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Ennui wrote

How is the value of a life measured? By the living thing. Therefore, you and I cannot determine the value of another life for that living being except in a superficial way. How do we know that something besides ourselves is part of the universe of experience? If we say that life requires some realm of experience, then the question becomes how we know that something besides ourselves is alive. Your critique of anthropocentric conceptions of consciousness shows that we should not assume our human experience is the only one, but it opens up the door to skepticism (or, rather, the skepticism was always there), e.g. how do we know anything else is conscious. It also leads to the question of whether traditionally dead things (rocks) are alive. What is your answer to these questions?

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existential1 wrote (edited )

To the former, I tend to ask the question, "What would happen if I did nothing?" As it regards many plants, lets use lettuce as an example, it grows to certain point then flowers and provides for insects, then it seeds. The seeds fall and more lettuce grows. If I cover half the lettuce in shade, it bends towards the side with more light. For fruit tree seeds, if I plant them in the right conditions, they grow. If I put them in a poor situation, they die. If they can transcend the poor situation I put them in, they will live albeit with signs of stress or trauma via scars or thinness in certain areas. It's truly not all that different than anything else that we would say lives. I think what I've attempted to express in other posts here is that even the idea of the universe of experience is something we can communicate and express to each other but cannot do so with other creatures. We cannot know what they do or don't experience except through poor inference. However, some people choose to use inference to assume they experience nothing while I choose to use to to the contrary. This is not currently a provable thing. And it bothers me that an entire culture has been built on the assumption that not only it is currently provable, but has been proven. So as I've said in other posts, given the unprovability one way or the other, what evidence is available to form an opinion of what might be the case? A lot of folks seem to use human and/or animal physiology to explain a phenomena that we still cannot fully grasp in humans and try to map it to other species. I find this notion to be terribly off-base given what we may deduce from the size of the known universe. But that then leads to a whole 'nother conversation.

Towards the second question, my basic answer is I don't know. The more complicated answer is no if I'm using the conventional definition of alive that fits for a lot of biological things but not viruses. It again gets back to Godel's incompleteness theorem. The very definitions we use for things like "alive" or "conscious" necessarily create edge cases that do not fit in either category squarely. And since I know these paradoxes exist and cannot be solved at the level of the words themselves, I know that there may be a further abstraction that can resolve the seemingly paradoxical. But I don't know what those are at the moment...so I say again, I don't know. And truthfully, nobody does. But people find comfort in accepting certain definitions without ever thinking about the paradoxical edge cases.

EDIT: I appreciate the questions :)

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