Life, Aliveness and Monk

So, I promised you 'alive'. What it is to be alive? How do we know that something is alive? What separates organic from inorganic? Are you well stocked with margueritas?

Now it isn't such a dumb question really. We all know that a tree, an insect, a cat is alive, but how we can 'know', not just believe it be so? Do we have some sixth sense. I know I'm alive so therefore I recognise 'aliveness' because it's an integral part of me and so I recognise it in the same way I recognise my own mother. (We won't get into the question of how I know I'm alive, it's a self defeating proposition if I have any doubt about that and the arguments are going to be pretty short, I think. So we'll just take it as read.)

Now I think most people would answer the question of 'aliveness' by pointing to DNA, assuming they know about DNA. If it's got DNA within it, it's alive in some basic sense. But how do we know it's got DNA in it? In most cases we don't, at least empiracally. We derive our knowledge from books, the internet, somebody else's research. We believe what we are told. But doesn't our certainty extend beyond this, beyond book learning, beyond experiments written up in obscure journals that none of us read? I KNOW my fellow penguins are alive and you know that your partner, children, cat, dog, the damn crane fly that won't get off the wall are alive. But how?

They grow, reproduce, perform acts that seem to have purpose. They eat, have sex (sometimes :), they produce waste. Is a river alive? It seems to have purpose, it carves out ever-deepening, widening channels; it eats, mainly rocks; bar a few exceptions it flows to the sea; sometimes it reproduces; it changes its environment. And yet we only attribute life to its inhabitants, some but not all, of its constituent parts, not to the river itself.

But are we any nearer to defining life? After all, the vehicles that we deem to be alive, our bodies; are they in any way different? A motley collection of mindless cells, different to be sure, but still a motley crew of willing helpers, all working to the common good, our common good, but essentially as lifeless as the water in the river. What is it about the emergent phenomena which makes a simple and not so simple collection of cells alive?

Is a virus alive?I suspect most people, and penguins, would say yes. But is it? It certainly has an effect but it's even more mindless than a liver cell. The only way it can survive and reproduce is by attacking and inhabiting a 'proper' cell otherwise it just strands of DNA and RNA, the simplest parasite we know. Do you still think it alive when it exhibits no vestige of life as we think we recognise it? If it weren't for its ability to hijack our cells we might give it no more chance of 'aliveness' than table salt.

Perhaps Lovelock has it right after all. Perhaps we need to think of the God forsaken rock we all inhabit as alive. Perhaps then the distinction between what we see as life and the so-called inorganic processes which fuel or world would start to blur, smudge, vanish into so much mist that we would no longer see ourselves as separate and merely a part of an all encompassing whole.

Since we talking about life, you try telling me that this manic depressive monkey is not alive!