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    Made withinDC&Austin
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    A live object has a distinctive sort of control over whet... — Carmelics
    Home/Afterlife & Death
    HistoryEditSee Inverse

    A live object has a distinctive sort of control over whether things come to be, or cease to be, part of it.

    Afterlife & Death
    ?Rate how convincing each reason is below to see the overall strength.
    1 reason for
    2 reasons against

    Reasons For

    1 perspective
    Reason for
    ?
    • 1.The control in question is made possible by activities its constituents themselves are capable of.
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    • 2.Non-living objects like automobiles have their composition settled passively by external forces (mechanics, accidents, etc.).
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    • 3.If a car's parts were somehow capable of replacing some of themselves with fresh parts without outside assistance, so that the activities of its current parts were responsible for its future composition, that would make it quite lifelike.
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    Reasons Against

    2 perspectives
    Reason against 1 of 2
    ?
    • 1.Crystals, fire, and rivers maintain and extend their own composition through internal physical processes without external direction.
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    • 2.If self-directed compositional change is sufficient for 'distinctive control,' then paradigmatically non-living systems satisfy the criterion.
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    • 3.The claim therefore fails to demarcate life from non-life unless an independent criterion distinguishes biological self-organization from physical self-organization.
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    Reason against 2 of 2
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    • 1.Kant and later Maturana & Varela argue that living systems are distinguished by autopoiesis—recursive self-production of the very processes that produce the system.
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    • 2.The claim locates the distinctive feature of life in compositional control, but this conflates the causal mechanism (what does the controlling) with the organizational closure that defines life.
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    • 3.A philosophical account that cannot distinguish the controlling activity of a prion replicating proteins from genuine organismal agency has misidentified the relevant property.
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    Afterlife & Death

    Related

    A philosophical account that cannot distinguish the controlling activity of a pr...Crystals, fire, and rivers maintain and extend their own composition through int...If a car's parts were somehow capable of replacing some of themselves with fresh...If self-directed compositional change is sufficient for 'distinctive control,' t...
    +5 moreShow less
    Kant and later Maturana & Varela argue that living systems are distinguished by ...Non-living objects like automobiles have their composition settled passively by ...The claim locates the distinctive feature of life in compositional control, but ...The claim therefore fails to demarcate life from non-life unless an independent ...The control in question is made possible by activities its constituents themselv...

    Similar

    Individual objects are alive only if their composition is under the co...79%Being alive is a property an individual may bear on its own, without b...76%If something ceases to exist, it ceases to be alive.75%That object was once alive and then died.75%

    Source

    AI-extracted3/3 agreementValid
    SEP: death
    View source passageHide passage
    The answer seems to be that, normally, a live object has a distinctive sort of control over whether things come to be, or cease to be, part of it. The control in question is made possible by activities its constituents themselves are capable of. Contrast objects that are not alive, say automobiles. What an ordinary car is composed of is settled for the car by the mechanics who repair it (detaching some parts and affixing others), by whether it is involved in an accident and loses some parts, and so forth. Imagine a car that is not passive in this way. Imagine that its parts were somehow capabl...
    Extraction notes

    Validity: The premises are faithfully extracted from the passage and collectively support the conclusion by contrasting living objects' self-directed compositional control with non-living objects' passive composition, and by showing that granting a non-living object such self-directed control would make it "lifelike."

    Confidence: The argument uses the contrast between living and non-living objects and the thought experiment of a self-repairing car to support the conclusion about the distinctive control of living things over their composition.

    Details

    Type
    claim
    Perspectives
    3 (1 for, 2 against)
    Edits
    1 edit