Ask Lemmy

Time and gravity are not abstract ideas, both are measurable like temperature and weight. One is a property of space-time itself, the other is one of the fundamental forces, very likely caused by a physical particle.

Life is simply a bunch of chemical reactions tied together in a way that allows us to think. There's nothing beyond the physical form, even your very thoughts are tied to the chemical reactions in your brain.

If you want a proof, simply look at anyone who has had a dramatic shift in personality after a head trauma. If there was a "soul" (or whatever you want to call it), wouldn't their personality remain the same?

Can you elaborate? I'm I scientist so I can go on all day about life systems and how everything works but I have no idea what form and formless means. Life is definitely physical, measurable and concrete, I'm not sure theres much more to it than that. Everything else just seems like ideas that help us relate to observed behaviours.

I see this classic question as a sophistic trap premised on a false dichotomy. You can create "categories" of things in any way you like and then drive debates about what they mean or imply.

I'll look at this one:

1. A live person is a body, but a body can also be dead, so "life" must be Aruvam.
2. But how do you know if something has Aruvam? It moves? It reproduces? A river does both of those.

It then usually goes on one of two directions:

• Lots of things look and act like they're alive; therefore Aruvam must be in everything, and the whole universe is alive, and there's your religious framework.
• Or: Aruvam clearly can't be in a chair, since a chair doesn't demonstrate Aruvam in any observable way by. Rivers might fulfill most of the qualities of life, but they clearly don't demonstrate Aruvam. So only some things have Aruvam and so they're imbued by something with this holy essence, and there's your religious framework.

I think this is all lazy, and built on sloppy ontology. I've decided that my new word, Bliggigly is everything that poops, and everything that doesn't poop is Fanfasma. So: is life Bliggigly, or Fanfasma? Debate! And then, create a religion around it, get a few generations behind it and gather up some texts written by some philosophers on the subject into a book, make it a canonical holy text, and now you've got everything you need to have a good holy war against the infidels.

Under Tamil philosophy, life is clearly Aruvam, because that's how they've defined their categories. You have a li ving person. You kill them. The same body exists; this must be Uruvam. So the difference must be Aruvam, therefore life must be Aruvam. Oh, but now we get to say that Aruvam is distinct, and we get to infer that there must be a spirit.

But: can rocks have Aruvam. Why not? How do you tell if a rock is happy? What makes a rock happy? We don't like getting broken up, but maybe that's the greatest thrill for a rock. Or, rocks can't have Aruvam - why not? Can you prove rocks don't have Aruvam? Can you prove dead people don't?

Choose your categories, and you have to build religious frameworks around them to make sense - but, ultimately, it's all predicated on some distinctions that are axiomatic and yet unprovable, and yet people build entire cultures around this stuff.

I believe Aruvam and Uruvam is a false dichotomy, and poor distinction that falls apart under scrutiny. It's interesting to debate it for the sake of the argument, but there's no intrinsic Truth you can derive from the debate. Anymore than you can glimpse some Truth about the universe from Bliggigly/Fanfasma.

There's only the physical, measurable ("form"). The abstract ("formless") is an approximation we come up with to allow reasoning within our limited brain.

I feel many of the examples you gave for "Form" dont even really fit. "Chairs" are an abstraction we created, so is the sensation of temperature (albeit this sensation is less absorbed, it is more automatic, fundamental, immutable compared to the concept of a chair) I see life as reproducing emergence. I love looking at artifical life and emergence, its really interesting seeing all the different digital mediums we have created that have seemed to allow for compex evolving 'life' to emerge.

Seeing these "artificial life" simulations does make me see all that which only kind of fits into the definition of life. I have seen evolving organisms come out only because rules were created to give them a genome, death, and reproduction, but I have also see simulations made out of incredibly simple rules that produce complex evolving reproducing patterns.

It feels to me that "life" is just a line in the sand we have drawn, and this line exists only because stuff that falls into our "life" category are the best at reproduction and competition.

It is also my view that questions like these can be vague, leaving different people to understand the question differently, leading to them giving different responses. I personally understood this as "is the concept of life an abstraction"

This is a fun question OP. I'm glad you asked.

For my answer, I'm going to go with I see Life as an entanglement between the form and the formless. Whether Life leans primarily towards form or formless will vary from species to species, organism to organism, cell to cell as the ratio of entangled form and formlessness can change based on a variety of factors and circumstances.

To give an example, I would view birds as leaning more to entangled formlessness, whereas something like elephants would lean more to entangled form.

I mean abstract ideas, thoughts, and consciousness come from the brain and emotions come from our endocrine system. So I don't really see a difference here. That being said. Oh, life. It's bigger. It's bigger than you and you are not me......

The classic debate of materialist vs the metaphysicalist. I would argue that any sufficiently complex system exhibits the properties of the formless as u have defined. By that logic one could argue that any Turing complete mechanism is life which is a whole new can of worms.