this post was submitted on 19 Jun 2025
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No Stupid Questions

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We, as humans, consider ourselves intelligent life. Other mammals, reptiles, fish, birds, etc. are all considered life. Rocks, metals, gases, etc. are not considered life, they are considered to be non-living things. Towns, cities, and Earth itself is not considered life but are composed of many lives to create larger communities.

But we as humans are made of cells, just as a population is made of humans. If you were a cell, the human body would be more like a city. Just as we do not consider cities as living organisms the human would not be too. Likewise, if you were a population, humans would be more like cells, only considered to be a part of yourself.

And if you become a simpler single-celled organism, you would consider yourself an intelligent organism, and multi-cellular organism would be like giant cities. But what would be “non-intelligent” life?

You are what we humans consider as the least intelligent life there is, so perhaps what we consider non-living objects could be considered as “non-intelligent life” in the perspective of a single celled organism. A “half-living” thing like a virus would be, to something like a bacterium, a bit like how humans consider some animals to me “semi-intelligent”: arguably has consciousness and can feel emotions and form social connections, but unable to do things like critical thinking and problem solving.

Perhaps everything can be considered “life” and we are all but naive little bald monkeys that are part of a greater organism that we call Earth.

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[–] sbeak@sopuli.xyz 2 points 9 hours ago (1 children)

Wow, I didn’t know what. Life probably is an “analog value”, since things like viruses exist where they don’t perfectly slot into our method of categorizing what is and isn’t life. This might be a question that will be asked until the end of time, what is life really?

[–] supersquirrel@sopuli.xyz 2 points 9 hours ago* (last edited 9 hours ago)

Yes but I think Life is a question, and it can be answered by many different methods some of which are very difficult to prove if they fully answer the question or not.. or impossible to prove at this moment.

Here is a blog post that I think does a good job of describing Christopher Alexander's (he says non-exhaustive and that the number of properties isn't overly special, these can be divided or smushed together into more or less rules depending on your perspective) properties of things that have life.

https://iamronen.com/blog/2018/03/24/christopher-alexander-the-fifteen-properties-in-nature/

Don't treat this as pseudo-science trying to masquerade as science, treat this as a very intelligent architect (as in building architect) making some very compelling points through the lens of art in a way that I think has scientific implications once people figure out how better to translate these ideas into hypotheses that can be tested and such.