I'm going to take a philosophical look at the language and concepts we are using for this phenomna. I think the discussion is having trouble with entity and entity is a tough thing. It's partly a result of language and partly a way our nervous system organizes input. And living organisms particularly, since each of us is one, have a strong attraction in our thinking.
Take the conditions for a star to begin and then end. When does a cloud of gas become a protostar? a protostar a star? a star a dead star?
Back to semantics. "I gave my love a cherry that had no stone". Nouns are illusions created by semantic structuring and neuroprocessing. There are no things. What there are are stages in processes that we give names to. Budding, blooming, fruiting, ripening, rotting are all stages in a process of cherrying. Our organism process is most interested in interacting with the end of the ripening process of the cherrying, so to for birding processes, but beeing processes prefer interacting with the blooming process. Unless we are doing some sort of decorative process that interacts with the blooming process.
So living processes occur and continue and include something sort of like the ripening process and the rotting process. Matter and energy move through living and non living processes.
Conjecture: the universe is a collection of movements of energy/matter creating space/time. And then there is consciousness which I'm spending a lot of time musing about but just don't know quite how it fits.
The concept of border might be easier to understand if we spoke of threshold, and action threshold. Under what conditions does water change state from solid to liquid to gas? Under what conditions does matter change state from nonliving to living to nonliving? And what role does consciousness play in this?
lfen
This message has been edited by lfen, 08-14-2004 09:21 PM