Gods Ourselves
Sam Aurelius Milam III
For
most of my life, I've occasionally pondered the distinction between the
living and the non-living. Whatever definition of life I devised,
I could always think of an exception. Mobility? Some living
things don't move. Some non-living things do, although not under
their own power. However, some living things also move only under
the influence of external forces. Mobility isn't a good distinction.
Breathing? Plants and animals transfer gases very differently from
one another. Even if you ignore plants and consider only animals,
eventually you have to reduce the concept of breathing down to the process
of respiration — consuming a fuel and producing waste in the presence of
oxygen. A burning log does the same thing. Reproduction?
Some living things don't reproduce. Mules and some women that I've
known come to mind. The fact is that a general and unambiguous definition
of the distinction between the living and the non-living is elusive.
Eventually,
I reduced the idea to the simplest form that I could imagine. I set
aside all of the many characteristics by which we intuitively decide if
something is alive or not. I based a tentative definition on the
simplest and most pragmatic feature of life that I could imagine, function.
I speculated that if a thing could die or be killed, then it was a living
thing. If a thing could not die or be killed, then it was a non-living
thing. I thought of the death of a thing as being the termination
of its functioning without any disruption of its form. That's handy
when considering, for example, prions. They're presumed to be not
alive, yet they function. The only way to make them stop functioning
is to destroy their form. On the other hand, a man can stop functioning
(die) without any disruption of his form. It seemed like a good distinction.
I
recently got into a discussion of the idea with Sir James the Bold and
it took only a few minutes for him to notice either a problem with or a
startling implication of (take your pick) my definition. That is,
my definition applies exactly as well to an automobile engine as it does
to a person. Thus, according to my definition, a car is a living
thing. At first, I was a little skeptical. Then, I got to thinking
about his point. It's a fact that we've long applied the terminology
of life to our creations. When an automobile engine stops running,
we say that it died. If we want somebody to turn off a light, we
might tell him to kill it. We talk about computers remembering things
and malfunctioning appliances getting sick.
It isn't even a new idea. Science fiction is rife with tales of machines
taking over the world, electronic systems becoming self-aware, and so forth.1
Maybe there's more to it than terminology. It's as if we've unconsciously
recognized the existence of life without consciously admitting it.
If my proposed definition is valid, and it seems to work as well as any
other that I've encountered, then there are many living things on this
planet that we haven't previously acknowledged as being alive.
There's
a more profound implication of my proposed definition. If it's valid,
then it doesn't transform just our understanding of life. If cars
can legitimately be thought of as alive, and maybe they can, then we've
been creating life for quite a long time. My proposed definition,
therefore, goes beyond just the mere understanding of life. It reaches
even to our understanding of ourselves. If our creations can be thought
of as living things, then we are more than the mere images of God.
If we can create life, then we are Gods ourselves.
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Also, see my essay The Lone Raver Writes Again. |
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