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Can anyone please help with definition of living and non-living in philosophy. what is that dividing line that divides livings from non-livings according to Socrates?

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Prakhar Thakur
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    What kind of answer are you expecting to hear? As you ask here, I guess it's not something like "they have living processes like..." So, how about "They have a telos"? Would that be an answer? Maybe your question is, as it stand, too broad and unclear. – iphigenie Jan 14 '15 at 22:22
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    This question appears to be off-topic because it is about the meaning of a word used in biological sciences. – Rex Kerr Jan 14 '15 at 23:20
  • This question is the basis of a body of philosophical literature in philosophy of biology. – ChristopherE Jan 15 '15 at 01:27
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    I disagree - analytical philosophy has a lot to say about it. – iphigenie Jan 15 '15 at 01:27
  • i remember being taught this is like year 2 of primary school lol, they gave us seven qualities to remember :) –  Jan 15 '15 at 02:26
  • As posed it's off-topic by our standards because it's a definitions question. Things are defined however X person defines them. There is no philosophical "meat" there. If it was taken deeper, asking about a more specific philosophical investigation into a particular notion of "life" perhaps, it would be totally fine. But just asking about the difference in the definition of two biology terms isn't quite there. – stoicfury Jan 15 '15 at 05:16
  • Suggested reading: The Principles of Life by Tibor Ganti. For all the folks here arguing that "it is just a matter of definition"... everything is a matter of definition. The question is, are the definitions useful to describe and make predictions about reality. Btw folks over at biology stack exchange think it is a philosophy question, so you guys should sort it out because it seems kind of important :D – BKE Feb 21 '18 at 22:47
  • Voted to reopen, to answer in specifically philosophical terms, rather than purely biological. – CriglCragl Dec 05 '20 at 17:55
  • @BKE All principles defined by Tibor Ganti are debatable. See my answer here to gather an idea of how a rock can be considered alive according to some formal definition: https://philosophy.stackexchange.com/questions/42511/philosophy-and-the-question-when-is-a-robot-considered-alive-and-thinking/78111#78111 – RodolfoAP Mar 24 '21 at 15:28

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The answer is that there is no dividing line.

The definition of living vs. non-living is one that is very important to us, and yet nobody has a fully agreed-upon line in the sand. Even science, which has entire categorizations for living things, openly admits that all it has is a list of things living things tend to have; it lacks a checklist you can do to test whether something is alive or not.

This is actually a big deal on the edge case: death. Because science doesn't have a solid definition of life, it also does not have a solid definition of death. There are cases we all agree upon (a putrefying corpse is dead), but there are cases we aren't certain about (heartbeat but no brain function, or brain function with no heartbeat).

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Cort Ammon
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  • This is not entirely accurate. For example, in The Principles of Life, Tibor Ganti does lay out a coherent list of criteria for living, dead, and non-living systems. I am not a biologist, so I can't comment on how well accepted those ideas are in the biology community. – BKE Feb 21 '18 at 22:54
  • @BKE It would be interesting to see what those criteria are. I do know that I have seen many lists, and each of them has quirks. Given a particular list, I could look into the fuzzy boundaries or undesirable categorizations, but I'd need to see what the list is. I also know the question of "is this body alive" is a *tremendously* important question for doctors when dealing with patients that are in a coma. If the dividing line was clear, I think there's a lot of doctors that would greatly appreciate being notified. – Cort Ammon Feb 21 '18 at 23:01
  • https://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/abs/10.1162/artl.2008.14.4.14404?journalCode=artl Ganti characterises a unit of life as a unit with metabolism, stability, and control. Units also form hierarchies which can be in different states in different levels. Ganti was particularly interested in minimal life, the minimal possible unit that can be called living. I would also like to point out that your criteria of practical applicability in medicine is not a fair one. Valid and valuable theoretical groundwork can be laid, without providing all answers in practice. – BKE Feb 21 '18 at 23:31
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    @BKE True. If one is willing to accept an inconsistent, incomplete, or inaccurate definition, then definitions are easy to acquire. – Cort Ammon Feb 21 '18 at 23:33
  • No. Inconsistent and inaccurate definitions should be rejected. Incomplete ones, not necessarily, depending on how they are incomplete. – BKE Feb 21 '18 at 23:41
  • @BKE Even then, that puts us in a similar situation as a halting problem solver. The halting problem is known to be *undecidable*. But, in practice, one can decide whether a program will halt or not with remarkable success, given random programs. Such does not make the halting problem decidable. It just means that there are some decidable regions within its space. – Cort Ammon Feb 21 '18 at 23:45
  • Let's not get off-topic. Either re-open the question so I can attempt an answer, or read the sources I provided. I can't put sufficient detail in comments. – BKE Feb 21 '18 at 23:49
  • So it will be a while before I can go buy that book. From the first page, it looks like his book would run into the same issues with being descriptive rather than prescriptive that the other scientific criteria for life have which make them fall shy of a definition. But the issue stands. If you are comfortable with an incomplete definition, then it is trivial to create a definition, but philosophers and scientists have spent thousands of years trying to create a complete definition, and have yet to come to a consensus. – Cort Ammon Feb 21 '18 at 23:54
  • We can agree to disagree. You seem to think, that if a definition is incomplete, it is necessarily trivial. I don't think so. For all the work Ganti put into developing the chemoton model, it is far from trivial. Also, note other historical attempts eg. Schrödinger's What is Life lectures. Would you call it trivial? Biologists think the question is one of philosophy, and philosophers think it is just a matter of arbitrary definition were a possible theory can not exist? Sad state of affairs. I think the question deserves a better answer. – BKE Feb 22 '18 at 00:09
  • @BKE If one is willing to accept incomplete definitions, then it is always possible to construct a trivial definition. If we haven't excluded trivial definitions, then we need to construct a metric over the definitions to help us identify the non-trivial ones. That, itself, is big enough to be the subject of a book, not a SE question. – Cort Ammon Feb 22 '18 at 00:12
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    To continue with the doctor example, there are well accepted criteria with which one can determine that an individual is still alive versus when it is acceptable to call them "dead." These criteria are far from trivial. Doctors, however, recognize that these criteria are inaccurate and incomplete. They use them because there is no better criteria to use, but they must recognize that there are corner cases where it will come to their judgement as a doctor as to whether a patient is alive or dead. – Cort Ammon Feb 22 '18 at 00:15
  • True, it is possible to construct trivial definitions, but how is that relevant for example to the chemoton model of minimal life? Or other notable attempts? Yes, the subject is possibly big, one can write books about much smaller topics, yet that does not mean it at least a review of notable attempts could not be made. – BKE Feb 22 '18 at 00:15
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    @BKE Such a review could be an interesting artifact. You might be able to phrase a question which won't get closed that could capture that list. I know of at least a half dozen off the top of my head. I bet it could get to 2 dozen with proper research. – Cort Ammon Feb 22 '18 at 00:20
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    @BKE: There was a good recent episode of Mindscape on defining life, where Caltech professor Stuart Bartlett makes exactly that point that there is no unequivocal definition, and that the pursuit of a clear line between is intrinsically a problem - it blurred into existence from non-life https://youtu.be/Xs1K46AUK3M On definitions, most high schoolers have to learn 'MRS GREN', the acronym for the list of typical characteristics of life; and most high schoolers can find edge cases that confound this kind of list. That & other definitions: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Life#Definitions – CriglCragl Dec 05 '20 at 17:53