|
Steve,
you wrote Jan 25 on behalf of JR's remarks to my
post:
JR:
Also, I tend to think he wouldn't have defined life as a process. He would be more likely to say that life manifests itself to the observer as a process, in a living organism. SJ: Can someone give a definition what "process" means in this discussion? What does it mean to say that life "is not a thing but a process"? I hear this phrase a lot especially with regards to the subject of consciousness. People really like to say that "consciousness is a process". What does one exactly mean by that? The dictionary defintion is "A series of actions, changes, or functions bringing about a result." If this is the operatinal definition then what does it mean to say that "life/consciousness is not a thing but is brought about by a series of changes"? - Steve --------------------------------- I believe the dictionary def. misses the
interrelation of the 'changes/functions' callable a process. Desultory such may
have a result, yet we would not deem it a process.
Consciousness IMO is a historical noumenon with
NO meaning agreed upon among (sci.) people working with it
- everybody identifies it according to the needs
of the person's theoretical inclination. Life is also vague, I like the
RR-preferred M-R (metabolism and repair) which linked it away from my
counter-example: fire. (No repair). IMO the M-R is a notion excluding other
concepts, but does not identify what a "life" phenomenon consists of (as
process, if you like me). - not even in our narrow Gaia-concepts.
As I hinted in my post the other day in
connection to the low low temp. hydrocarbon world, our terms of biology
even from a decade ago may not be sufficient identifiers.
Some researchers restrict consciousness to
humans, so could we restrict 'life' to our terrestrial
surface-processess?
(I put in the surface, because the deep-see
volcanic life is also a different ID. )
And sorry for the belated
reflection
John M
|