Are We a Living Thing?

or are we just a collection of living things (i.e. cells) working in coordination?

 

So in that aspect then you would say the Earth is alive? Or perhaps the universe? Noting that single living cells came together and formed animals that we also call living.

I'm no biologist, I'm a physics student who has just been reading a lot about the cell lately as a precursor to neurology.

As far as I know, your cells can live separately from you as a complex functioning living thing. Cells themselves have "organs" called organelles. Each of your cells also has your complete structure "on file", structures that lead specifically to your physical and mental characteristics (+ errors, but the cell somehow knows that it can generally get a six if it rolls six times, which is why it sees the advantage in symbiotic relationships with other cells).

Perhaps when we perceive consciousness we are undergoing long-term orders from the cells who have been practicing their code-writing for billions of years, passing the code down through cell generations.

 

I'd have to disagree about it being like a piano. Pianos have no fractal nature to them whatsoever. Life does. Living cells are also defined as living, just like you and me. Piano strings are not defined as pianos.

 

to the contrary, I remember hearing lots of theories about the animal cell today being made up organelles that may have actually been their own single-celled organism at one point and formed a symbiotic relationship with what is now the animal cell.

I'm not sure that flies with me very well. A better analogy exposing the fractal nature of pianos would have been to talk about how a piano has notes, but so does a single string. Furthermore, each string's note has more notes (the harmonic series). So yes, I take it back, this is a pretty decent analogy. But we do call all those things 'notes'. I wouldn't be claiming that a note is a piano. I'm claiming that the piano is NOT a note. That would make the analogy consistent.

If you'd like to carry the analogy to the animal being the string, well then the string's only a single note in the reference frame of the piano (not the guitar, for instance). In this way, it's not really a single note (adding that the harmonics series of note anyway). Only a pompous pianist would presume such profuse propaganda.

 

I guess I'm trying to find the difference between obvious biological systems and systems like our planet. I doubt evolutionary processes apply to Earth at all though. It can be said that it has changed with time, but as far as we can tell, it does this in accordance with the physical laws that govern it. But how are life systems different (given that the chemical system is fundamentally a physical system) than other cycles that exchange energy and chemistry. For example, would it be possible for non-biological systems to experience consciousness? Could we even answer such a question?

 

Yeah, I didn't mean to imply they're mutually exclusive, my apologies. My OP is meant to assume that cells are living either way.

 

My point is that consciousness doesn't necissarily belong to life. Cells themselves are pretty automated. I'm suggesting that "Consciousness" could be the result of living things working together in a very complicated, but ordered process.

The reference I'm about to cite views societies of prokaryotes as a multicellular organism. It's not widely accepted; it might even be a source of debate.

Shapiro, J. A. 1998. “Thinking about bacterial populations as multicellular organisms.” Annu. Rev. Microbiol. 52: 81-104.

But as I get deeper into studying biology, I'm starting to find that the definition of life simply revolves around DNA. Is that the case? Is there anything we consider living that doesn't have DNA?

I haven't seen anyone use DNA in their definition of life.

not bacteria, they are single-celled, I believe, so they're assumed alive for sure in this discussion. The others are multi-cellular, so the question would be about them too. Though I'm starting to see that all these things have DNA specific to them (the DNA in a frog is probably a lot different than the DNA of a single-celled organism from the past that evolved into a frog)

 

These are similar to the questions I've been asking myself about this. I wonder why DNA is never included in these definitions though. It seems to be the clear difference between self-organized systems that we consider alive and those that we do not.