that act unpredictably are living entities while those material or immaterial entities that act predictably are not living.

In either case, if you assume for a moment the existence of an omniscient God, His greatest creation would not be what He created or how He created it (Creationism versus Evolution) but that He could create a living entity. That is, an entity that by my definition had free will, which is to say, an entity that could act in ways that even God's omniscience could not predict. -- Sincerely, Albert the Traditional Catholic

HRG

This question is meaningless, IMHO. Life "isn't" anything as long as we haven't defined the term "life". It is not "a brooding omnipresence in the sky" (O.Holmes).

There are various definitions of life; most of which (like "reproducing and metabolizing" ) definitely require a material basis.
This should be called Living-2 to distinguish it from Living-1 (as defined above). Obviously the same word is used for two completely different concepts, which brings the immediate danger of equivocation.
There is no "common denominator" of life, unless you specify a particular definition.

You might as well ask what is the common denominator of "field(horticultural) " and "field(mathematical) " - like in "the field of rational numbers".

That would be the definition of Living-3 ...

In this case, there are no non-living entities since the universe is basically non-deterministic.

Regards,
HRG.

Jayhawker Soule

"Hence"?

[ February 25, 2002: Message edited by: ReasonableDoubt ]</p>

abe smith

Well, kiddy, I am not obliged to prove nor justify a damned thing to you nor to anyone else.

Albert Cipriani

Dear HRG,
Fair enough: material life we can call Living 1 and immaterial life we can call Living 2. Call it what you will, the issue revolves around where their common denominator lies. But you say:

Au contraire. One of the many common denominators between a field of corn and the field of rational numbers would be linearity. Another would be their infiniteness (e.g., corn on Mars once it's terra-formed).

You said that:


Really? Maybe you're right. Would you indulge me with your reasoning on this point? I've always seen the physical universe as a giant billiards game wherein the movement of every body and bank shot was predetermined at the moment of the Big Bang. I am willing to be corrected. --Sincerely, Albert the Traditional Catholic

DB_Hunter

Nope - the universe is quamtum mechanical in nature. Probabilities rule in the end, not classical physics. Chaos is basic to the way the smallest scales of spacetime work. That doesn't mean that there are no patterns, just that you cannot make long-term predictions based on initial conditions that remain accurate. Radioactive decay is random on the atomic scale. Alpha particles are released in a fairly random way from individual atoms, and it's only on the scale of large numbers that statistical probabilities can be determined. Each decay changes the gravitational makeup of spacetime in a small way, and make determinalism defunct.

If you think THAT'S bad, try stellar degeneracy, core conditions for type II supernovae, and neutrino/matter interactions. The idea of a determinalistic universe was thrown out several decades ago...

DB

99Percent

That is why Einstein had such a hard time with Quantum Mechanics. Being the deist he was he could not believe that "God plays dice".

Jamie_L

I was sort of under the impression that the physics of the universe ARE deterministic, even at a quantum level, but we just can't measure/observe at that level. If we could measure every single variable and initial condition, we would be able to exactly predict these seemingly random events. But since those initial conditions occur at quantum levels, we can't measure them without alterning them. Thus, we are left having to use statistics.

Is this an inaccurate understanding?

Jamie

JB01

It's possible that the universe is fundamentally deterministic at the smallest scales, but since the uncertainty principle places inescapable limits on our measurement abilities, there's no way to know for sure. The best non-speculative theories we have remain probabilistic in nature.

Albert Cipriani

Dear DB,
Nothing you said leads me to share your conclusion of a deterministic universe. You seem to be confusing our interactions with the universe with the universe itself.

As Jamie says, our ability to detect quantum events affects quantum event and so, as you say, "probabilities rule." We are reduced to statistical sureness instead of quantifiable fact. The uncertainty principle reigns instead of Newtonian absolutism.

But our inability to determine it does not make the universe indeterminate. Our shortcomings only relate to our relationship to the universe, not to the nature of the universe.

For example, just because I won't let you read my diary, doesn't mean that I don't have a diary. Just because we are too gross to detect the determinism of quantum events does not mean that those quantum events are not deterministic.

If, as you say, "radioactive decay is random on the atomic scale," then why can't random number generators be based upon them? My understanding is that no truly random random-number generators can be built.

Our universe is so deeply imbued with order that even super computers can't create an indefinitely long string of random numbers, which to me is the logical equivalent of chaos. Ergo, not only does chaos not exist, but chaos cannot exist. Sincerely, Albert the Traditional Catholic