Is there a border dividing life from non-life?

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?lfenThis message has been edited by lfen, 08-14-2004 09:21 PM

sidelined,Be kinder and gentler and call it a "limitation" and not a "fault". Unexamined philosophical assumptions can create problems in doing science. And I think my suggestion to look at thresholds insteand of borders while admittedly only semantic recasting of your question, might lead to looking at the situation differently enough to better understand it.Border as a word tends to call to mind the lines on a map. But the border of the land and water is a transition zone. The borders between living and dead are likewise transition zones.So will you accept that though there are no discrete borders there are zones that lie between what we clearly recognize as alive and dead?As to a thread on consciousness I will be there when you get it going.lfenedited to note: I am speaking of life as an emergent property so I agree with your initial formulation only emphasizing the emergent property rather than the reductionist emphasis.This message has been edited by lfen, 08-14-2004 09:48 PM

Well, I concede your point. I think you are right about that.lfen

Ned,Would you be interested in discussing that in a new thread? I'd like to know why and to what extent you can support consciousness as an emergent. I'd like to look at other possibilites such as is it a fundamental property, or perhaps, as in the eastern nondual approach, is it the fundamental property of the universe in the same sense we call energy/matter a fundamental.Since consciousness is what enables discussions such at this it is very hard to examine. I'm mostly interested in finding new ways of looking at the problem of what consciousness is.lfen

S.Thank you, that was very informative. I look forward to your future posts.lfen