How can anything be “more” alive? What an absurd concept. If this idea were accurate then the opposite would have to be true..

Can something be more dead then something else…?

I knew you’d hate the idea Phreedm, because it does smack down the whole “we are all equal in the eye of God” thing. But there’s a lot on which we disagree.

When you delve in deeper and deeper, you are absolutely right that there is no magical line between “alive” and “not alive”, everything disappears into chemical reactions. We don’t value life for itself, we value certain traits of the living. When those traits are absent or diminished, the value we place on this life disappears or is reduced. And this is all just and good.

I do feel compelled to respond to this, though:

The whole concept that “all life is sacred” has caused the abortion debate, the vegetarian movement (besides health reasons)…

I strongly disagree and think you’re misinformed or indulging in some strange stereotyping. I’m sure there are some extreme vegans who think all life is sacred, and some real whackjobs that take this to the extreme of killing humans to save the lives of experimental animals. But vegetarians are as diverse as atheists and there many reasons to choose to be vegetarian that have nothing to do with “sacred” or health. For a start, there is the environmental cost of meat production, an important reason and hugely underrated. But since you understand that “life” exists on a continuum, you’d see that other animals are alive and suffer, so it’s easy to build a moral reason without any “sacred” BS.

Yeah, it sounds like this is a diversion, but it isn’t. Once you understand that what we value in life and what we think is good to preserve exists in varying amounts in humans, you understand that it also exists in varying quantities in other animals. While you may morally justify killing another man when threatened, you couldn’t justify killing him for convenience. Similarly, you can justify killing an animal if necessary for your health and welfare, but not for your convenience, which is really what you’re doing when you eat meat. Those that try to justify it, often end drawing an arbitrary line in the sand saying “these lives are valuable and worth saving and great cost, these have absolutely no value at all.” You undermine your own argument.

How would we measure this? Could we actually quantify “life”?

What it means to be alive seems less important to me than what is important about the living.

Wow…I thought Clinton took the prize when he stated…”it depends on what the definition of “is”, is…

Wow! You beat your previous record – the Clenis Corollary to Godwin’s Law has been reached on the first comment!

And I though Ollie North took the prize when he said “all I did was lie to Congress”.

Or maybe Rumsfeld did when he said “I know where the WMDs are – they’re either east, west, north or south of the arbitrary spot in Iraq I’m going to mention.” Or something like that.

Or maybe cheney did it when he told a united states senator to go Cheney himself on the floor of the senate.

Gee – for every off topic religiously insane retort that phreakshow spews, there’s a myriad of ways to point to some Republican’ts saying something worse. Funny how that works…

How can anything be “more” alive? What an absurd concept. If this idea were accurate then the opposite would have to be true..

Can something be more dead then something else…?

Two sides of the same coin, phreakish lout. Saying something is more dead than something else vs. saying something is more alive than something else is like saying the glass is half full or half empty*. Meaningless semantics invokes to distract from the point of the conversation. Funny how that’s all we get from certain phreakish quarters…

tyro: you said While you may morally justify killing another man when threatened, you couldn’t justify killing him for convenience. I would agree that, theoretically, you would be correct if you had said that men shouldn’t justify killing for convenience. But I would strongly disagree that that statement is historically correct – there have been wholescale pogroms (example: north american indian civilzations’ destruction) of one set of humans for the sake of making life easier for another particular group of humans.

As for the topic of the post at hand, there are currently many ways to define how alive, relatively speaking, one thing is to another. I thought that was already being done, to a certain extent, in the way that species, phyla, etc. are defined and sub-defined. As in: rocks (which can grow or wither) can’t move of their own volition, whereas amoeba can; therefore amoeba are higher forms of life than rocks. For the record: I am just trying to report this, not comment on it one way or the other – that’s how I interpret some of the hazy recollections of biology lessons from days long gone by.

* – engineers would say that the glass was designed wrong…

historically correct should be historically incorrect…

that could be because most of the people involved in these raging debates refuse to see this line of thinking.

my girlfriend is at a “historically presbyterian” school, with its fair share of fundies (attracted by the mandatory bible classes no doubt) and she’s been more or less yelled at for being vegetarian by peers and family members who want her to adhere to their own righteously carnivorous lifestyle.

Phreedm:

even if, as Alex points out, we stick with the biological definition of alive (reproduction, response to stimuli, metabolism) there is a grey area in the form of viruses and parasitic genes which seem to fulfill all the requirements only under certain conditions, or even RNA fragments which will reproduce in an appropriate substrate. these pseudo-organisms are sometimes classified as living organisms and sometimes as inert material, according largely to convenience. these pseudo-organisms could accurately be called “more dead” than a bacterium but “more alive” than other large organic molecules like polysacharides. I agree with dave that this miniscule gradient can be more or less properly extended up the ladder of complexity to include sentience, and I’m sure it will be when we have a more thorough understanding of exactly what sentience is and how it arises.

“dead” has a lot of baggage attached to it.