Recent content by LivaN

Say you have a glass tank and a single wave moves from left to right through a water medium in that tank. The atoms that started out being the wave on the left are not the same as the atoms that make the wave in the centre, or the atoms that are the wave on the right. Even though it is one and...

No, not for my specific question. I was not hand waving, or if it appears that way it was not my intention. granpa's post #32 put things into perspective, and #33 answers my question. Thanks to grandpa for a good explanation.

If the biological entity were say a mouse, then it couldn't. Well not by itself. It would need the scientist that created it to create more! I think we are going about the definition differnetly. You look at what the definition currently appleis to, ie all life on earth, and then are trying...

No, just trying to make logical sense of the term alive, and the context it's used in daily. My bad, I should have left out the murder thing. So you could exist without being alive? Interesting angle. But then, could I argue that my mental processes be included in your definition...

I think you're right. I can't however imagine any definition, of what is alive, leaving out self awareness as a garentee of being alive.

So a synthesized biological entity that is for all intensive purposes the identical of anyone one biological entity on earth, aside from its lack of ability to procreate, is by your definition not alive? So if your dna was sampled and used to create a copy of you, with all your potential for...

Don't species evolve? Can an individual evolve? If every human suddenly died except for myself, would I be able to reproduce? Would I be able to evolve? Am I still alive? Surely a scientist could hypotheticaly create an organism with a brain and nervous system that has no possible way to...