Philosophy Concordance - online philosophical quotations

Further, nothing in the concept of life rules out the possibility that there could be living beings that are immortal, and don't reproduce, that are tree-like (so don't locomote), get their energy by electromagnetic induction (so don't digest or excrete), and have no need for any substance in the air (so don't respire).

Perhaps the definition will be of the reference-fixing kind: life =df the actual process that realizes the relevant cluster of functions.

More relevantly, it is doubtful that fulfilling any set of functions is conceptually sufficient for life. A moving van locomotes, processes fuel and oxygen and excretes waste gasses.

These examples suggest that no a priori functional analysis has much to do with the closing of the explanatory gap in the case of life. Still, the explanation of how living creatures can carry out the functions used to characterize life is part of the story of how the gap was closed.

More generally, it seems reasonable to think that the story of the closing of the explanatory gap about life takes something like this form: There are some paradigm cases of living things, including some that are quite simple.

We understand completely how some of the simpler forms of life work.

We have reason to think that more complicated living things work by similar principles, and see no bar, in principle, to our extending our explanations of simple living things to all forms of life. This particular model may not apply very well to consciousness, but the example of life does seem to us to illustrate how an explanatory gap can be closed without the sort of conceptual analysis that Jackson and Chalmers argue is required.

Closing the explanatory gap in the case of life has nothing to do with any analytic definition of "life," but rather is a matter of showing how living things around here work.

Recall that "the waterish stuff" abbreviates an appropriate cluster of descriptions of the superficial properties of water by which it is commonly identified by competent users of the term, something like "the stuff that falls from the sky, fills the oceans, is odourless and colourless, is essential for life, is called 'water' by experts .

A briefcase falls open, a list of the events in the life of Mark Twain tumbles out and is picked up by a student of the life of Samuel Clemens.