(2018-02-03, 10:38 PM)Dante Wrote:
Consciousness is the very thing which could make something "alive" that you referenced. We do not know. What is certain, is that we do not definitely know (which you seem to just have asserted) what it is that makes that cell "alive all on its own". We understand the mechanisms, we understand the biochemical processes, but we don't know how they started, and we don't know what consciousness is, how pervasive it is, etc.
As we follow this downward into simpler and simpler “cells” and further down into stuff which is no longer a cell (e.g. viruses) but may be alive and then into stuff which isn’t alive (e.g. prions), we don’t find a point where there’s something missing between alive and not alive. We don’t find a qualitative difference. Instead it becomes a matter of offering a definition as to what we are willing to call alive or not. The difference between a virus and a bacterium or a virus and a prion isn’t qualitative so much as quantitative, in terms of how many boxes we want to tick off.
A cell is “alive all on its own” because the mechanisms and biochemical processes (which you concede are not mysterious) are those which we call “life”, when present. I didn’t think I was saying anything contentious when I pointed out that the idea of a “life force” was dropped quite a while ago.
Linda