| It feels like a lot of the author's arguments boil down to a refusal to acknowledge that no life is self-contained and that all life depends on its environment. "How can a tapeworm be alive if it can't exist without being inside someone's intestine"? Well, hardly anything lives outside the context in which it evolved. How can a tapeworm be considered life if it can't live outside another lifeform? How can a human be considered life if it can't live outside an atmosphere oxygenated by plants? How can a tree be considered life if it can't live outside of soil full of bacteria and worms? For all the author's time studying lifeforms, it seems odd that they see the interdependence of life as a stumbling block to its own existence. That being said, I do think that the author is onto something. I think that people romanticize organic life because it is mysterious and complicated and some life forms do truly special things - some people go so far as to conflate life and sentience when trying to parse the meaning of it all. So, let's cut through the nonsense and try to distill the central thesis of the article. The author claims that life isn't a thing because the qualities that jive with our intuitive sense of what is "alive" don't neatly conform to the boundaries of our categories and labels. On the other side of that same coin, some simple organisms that exist neatly within the boundaries of the label are reducible to their component parts just like our own inorganic inventions and there remains very little mystery about how they work and where's the magic in that? And since life isn't a thing or it is a thing sometimes but it's not very special, our anchor for judging the value and specialness of our own existence dissolves and OMG emotional crisis. Aren't they a brilliant and edgy thinker. So here's what I think we should really take away from this: Life in the colloquial sense is mysterious and awesome. There is no reason to limit our sense of wonder to biological life. I would say that doing so is actually limiting and harmful - people build relationships with inanimate things by anthropomorphizing them all the time. I wouldn't want to lose the unique emotional appreciation that arises from seeing "magical" things through an unscientific lens. Life in the scientific sense is a label with defined boundaries, not always agreed upon, which can and will exclude "special" things because the universe is infinitely complex and labels and categories are limiting. Seeing life through a scientific lens also forces us to reckon with the notion that simply being scientifically recognized life is not enough to make one regard something with wonder and appreciation. Indeed, if I understand the author's intent, I think they might agree that bacteria cleanly fit the definition of biological life and are nothing more than tiny complicated self-sustaining machines, which doesn't sound very special anymore. But I would argue that they are special. And since just being life in the scientific sense doesn't seem very special now that we've mastered complex things, we're going to have to parse out why they are special with a little more precision and intent. Bacteria are special because those simple little machines form the basis of an enormous food web, because they shape our thoughts and emotions when they live in our guts, because they simultaneously make us sick and keep us healthy, because they are some of our most ancient ancestors. Life at the colloquial macro level is special because it's mysterious and powerful and everywhere. Life at the scientific micro level is just a subset of all the wonderful complex things in the universe with which we enjoy special relationships. Colloquial life and scientific life are two different things that must be appreciated two different ways. |