Arouet
Member
The same tired argument and back and forth based on an outdated fallacy! It's just like the paradigm of a flat-earth. In this case it is based on the tacit assumption where what we know about life - comes from observing its motion. "If it doesn't move - its dead; or if moves - kill it". The new paradigm, which I am employing does not lose what is learned from studying motion and chemistry; but includes what is learned from information science in the last 100 years.
There is a far clearer distinction between life and non-life; if viewed through the lens of communication. A virus receives signals from its environment and responds with individualize and adaptive behavior. They are fracking alive. A "protocell" - in its hypothetical state - that receives signals and responds appropriately to them may be alive. If it doesn't it is dead. It may also not be alive if it must get supplemental information to sustain itself in a natural environment.
I think the clearer example: is a seed (one cell or many). It can live for very long times and in extreme environments with no motion - yet respond to the affordance granting growth - when signaled from the environment. The telling criteria for sorting inanimate things from living things are about information --- NOT motion.
I can see what you're getting at, in terms of describing the difference between life and non-life. But were you suggesting this changes anything in terms of the argument we're evaluating? That is whether there is an essential difference between living and non-living? I'm not sure it does.
In your framing, everything is information. When information is exchanged in certain ways, we say the system is alive. When information is not-exchanged in certain ways we say it is dead.
Similar to:
Everything is made up of moving parts. When the parts move in a certain way, we say the system is alive, when the parts move in other ways we say the system is dead.
In both framings the fundamental difference between alive and dead is how the parts interact with one another.
Note, if all of physics can be described in terms of information, I'm not sure it makes much of a difference whether we describe it in terms of movement or information exchange. They seem to be different ways of describing the same things, though I think sometimes using one or the other is more helpful to conceptualize what we're trying to describe.