How do you define "alive"?

Stigmata

Stigmata

The Freeman
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This thread has been spawned by a multitude of threads on abortion and such. What I'm going to ask is, how exactly do you define something as being alive?

And I don't mean "alive" in the legal sense, or any other abortion-related context. I mean simply, how do you decide whether or not something is alive?
 
Living, physically, I would say as long as cells keep being formed.
With a human dying, as long as there is brain activity/some level of consciousness.
 
And I don't mean "alive" in the legal sense, or any other abortion-related context. I mean simply, how do you decide whether or not something is alive?
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When its not dead? I don't say that to be facetious - but the hallmark of death is easily seen. Are people with no brain activity dead? Not really - but - they may as well be, so switch em off. Sense of self awarness is not the mark of life either, for many things are alive, and yet, probably have no awareness of self at all.
 
Hmm... I was going to say something, but now I forgot how I was going to put it.

The point of what I was going to say was that IMO, nothing is "alive" nor "dead". We're all just clumps of atoms and electrons. So are fish. Rocks are as well. The only reason we can exist as we are is because of some lucky protein synthesis that happened millions of years ago, and has somehow managed to replicate and change its form, thus changing the arrangement of millions of atoms and molecules into what we know as the human body.

The brain, as well, is merely a lucky jumble of blobs of atoms, which, through some sort of arbitrary reaction, are able to propel electrons between each other, and somehow these transmissions create thought. This also applies to higher thought, and the decision-making process.

Just my two cents on my own question :)
 
I won't pretend to have the wisdom of defining what is life and what isn't.

But IMO it's birth.
 
The brain, as well, is merely a lucky jumble of blobs of atoms, which, through some sort of arbitrary reaction, are able to propel electrons between each other, and somehow these transmissions create thought. This also applies to higher thought, and the decision-making process.
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But still, you would agree that the term 'alive' applies to some jumbles of atom and not others? Ie the rocks in the desert are not alive, whereas people are?
 
stigmata said:
Hmm... I was going to say something, but now I forgot how I was going to put it.

The point of what I was going to say was that IMO, nothing is "alive" nor "dead". We're all just clumps of atoms and electrons. So are fish. Rocks are as well. The only reason we can exist as we are is because of some lucky protein synthesis that happened millions of years ago, and has somehow managed to replicate and change its form, thus changing the arrangement of millions of atoms and molecules into what we know as the human body.

The brain, as well, is merely a lucky jumble of blobs of atoms, which, through some sort of arbitrary reaction, are able to propel electrons between each other, and somehow these transmissions create thought. This also applies to higher thought, and the decision-making process.

Just my two cents on my own question :)
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that is basically the jist of what i was gonna say however life is clearly defined in that its (as far as we see it) organic chemistry based system.

Some people see life as "something more"....you know a "soul" or "spirit"....like when you are made you are given one or something.....i personally think thats nuts but everyone is entitled to their opinion as long as it dosn't effect me directly.

A human (as well as many other animals) is an ORGANISM (its oh so easy to accidently type orgasm in the excitement) ....we are made op of ORGANS which are made up of cells.....now, these cells can live and reproduce on their own so in theory they are life on their own.

So with my logic nothing is dead or alive like you say.......a cell can work or not work and thats it......they make up the body.

there is no point looking into "life" any further just to complicate it.
 
So with my logic nothing is dead or alive like you say.......a cell can work or not work and thats it......they make up the body
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But rocks don't have cells - so they aren't alive, even by your definition right?.
 
Calanen said:
But rocks don't have cells - so they aren't alive, even by your definition right?.
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Was he even trying to imply that??!
 
Are you wondering this cause you saw the movie "the doors"? And Val Kilmer kept yelling "How many of you feel alive!! How many of you feel really alive!" (slow motion, music starts, and they appear in a desert).
 
A person is alive when they could..uh..come out..and be conscious or aware of what's going on..like right after birth. A person is dead when there is no Consciousnes/Brain activity.
 
a person is alive if they perform respiration = C6 H12 O6 + H20 --> E + CO2

I am teh smartie! :laugh:

if they don't perform respiration, they have no energy, and then they.... :flame:
 
RakuraiTenjin said:
Once conceived: from the point of initial development.
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But sperm and egg cells are alive too. There is no point where something "not-alive" becomes "alive."

Which is why this is all a red-herring. The question is not when something becomes alive, but when it should be granted moral rights. While I think there is a legitimate range of discussion to be had over the status of a fetus that at least has most of the major systems in place and a functioning nervous system, I maintain that wanting to grant moral rights to a clump of cells without even a nervous system is so laughably ridiculous that all of history will one day chuckle at the sheer goofiness of such a belief.

Even from a religious perspective, I find it telling that for all the thousands of years that women actually aborted early pregnancies, God somehow forgot to tell anyone to stop this act, which we are supposed to believe is an offensive and immoral holocaust. Yet, despite this outrage, God never tells any of his phrophets, lawgivers, or anyone else about even the EXISTENCE of zygotes, much less sperm and eggs and so on, much less what's being done to kill them. All anyone knew for thousands of years was that at some point after sex, a baby can somtimes start growing inside a woman. Then all of a sudden, science discovers what's really going on, suddenly people start claiming that they know that God thinks that it's wrong.

Or perhaps there is the fact that a huge chunk of pregnancies self-abort naturally. Or perhaps the fact that if fertilized zygotes don't implant, they never develop into a fetus. And so on.

The fact is this: zygotes are clumps of cells no different in any relevant way than the skin cells you kill by the millions just by sitting down too hard on your butt. They can't feel anything, they can't think, they have no volition. In terms of DNA, all they are are the INSTRUCTIONS for constructing an embryo/fetus/baby: they are not a blueprint of a person, and they have NOT YET become a person: those instructions for construction have yet to be fully carried out. If you separate zygotes up, then they can end up as two or more people, arbitrarily! Or they can end up as no people. It makes no difference at all to them.
 
a person is alive if they perform respiration = C6 H12 O6 + H20 --> E + CO2

I am teh smartie!

if they don't perform respiration, they have no energy, and then they....
Click to expand...

Ok thats a person - what about other things, and things that don't breath oxygen?
 
The fact is this: zygotes are clumps of cells no different in any relevant way than the skin cells you kill by the millions just by sitting down too hard on your butt. They can't feel anything, they can't think, they have no volition. In terms of DNA, all they are are the INSTRUCTIONS for constructing an embryo/fetus/baby: they are not a blueprint of a person, and they have NOT YET become a person: those instructions for construction have yet to be fully carried out. If you separate zygotes up, then they can end up as two or more people, arbitrarily! Or they can end up as no people. It makes no difference at all to them.
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I knew the 'dead skin cells' thing was gonna come up sooner or later....if you are saying that this is what aborted babies are, or similar too, then you are wrong. Which was the point of some of my other posts, i think in another thread which got derailed on abortion.
 
a person is alive if they perform respiration = C6 H12 O6 + H20 --> E + CO2

I am teh smartie!

if they don't perform respiration, they have no energy, and then they....
Click to expand...

Anaerobic respiration anyone?
 
Calanen said:
I knew the 'dead skin cells' thing was gonna come up sooner or later....if you are saying that this is what aborted babies are, or similar too, then you are wrong.
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I said that this is what zygotes are morally equivalent to. If you read my post (make sure to equip level-one reading comprehension powerz before forging ahead!) I note that I think there is a legitimate range of debate over the status of a fetus with, at least, a nervous system.

But skin cells and zygotes aren't different in any way that meaningful to their moral status. What do you think makes them, or killing them, any different? If you are going to aruge about "potential" then you have to face the objection that this is a totally arbitrary claim of future happenstance: not any interest now existing (and not concieving a child in the first place prevents it from ever existing just as easily as killing the zygote, so how could one be okay and the other not?). You could take the DNA out of a skin cell, plop it down in a stem cell, and it would be able to be grown into a baby just as a zygote.

But the point is: zygotes are not babies. They are a bunch of chemical micromachines with instructions for assembling an embryo, for which there are further instructions for turning that into a fetus, for which there are yet more instructions for developing that fetus to the point where it can survive outside the womb.

But zygotes themselves have no feelings. They have no hopes and dreams. They don't make tiny cries of horror when they are killed or used for stem cell research. The idea that they are morally equivalent to a person is abhorrently insane, utterly demeaning to human beings.

Of course, I have problems with complaints about later stages of development as well. At least early on, fetuses have less awareness and capacity to feel pain than your average prawn. Yet people seem to have no compunction about killing or torturing to death prawns, or even very intelligent full animals, like pigs. That makes absolutely no sense. At least food animals can fear for their lives, suffer apprehension, suffer psychologically from the ill-treatment that is their lives. Embryos can't really do any of those things: they can't even feel pain! So how does anyone jsutify eating meat and complaining about early-term (first trimester) abortion? The only thing I know of is that for some inexplicable reason they think that the suffering of animals, even highly intelligent ones, is meaningless and just fine, but killing something that just happens to have human DNA and pretty much NOTHING ELSE is morally wrong. That just boggles my mind how someone can justify holding both views at once.
 
i believe after 4 months or 5 months the baby is 'alive' in the womb. and any thought of abortion should be stopped.

abortion before 5 months of pregnancy
adoption after 5 months of pregnancy

the above only applies to people who definately dont want the baby***
 
I'm not a doctor. Nor do i do medical negligence. I knew that a zygote was somewhere early in the piece. But the whole zygote question is smoke and mirrors in relation to abortions. Its not zygotes being aborted, but much more developed embryos.

Ok so lets see just how early in the process the zygote is:

In medical terms, once a fertilized egg, which is called a zygote, begins to divide, this tiny human being is called an embryo. The embryonic stage ends at about two months' development and the fetal stage begins as the bones begin to harden. However, once the child is born, he or she is, in medical terms, a "neonate."
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So a zygote is a fertilised egg up to the first cell division?

I think we safely say, that most abortions, occur after the first cell division.............
 
Whether they have a conscious/brain or not, the moment fertilisation occurs the being is alive. From that first cell division to the beings final breath.
 
Calanen said:
Ok thats a person - what about other things, and things that don't breath oxygen?
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well... does it matter about other things? like hell a doctor would perform an abortion on a gum tree... :laugh:

that said, i have always wondered that if i cut a rose off a plant, is it alive or dead?

and how do we account for undead things?
 
Something is alive if it has a funtioning brain and/or a nervous system, since plants have no brains.


IMO
 
its alive if respirates, and needs neutritions, food and drink.
and needs the sun .
 
I would say a couple days after conception? After squiggly joe there arranges his furniture for the long haul.
 
The whole respiration thing:

Glucose + Water + Oxygen --------------------------> Energy + Carbon dioxide
in the presence of sunlight

Plants do not complete respiration, they do Photosynthesis, but i've forgotten the equation for that... something to do with chlorofyll and water :S

So, if something does not do photosynthesis, or respiration..... you can kill it all you like without having a negative effect on your conscience.

I am still teh smartie! :laugh:
 
You're alive when you can.. wear..clothes.. :D:D:D:D
(I'm so good)
 
Well anything alive contains carbon right?
Click to expand...

shaddap! i'm the smartie here! :D

yeah.. perhaps everything does have carbon.
has somebody bothered to look in a dictionary yet? sheeeesh.. how lazy are you guys??? :D:D

:( i can't find my dictionary.....
 
Many things in this world we consider alive, but don't care much about, even seek to eradicate. Bacteria, viruses etc. I mean... these things are technically living, but aren't capable of sentient thought or memory that we know of. We care nothing about them except that they might get us sick... so we murder them by the hundreds of trillions.

I think the same goes with birth. Except no desire to 'eradicate' them. I'm against abortion for the most part... but from my unscientific belief, a baby as a lifeform really isn't much a lifeform until a few days after conception. Before then, its just an egg with a fat headed tadpole in it!
 
Ranga said:
shaddap! i'm the smartie here! :D

yeah.. perhaps everything does have carbon.
has somebody bothered to look in a dictionary yet? sheeeesh.. how lazy are you guys??? :D:D

:( i can't find my dictionary.....
Click to expand...

www.dictionary.com

Anyway, bacteria and viruses etc. Things that are incapable of thought, they're not smart enough to enjoy life, they just serve a purpose; surviving. But a egg with a flat headed tadpole in it has a potential.
 
is this like how do you tell if somebody is alive, or what makes something alive?
 
It depends what you’re asking by ‘alive’ I think. Do you mean ‘alive’ as in self-aware? Or alive as in, can reproduce and pass on dna? Heh there’s too many ways you can interpret ‘alive’

In animals, at conception there’s the potential for life.. that clump of cells is not ‘alive’ in the sense that it can support itself. It’s not an organism, it is the start of one.

Let me use my amazing knowledge of GCSE biology to try explain.. how does it go..

Cell -> Tissue -> Organ -> Organism (heh I’m probably wrong with that)

Cells are just atoms arranged in such a way that they perform a task… they make up something which is alive, but by themselves are pretty useless I guess. One solitary organ wouldn’t be considered alive.. but when they’re in order they make something which can function as a whole, support itself, reproduce, etc

But then you have those single celled organisms.. like bacteria. They’re ‘alive’. They won’t be self aware, I think they just do what the chemicals they’re made up of make them do. I don’t even think I can say ‘instinct’ here.. they just pass on their dna..

Viruses aren’t even cells are they? But they’re alive.. I think…

So, in conclusion, I have no idea what I’m talking about :D
 
Stuff is alive when it has purpose.

Random molecules, regardless of complexity, have no intention.

Cells, on the other hand, have purpose - to survive
 
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