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Author Topic:   Life - an Unequivicol Definition
Percy
Member
Posts: 22391
From: New Hampshire
Joined: 12-23-2000
Member Rating: 5.2


Message 268 of 374 (773883)
12-10-2015 11:44 AM
Reply to: Message 248 by AlphaOmegakid
12-08-2015 4:24 PM


Re: Black White or Grey?
It is either "obviously" or "arbitrarily", but both together is nonsensical as you agree.
I think you have problems with language and logic and facts. You're the one who used "obviously" and "arbitrarily" together, not me, and yes, it's nonsensical.
The analogy of the range of life from living to non-living with a gray scale has already been explained in several different ways, but let me try another. Here's the gray scale image again:
We know the color at the extreme left is white, and that the color at the extreme right is black. The question is how far from the left does white extend. Your answer is none. Our answer is that at some distance from the left it is no longer white, but we don't know how far that distance is.
Another way of saying it is that in your view there is only one point in the range from white to black that is white, and that point is at the extreme left. We're saying that there is a range that is white. From an HTML way of defining colors (just to use something everyone is familiar with), we're using the label "white" to apply not to just #FFFFFF, but also #FEFEFE and #FDFDFD and a bunch of other shades, too, some of which we're sure are white and some of which we're not.
You're having similar language, logic and fact problems in your posts to RAZD. You seem to be confusing RAZD's position with your own.
--Percy

This message is a reply to:
 Message 248 by AlphaOmegakid, posted 12-08-2015 4:24 PM AlphaOmegakid has replied

Replies to this message:
 Message 270 by AlphaOmegakid, posted 12-11-2015 11:03 AM Percy has replied

  
Percy
Member
Posts: 22391
From: New Hampshire
Joined: 12-23-2000
Member Rating: 5.2


(4)
Message 269 of 374 (773888)
12-10-2015 12:06 PM
Reply to: Message 267 by AlphaOmegakid
12-10-2015 9:50 AM


Re: the goldfish in the baggie problem.
AlphaOmegakid writes:
Read all of Message 232. Message 232 is about what the scientific community says about viruses for the most part.
You should read all of your own sources. You cited the Wikipedia article on viruses. It states quite clearly that, "Opinions differ on whether viruses are a form of life, or organic structures that interact with living organisms." That paragraph goes on to briefly describe properties that viruses share with cellular life, making clear why there is a variety of opinion. You want to ignore the variety of opinion within biology and just declare viruses non-living. Here is some of the variety of opinion that differs with you:
Seite wurde nicht gefunden. -: "Viruses straddle the definition of life."
Are viruses alive? New evidence says yes | Popular Science: "The diverse physical attributes, genome sizes and lifestyles of viruses make them difficult to classify. A new study uses protein folds as evidence that viruses are living entities that belong on their own branch of the tree of life."
Are Viruses Alive? - Scientific American: "First seen as poisons, then as life-forms, then biological chemicals, viruses today are thought of as being in a gray area between living and nonliving: they cannot replicate on their own but can do so in truly living cells and can also affect the behavior of their hosts profoundly."
Viruses ARE Alive, And They're Older Than Modern Cells, New Study Suggests : ScienceAlert:
quote:
But one thing that scientists have struggled to agree on is whether or not viruses are alive. After all, they can't survive or replicate without a host cell, and due to their rapidly changing genes, scientists have never been able to work out how or when they evolved.
Now a study by researchers in the US has managed to complete the first viral tree of life, and it suggests that not only are viruses alive, they're also really, really old, and they share a long evolutionary history with cells.
AlphaOmegakid writes:
It is you and a small handful of other scientists who argue they are alive...
Obviously your survey was flawed.
This is beyond the pail.
Well, at least no one threw a pale of water on you.
--Percy

This message is a reply to:
 Message 267 by AlphaOmegakid, posted 12-10-2015 9:50 AM AlphaOmegakid has not replied

  
Percy
Member
Posts: 22391
From: New Hampshire
Joined: 12-23-2000
Member Rating: 5.2


(1)
Message 273 of 374 (773955)
12-11-2015 11:41 AM
Reply to: Message 270 by AlphaOmegakid
12-11-2015 11:03 AM


Re: Black White or Grey?
Of course I put them together specifically to show you that your prior arguments were nonsensical.
You seem unable to recognize your own nonsense.
There are continuums between extremes everywhere. Living/non-living, harbor/ocean, foothills/mountains, rich/poor, and on and on. You can legitimately prefer other perspectives rather than continuums, but you cannot say they make no sense or are contradictory. Continuums are an incredibly common way of looking at a wide variety of things.
Even whether a person is living or dead is a continuum. Is a person dead when they stop breathing? When their heart stops? When they're brain dead? When their cells are dead?
If you choose brain death, how much of the brain must be dead before the person is considered dead?
If you choose cell death, what percentage of cells must be dead before the person is considered dead? Does it matter which cells in the body are dead?
You can choose hard and fast definitions for living and dead, but they would remain just your opinions. There are a variety of opinions out there, and so fixing on any particular definition would be arbitrary. There is a gray area between living and dead where we can't be sure.
--Percy
Edited by Percy, : Typo.

This message is a reply to:
 Message 270 by AlphaOmegakid, posted 12-11-2015 11:03 AM AlphaOmegakid has replied

Replies to this message:
 Message 274 by AlphaOmegakid, posted 12-11-2015 5:23 PM Percy has replied

  
Percy
Member
Posts: 22391
From: New Hampshire
Joined: 12-23-2000
Member Rating: 5.2


Message 275 of 374 (773983)
12-11-2015 6:24 PM
Reply to: Message 274 by AlphaOmegakid
12-11-2015 5:23 PM


Re: The horse is just about dead!
AlphaOmegakid writes:
But here's the rub! You can't have a continuum between harbor/non-harbor, ocean/non-ocean, rich/non-rich, poor/non-poor, foothills/non-foothills, and mountains/non-mountains. Do you see now how nonsensical these all are! And the same applies to living/non-living.
All of these make perfect sense in their particular context. If the context is bodies of water, then harbor/non-harbor and ocean/non-ocean make perfect sense. If the context is wealth, then rich/non-rich and poor/non-poor also make perfect sense. If the context is geography or geology then foothills/non-foothills and mountains/non-mountains make perfect sense. And if the context is life then living/non-living makes perfect sense.
Apparently to you living/non-living and life/chemicals are distinctly different opposites. I don't mind using the term life/chemicals, if that's what it takes to help the discussion move forward, but I don't agree with you that living/non-living is a completely different beast, and I don't think anyone else does, either.
Your earlier objections had a completely different basis, nonsensically mixing "obvious" and "arbitrary" in ways that no one else had, and insisting that your nonsensical statements were identical in meaning with other people's when they were clearly not.
So using your terminology, a dog is an obvious example of life, and a block of lead is an obvious example of chemicals (in this case a single element), and there is a continuum between life and chemicals where there is no clear boundary between the two. This doesn't feel as clear to me as when expressed using the terms living and non-living, but there you go.
--Percy

This message is a reply to:
 Message 274 by AlphaOmegakid, posted 12-11-2015 5:23 PM AlphaOmegakid has replied

Replies to this message:
 Message 292 by AlphaOmegakid, posted 12-15-2015 11:17 AM Percy has replied

  
Percy
Member
Posts: 22391
From: New Hampshire
Joined: 12-23-2000
Member Rating: 5.2


Message 281 of 374 (774066)
12-12-2015 5:36 PM
Reply to: Message 280 by AlphaOmegakid
12-12-2015 2:45 PM


Re: The horse is just about dead!
You're rejecting common language anyone would use when describing a continuum, even just a simple blending of white into black. Why don't you tell us what language you would use to describe a continuum from white to black?
The original points remain. Your definition of life is just one of many possible, and not a very good one at that. It's arbitrary, incomplete, ambiguous, and lacks generality by not even attempting to anticipate other forms of life.
--Percy

This message is a reply to:
 Message 280 by AlphaOmegakid, posted 12-12-2015 2:45 PM AlphaOmegakid has replied

Replies to this message:
 Message 286 by AlphaOmegakid, posted 12-14-2015 5:45 PM Percy has replied

  
Percy
Member
Posts: 22391
From: New Hampshire
Joined: 12-23-2000
Member Rating: 5.2


Message 288 of 374 (774232)
12-14-2015 9:32 PM
Reply to: Message 286 by AlphaOmegakid
12-14-2015 5:45 PM


Re: The horse is just about dead!
AlphaOmegakid writes:
See Message 285
I answered your Message 285 before you even wrote it, see Message 275.
--Percy

This message is a reply to:
 Message 286 by AlphaOmegakid, posted 12-14-2015 5:45 PM AlphaOmegakid has not replied

  
Percy
Member
Posts: 22391
From: New Hampshire
Joined: 12-23-2000
Member Rating: 5.2


Message 300 of 374 (774287)
12-15-2015 3:22 PM
Reply to: Message 292 by AlphaOmegakid
12-15-2015 11:17 AM


Re: The horse is just about dead!
AlphaOmegakid writes:
Apparently you and Cat Sci do not understand mutually exclusive words. For a moment, let's forget about the concept of a continuum and just use two words, "atheist" and "non-atheist". The set of atheists is the set of all people who meet the definition of atheist. The set of non-atheists is all other people in the world who do not meet the definition of atheist. So who is not included in those two categories? NO ONE! In the case of the continuum, this becomes nonsensical.
"Atheist" is a good example. There is no more an unambiguous definition of atheist than there is of life. From Wikipedia on atheism:
quote:
Writers disagree on how best to define and classify atheism, contesting what supernatural entities it applies to, whether it is an assertion in its own right or merely the absence of one, and whether it requires a conscious, explicit rejection. Atheism has been regarded as compatible with agnosticism, and has also been contrasted with it. A variety of categories have been used to distinguish the different forms of atheism.
Skipping all your nonsense about continuums and moving ahead to where you finally comment on my expression of willingness to adopt your terminology:
However, if "life" is definable and clear, and "obvious" as I argue, then there can be a "chemical evolution" from chemicals to life. And viruses and prions and self replicating molecules might have some relative location in the grey area, but they will not be "alive", and they will not be elemental chemicals.
Life cannot be defined unambiguously, as the absence of agreement with your definition makes clear. As we saw just earlier, you're not even consistent about whether biologists agree with you or not (they don't). Check out Wikipedia's definition of life ("there is no unequivocal definition of life"). Even if we knew all the steps from raw chemicals to life today, we would still be unable to pinpoint precisely where chemicals became life.
--Percy

This message is a reply to:
 Message 292 by AlphaOmegakid, posted 12-15-2015 11:17 AM AlphaOmegakid has not replied

  
Percy
Member
Posts: 22391
From: New Hampshire
Joined: 12-23-2000
Member Rating: 5.2


(1)
Message 306 of 374 (774329)
12-16-2015 11:55 AM
Reply to: Message 305 by AlphaOmegakid
12-16-2015 11:39 AM


Re: The Russian Dolls of life ...
AlphaOmegakid writes:
I have often found that when a persons arguments don't work, they often try and change the words, like you are doing.
When someone explains their understanding to you and you make it clear you disagree, wouldn't you find it unhelpful if they repeated their explanation in exactly the same way? Wouldn't you find it more helpful if they tried to explain their understanding again in a different way? Just like people have been doing over and over again here in this thread?
It is not my definition of "quite distinct". Merriman or any other dictionary will do quite fine, but "quite distinct" does not mean "somewhat distinct" or "just a little different" or "almost the same".
You have too many spurious complaints. You're all full of definitions and no comprehension. RAZD said quite a bit more than just his opening comment about "quite distinct" - why don't you respond to that? It was Message 303.
--Percy
Edited by Percy, : Typo.

This message is a reply to:
 Message 305 by AlphaOmegakid, posted 12-16-2015 11:39 AM AlphaOmegakid has not replied

  
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