The main argument by Ferris Jabr, an editor at Scientific American, is that scientists have largely been unsuccessful with coming up with a good precise, universally accepted definition of life. And he adds,
To compensate, modern textbooks point to characteristics that supposedly distinguish the living from the inanimate, the most important of which are organization, growth, reproduction and evolution. But there are numerous exceptions: both living things that lack some of the ostensibly distinctive features of life and inanimate things that have properties of the living.
He also discusses how things like crystals and digital programs that everyone agrees is not alive, can be seen to have life-like characteristics.
Jabr goes on to argue that life is really only a construction in the mind. And therefore nothing is really 'alive.'
It's certainly a provocative argument. And it's certainly interesting how 'life' cannot seem to be captured in any precise, objective definition. Food for philosophical musing, and all that.
There is, however, this thing called subjective experience, and Jabr doesn't consider its relevance in his piece. And that seems to be a pretty big piece missing. Without our subjective experience, we might well consider the possibility that what are called living things are not substantially different from the non-living. Of course, if we didn't have subjective experience, we wouldn't be considering anything.
My point, is that while we might not be able to define clearly and precisely what life is, that doesn't mean we don't experience something called life. That is, life is (obviously) a very meaningful concept in our experience. We know what it means to live or not. In fact, we really do know a great deal more about this than virtually any scientific concept that Jabr likely thinks we know tons about. We know we are alive. And while Thomas Nagel has convinced many of us that we may not know a lot about the subjective experience of other creatures, we do know they possess some kind of subjective experience.
And it's not just that we know we have life, we know that it's the most important thing we have.
It's a pretty big difference then, I think, when a scientist or philosopher discusses the nature of things while feeling free to leave out our subjective experience, than when he does. Or when there is a presumption that things that can't be defined precisely are assumed not to exist. I imagine there are a lot of things we experience, like love, joy, compassion, that are difficult to define with the rigor and precision of a mathematical formula.
This is the problem that scientists (and some philosophers) get into by marginalizing the importance of our experience. They don't just get things wrong. They miss what is perhaps the most important. After all, without our experience, what do we truly have? What do we truly value?
