Lesson 30. What Is Life?

Introduction

As far as we know, as far as we are taught, there are three forms of stuff in the world: animals, vegetables, and minerals. Using this broad categorization rocks and soil are certainly mineral. In the broader categorization as one of the three types of things, all of the elements on the periodic table, and all compounds made from them would be considered mineral. Thus, even the bodies of animals and vegetables are composed of is minerals, albeit with something extra. On a macro level, we think it is relatively easy to distinguish among them. However, when we look more closely, it becomes difficult. A sponge is an animal, so is coral. However, sponges, coral, and even sea anemonies sit in one place, a mobile, and catch and eat food that passes by. And what about the Venus fly trap? It has chlorophyll, it turns toward the sun, and it converts minerals it receives through its roots into energy for its growth. That’s all very plantlike. However, the Venus fly trap also catches and eats insects! The fine distinctions between plant and animal can be very deceptive. In fact, one could say that the distinction was purely artificial. As far as we know, everything is composed of some form of mineral, by the above definition.

Modern taxonomy.

A taxonomy is a method of organizing objects or ideas. For example if we have a bag of cubes and balls, we could organize the stuff in the bag by putting the bags content on the table and segregating it into two groups by shape, a taxonomy of shapes. We could also have a bag of cubes and balls in several different materials such as Styrofoam, leather, wood and plastic. Both the cubes and the balls could come in all of those materials. We can organize them by material of manufacture, a materials taxonomy. It is much the same with living in nonliving things. Scientists over the years have attempted to categorize living in nonliving things.

Historically, we learned in school that there were plants animals and minerals, a taxonomy with three categories. Scientists today have decided that the original three categories were insufficient. The new categories are:

• Minerals -- nonliving things which compose all matter, including living matter. One distinguishing feature between living things and minerals is that all living things that we know of are made up of a structure containing minerals. Living things are characterized by cellular structures. Minerals do not form cellular structures. Also, one mineral does not take into fuel in the form of light and organic compounds in order to produce exact replicas of itself.

• Viruses and prions -- things that reproduce by taking over or forcing the other living things to construct copies of themselves, often at the distructions of the original host. These objects are literally bundles of DNA with few structures. Since they do not conduct any of their own metabolic processes, scientists are reluctant to classify them as living things. However, unlike a chemical process, they do reproduce through other organisms and use the energy and other byproducts of the host organism's metabolic processes.

• Prokaryots -- primitive, living things that do not have a cell nucleus, and exist as simple, one celled creatures, or as an organization of several cells that are not differentiated. This is a very primitive form of life, possibly from which modern life sprang. Their physiology necessarily limits their size.

• Eukaryots -- living things that have a cell nucleus and may exist as single celled or multicelled organisms.

o Protists -- simple organisms that may have only one celled, or may exist as multicellular creatures that have no cellular differentiation.

o Fungi -- a class of living things such as mushrooms which does not photosynthesize. Like plants, fungi cell have a cell wall, however, the cell wall is composed of chitin, a substance used by animals to produce shells, rather than cellulose, which is unique to plants. According to modern taxonomists, structurally, fungi are closer to animals than plants!

o Plans -- multi-celled organisms with both the cellular membrane and a cell wall.

o Animals -- multicellular organisms without a cell wall.

As we have previously observed, it can be very difficult to tell a floral still filled animals such as a sponge from a carnivorous plant such as the Venus fly trap.

Again, we reiterate, originally, things could be divided between living in nonliving. Then they were divided into living plants versus animals, and nonliving. Now, as we can see, living things consist of more than plants and animals, realizing that some previously known entities such as viruses, prions, protests and fungi are clearly members of neither class.

How to tell living from nonliving.

This may seem like a silly question, however it is not so simple. One might say living things grow and nonliving things do not grow. But don't crystals grow? Can I not grow as salt crystals in water? Do we natural world is in other minerals as the crystals used in lasers? Do not stalagtites and stalagmites grow in caves, getting larger as the centuries pass? So growth, as in going from smaller to larger, is obviously not the determining factor.

We could say that all living things are composed of cells. However, what would that do to viruses and prions? They use the functions of living cells to reproduce copies of themselves. Of course, we have the question, are viruses and prions a stage between living in nonliving.

It would appear that all living things make use of the cellular structure. All in nonliving things, in the sense that they would never living, do not. So it could be said that all living things contained in, or make use of, a cellular structure, we produce things that have the same lifecycle, and multiply.

Living things.

How do we tell if something is a plant or an animal? We could say all plants have chlorophyll and conduct photosynthesis. But there's a problem. Sponges are animals. Some sponges have chlorophyll, or structures known as chloroplasts, in their makeup. If we classify sponges as animals, that means that all things containing chlorophyll cannot be plants. I could say plants are immobile, and draw nutrients through their roots and usually also perform photosynthesize. But what about the Western Tumbleweed? It just blows around with the wind! It's not fixed anywhere.

The most reliable definition is one that tells us that both plants and animals have a cell membrane, that which holds in their fluids and other structures that make up the cell. However, only plans have a cell wall, made of cellulose, outside of the cell membrane, and only fungi have a cell wall made of chitin, which allows them to have a rigid form without a skeleton.

So we can have plants that eat meat and animals that use sunlight to create energy. But we can always tell a plant from an animal by its cellular structure.


...Continued


So why does life exist?

The earth is teeming with life. Every millimeter of its surface, even under and in the oceans, and atmosphere is saturated with life. It would be statistically unlikely that of all the planets and their moons surrounding the sun, all the sons in our galaxy, and all the galaxies in the universe, as we know it, only earth contains life!

The notion that we are alone in the universe is not statistically probable. So why does life exist? There are several possibilities:

1. Cosmic accident theory. Life on earth is a cosmic accident; something that a confluence of events, unique to our planet, caused to happen. Life exists nowhere else in the universe.
2. Occasional happenstance theory. Like number 1, above, life is accidental, however it has occurred accidentally in some small number of worlds in the universe. Here we must recognize that small, in terms of the universe, is large in human terms. If 100, or 1000, or 10,000 planets harbor life, that would be very small indeed, in terms of the universe, however large as humans measure. However, if life is accidental, and the number of bodies harboring life is small, we may be the only life that exists in our galaxy. That would be unfortunate indeed, because it could take as many years as there has been life on earth to contact life in another galaxy. We may not be alone, but we may be isolated.
3. Common process theory. Life is common and ordinary in situations where the environment is suitable. It may be that celestial habitats capable of evolving life may be the minority of celestial bodies. But, out of the billions of stars that make up a galaxy, and billions of galaxies that we know of, even if life exists on only 1%, that's a lot by human standards! The odds of bumping into life in this galaxy rise dramatically.
4. The inverted theory. Our understanding is inverted, backwards. Intelligence, minds, predated this universe as we know it. Our universe is in fact existent solely for the purpose of creating a physical, corporeal existence for the mind. In essence, minds existed first and the physical universe came later. In essence, the universe as we know it was created by minds which preceded it. It really doesn't matter, in terms of this theory, whether there is one mind which manifests itself in many bodies and many units of consciousness, or whether each mind is unique.
5. The emergent mind theory. This theory states that mind is a byproduct, also known as an emergent property, of bodies. With this theory, body existed first, brains second and mind cotempers were brave, or third. In this theory, we have to separate the concept of mind and memory. Much is a computer stores memory on a flash drive or a disk, and coded in ones and zeros, and the storage medium can be transported from computer to computer, memory is an artifact resulting from thinking thoughts in the brain. As animals, humans included, may have a rudimentary capability to reach peace thoughts. There is some evidence that, if this is true, humans radiate thoughts at a particular frequency, like a radio station, and may have the ability, under the right circumstances, to retrieve other, typically previous thoughts, on that same frequency.
6. The dualistic theory. Mind and matter, mind and body, existed independently prior to the creation of the universe, or matter, as we know it. Mind, whether singuler with lots of tentacled, or whether independent, may have adapted to the presence of matter. It is even possible that mind uses matter much as humans and chimps use tools. In this sense, the tool, the body, may have come into existence long after the dawn of the mind.
7. The multiverse theory. This theory states that our universe popped into existence with the Big Bang, which at its beginning, was a tiny, hot, dense spot of plasma/energy that exploded, expanding into the known universe. The multiverse theory states that the Big Bang actually happened millions or billions of times. Our universe is but one of these. In each of these universes, the physical laws and mathematical constants may vary. A universe in which we live happens to have the right configuration of natural laws acend mathematical constants to permit life, therefore it evolved here on Earth, and perhaps other planets, where as other universes did not. Perhaps still other universes develop the modes of life or intelligence totally foreign to hours.

Analysis of the six theories.
Here, we take for a moment, a leap of faith. Occam's Razer told us that the simplest explanation is usually the correct one.

Life emerging on earth as an accident, given that so many things in the universe follow predictable laws, even laws we don't yet understand, the sudden appearance of life as an accident on earth is highly unlikely. Not impossible, just improbable. This, of course, makes option number two even more unlikely. If it's unlikely that life was a mistake and one planet, the probability that the same mistake was made on many planets is very remote.

Option three which states that, in the right environment, life is likely to appear, and that in the billions and billions of stars, the relatively ordinary sun means that, undoubtedly, life is rather common in the universe. Even in our own solar system, life may exist on other worlds. Jupiter, various moons, and other unexplored territories are possible candidates for life. We also must remember that life here on earth is carbon-based. That may or may not be true on other worlds. Silicon is another element with properties very close to those of carbon.

Options four through six take a different approach to looking at mind versus body. Advanced cellular structures, what we call eukariotic cells, for example, which make up our human body are actually believe to be cells that, millions of years ago, captured other organelles, found them useful, and made them permanent residence or parts of the cell structure. This same process could have happened between mind and body. The two developed independently, possibly even indifferent conventional space. The line found that substance we call matter, and began experimenting with it, injecting pieces of itself into the physical existence.

Take a look at life on earth. It began as very simple one celled creatures, e-mail is the multicellular creatures in the seas, crawled out of the sea is to explore the land, and once for some very specific cycles. So these experiments were unsuccessful, and died off -- became extinct. Some of them were successful as life, but insufficient for the needs of the mind. They stayed. We experimented with very small lifeforms, very large lifeforms like a dinosaur, and ended up with humans, somewhere in the middle. Humanity is the mind's results in experimentation with the vessels capable of being illuminated by the spark of mind.

If you read six, the dualistic theory, is very similar. However, it assumes the mind and matter URL found two separate paths. Presumably, even mind is older, or capable of evolution much more quickly. Matter was observed by mind, and basically put use. Mind you discovered that it can accomplish more and experience more by using matter is a tool. That is, our bodies are essentially tools of that thing we call mine, which is still in the process of experimenting with matter.

Finally, we have the emergent property concept. Matter formed into cells, cells and life, and life became increasingly more complex. The mind is something that emerges from life, as a result of life. Much like if we throw a bunch of parts that ultimately formidable bicycle, into a box, without proper assembly, they just remain a bunch of parts in a box. The mind is a centrally the bicycle in a box. When life becomes complex enough, the body organizes the parts of the box into a bicycle -- into a mind.

There's only one problem with this. If we look at physics, there is a concept called entropy. Entropy says that everything moves from order and structure to disorder. I start with a tree, the tree dies, the tree decays into its component parts. Two people beget a third, the two original people essentially returned to dust, and over time, the third does also. Entropy exists. The concept of putting a bunch of parts in a box, and magically assembling those parts into a bicycle is contrary to the law of entropy. Mind is an emergent property of the body is contrary to the laws of entropy.

So what happened?

Entropy is the natural tendency for things to go from a state of organization to a state of disorganization over time. Entropy is a law of physics, and a law of nature. According to the law of entropy, everything decays. Rocks become sand. Living things die. Organic things decompose. Things that are hot become cold. Things that are bright become dim and eventually, dark. According to the laws of entropy, the universe is moving from that enormous expenditure of energy called the Big Bang to, if nothing else intervenes, a state of coal darkness. This may happen over many billions and billions of years, but, physics, the physics of our four dimensions, tells us, it will happen.

Now, if the law of entropy, which governs matter, also governs the behavior of non-material things, then there are two possibilities.

First, there is the possibility that life, as we know it, is actually a more disorganized state then the explosion which occurred at the Big Bang. That is possible, but does not, following contemporary human logic, seem likely.

Second, entropy is a condition of matter. Entropy is a law governing things from rocks, to our bodies, to planet Earth itself. However, while the world of subatomic particles, atoms, and more complex matter may be subject to the laws of entropy, there may be other laws that work. The N dimensions that exists (where N is greater than four) may follow totally different laws.

Since matter spontaneously generating a more complex form of life is counter to the law of entropy, it is logical, then, to assume that some force, some energy, was expended for the purpose of organizing matter. Given the laws of entropy, that force had to be outside the frame of reference, outside the frame of existence of matter. Otherwise, we would violate a basic law of physics, the physics that we understand as the physics of matter and energy.

End state.
This logic inevitably leads us to the conclusion that what we know is mind, in its broader definition meaning both the ability to think, and the ability to animate otherwise inanimate matter must be a force not subject to the laws of entropy, or, at least not subject to the laws of physical entropy as it exists in the material world. Mind, soul, or spirit, or whatever you want to call it, must exist separate from physical matter that exists in our four dimensions.

This raises another interesting question! If time, as we measure it, always progressing in a forward direction, as we perceive it, how it is time a fact other dimensions? Are they eternal? Do they exist independently of time? Can something that exists in those other dimensions moved back and forth through time, since nothing in our known physics tells us that the arrow of time must always point from now to future with existing consciousness being stuck in the present.

Note. So far, through these lessons, we have agreed that there are four dimensions: height, width, length, and time. We have also stated, that according to physicists, there must be some more dimensions beyond those that we can perceive. We have been describing, counting, these dimensions as "N, where N is greater than or equal to three." In the rest of this document, we shall refer to the four dimensions we can perceive, and we shall refer to the rest of the dimensions as the Q dimensions.

End of less and quiz.

1. What is a taxonomy?

2. What is the taxonomy of things in our universe?

3. What he is the difference between living and not living?

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