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For at least 2,500 years, philosophers debated the "Hard Problem of Life". Plato said life was about nutrition and reproduction, Aristotle that it was resisting perturbations, the Chinese talked of qi and the Indians of prana. 'Élan vital' was coined as late as the 20th century!
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But somehow, in 2022, no one thinks about the "Hard Problem of Life". And it's not because any philosophical argument or insight or definition satisfied everyone intuitively. It was merely the result of advances in biology.
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Biologists don't study "life", they study metabolism and genetics and biochemistry and evolution and so on. Viruses mutate but don't metabolize. Are they 'alive'? That's just a semantic quibble at this point.
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Uhh I do. It’s a superset of the hard problem of consciousness. Just because viruses form a fuzzy edge case doesn’t mean there is no set interior. Just because biologists study details (they did in antiquity too— humors, anatomy) doesn’t mean the gestalt is somehow meaningless.
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"are forest fires kinda alive" is an interesting philosophical quandary to ponder, but no one really thinks that this question has much bearing on whether science can in principle explain life the way Hard Problematics imply for science's ability to explain qualia
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Ie, “life” is still an unsolved mystery as far as I am concerned. Except for all you p-zombie strong AI rats who will shortly be replaced by robots 😇