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    Being alive is a property an individual may bear on its o... — Carmelics
    Home/Afterlife & Death
    HistoryEditSee Inverse

    Being alive is a property an individual may bear on its own, without being capable of Darwinian evolution.

    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
    ?
    • The compositional account implies that being alive is a property an individual (say the last remaining dodo) may bear on its own.
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    Reasons Against

    2 perspectives
    Reason against 1 of 2
    ?
    • 1.Life is fundamentally a population-level phenomenon; organisms are defined by membership in lineages with reproductive capacity, not intrinsic properties.
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    • 2.Mayr's biological species concept and Hull's process ontology ground biological categories in historical-causal networks, not individual instantiation.
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    • 3.An isolated last dodo lacks the relational properties constitutive of being alive as a biological kind, even if its metabolism continues.
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    Reason against 2 of 2
    ?
    • 1.Maturana and Varela's autopoiesis defines life by self-producing organization, which itself presupposes evolutionary origin and cannot be decoupled from Darwinian history.
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    • 2.A system's current autopoietic organization is intelligible only against the background of selective pressures that shaped it, making evolution constitutively relevant.
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    Afterlife & Death

    Related

    A system's current autopoietic organization is intelligible only against the bac...An isolated last dodo lacks the relational properties constitutive of being aliv...Life is fundamentally a population-level phenomenon; organisms are defined by me...Maturana and Varela's autopoiesis defines life by self-producing organization, w...
    +2 moreShow less
    Mayr's biological species concept and Hull's process ontology ground biological ...The compositional account implies that being alive is a property an individual (...

    Similar

    Being alive consists in having the capacity to engage in vital activit...85%Being alive consists in having the capacity to engage in vital activit...83%Nothing can be alive unless it exists.80%The compositional account implies that being alive is a property an in...80%

    Source

    AI-extracted2/3 agreementValid
    SEP: death
    View source passageHide passage
    This account of life needs refinement, but it avoids at least most of the worries mentioned earlier. It implies that an object may be alive even though it is sterile (as in the case of mules), even though it survives on stored energy (as in the case of a silk moth), and conceivably even if it lacks nucleic acid (yet is still composed of things that engage in activities integrated in conformity with information they carry). In fact, it implies that being capable of none of the items on Aristotle’s list is necessary nor sufficient for being alive. What is more, the compositional account just ske...
    Extraction notes

    Validity: The passage explicitly states that the compositional account implies being alive is a property an individual (e.g., the last remaining dodo) may bear on its own, "which suggests that it may be alive without being capable of Darwinian evolution."

    Confidence: Directly stated implication of the account.

    Details

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