On 7/4/07, Tom McCabe <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
--- Randall Randall <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > > On Jul 4, 2007, at 1:14 AM, Tom McCabe wrote: > > > That definition isn't accurate, because it doesn't > > match what we intuitively see as 'death'. 'Death' > is > > actually fairly easy to define, compared to "good" > or > > even "truth"; I would define it as the permanent > > destruction of a large portion of the information > that > > makes up a sentient being's mind. > > I would say that 'life' is a process, and that > the cessation of the process is death. So, we die whenever we're put under anesthesia? That seems to contradict the reports of everyone who's had surgery.
There's a hidden assumption here that there is a sharp distinction between living and non-living. How do we know that there's such a distinction? Are viruses alive? The laws of physics governing these living and non-living things don't make any such distinction, and while it's useful for us to classify things into different buckets for the sake of our understanding, there's no guarantee that a boundary present in our model of the world (e.g. living vs non-living) actually exists in reality. </a reminder of the obvious> -Jey Kottalam ----- This list is sponsored by AGIRI: http://www.agiri.org/email To unsubscribe or change your options, please go to: http://v2.listbox.com/member/?member_id=4007604&id_secret=11399613-88b846
