Bird's Eye View III

Nature is the ultimate expression of freedom, for it could not care less about approval or satisfaction of those with whom it shares existence.

Acceptance

One of the most impressive traits of science is that it shows the humility to write an uncertainty at the end of the calculation. It is utterly ironic that the humbleness to not claim absolute knowledge, one of the characteristics that makes science so virtuous, is simultaneously the worst nightmare of the mind that conceived it. Thus, humans, when faced with discomfort, are the first to point out the small uncertainty and to reject unwanted results, in likeness to the hungry mouth that spits on the feeding hand when it fails provide total and absolute satisfaction.

Trying to Define Life

The issue of defining what is alive or not alive is a complex one. Here is an idea, which I am currently trying to disprove. A system is limited by defined boundaries which separate it from its surroundings, with which it is in an dynamic/steady-state equilibrium.

1) A system can be said to be "alive" if it is in a steady-state, or dynamic equilibrium, with itself and its surroundings.

From the macroscopic organism to the single cell, this would be true. All chemical process that govern life happen because there is a non-equilibrium state between the system and the surrondings which allows for change. The difficulty with this definition is that it leaves open the possibility of considering a machine to be alive. We can imagine a machine which is in dynamic equilibrium with its surroundings (e.g. a thermostat), yet we would not consider a machine to be alive. Thus, another point is necessary to consider such a state as "alive".

2) If a system has always been in a state of static equilibrium in the past, or if this state is reached at some point, the system remains in this state indefinitely (irreversibility of equilibrium). 

A system in a static equilibrium is said to be "dead" if the system was in the dynamic state somewhere in the past, or, more generally, "not alive" if it never was in a previous dynamic state. Using this definition, we cannot include "machines" in the definition of alive: if you "unplug" a machine from its energy source (induce a static equilibrium), you can, at any time in the future, "plug it", and it will again perform the same functions (dynamic equilibrium). However, when a cell reaches complete static equilibrium with its surrondings, this state cannot be reversed and the cell is considered to be dead. A cell which has been properly frozen and conserved is not "dead", but just "dorment", which means that its cellular processes have been slowed down to a minimum; if the cell, at some point, reaches equilibrium with the surronding medium (e.g. if you break the cell membrane) then the cell inevitably dies and cannot live again. Molecules such as proteins, or even atoms, cannot be considered to be alive, since they do not maintain a dynamic equilibrium, or perform active processes with their surroundings, i.e., there are no defined boundaries which one can consider.