Just What Is Life?

Author: honey the monster

So I was discussing markets and economies with someone, and I characterized them as "alive"

This was of course met with skepticism, but it raised some very good discussion.

I'd like to share some of it here and see what y'all think. It in the end has to do with the parameters, the boundaries of life itself.

First of all, I make the this distinction (i'm quoting from a discussion)

i make the distinction between life and sentience, and i think it's an important one. I don't believe there is evidence of sentience simply because something reacts. It has to *experience* the sensation. And we may have different ideas about what that means - it's qualia, but it is entirely within the realm of possibility, and even likelihood that lower level forms of life are not sentient at all. they have no "experience" in any sense that could be meaningful. They react just like gravity does - it doesn't mean it's necessarily sentience - just biochemical reaction that says nothing about experience.

So to me, life and sentient life are two distinct concepts. The former includes the latter but would also include things that can't be demonstrated to be sentient, like a starfish, or a venus flytrap.

I don't believe there is evidence of markets being sentient. But I maintain they fit the important qualifications for life. Or at least a compelling illusion "as good as the real thing" which I'll go on to explain.

They are adaptive, evolving, largely irreducible and only partly predictable. They grow. They react. They even provisionally reproduce.

I believe that everything lots of life touches, takes on that life. a government. an economy, an ecosystem/habitat, a social grouping, actually anything complex and vaguely self organizing.

basically what i'm saying is markets are ultimately collections of people by way of behavior and as such they take on the organic properties of the life that is driving them - but in a way that is only partly predictable from its components - it has "a life of its own" in other words.

and see, i see that as literally, if only because i don't see the meaningful difference between this phenomena, as explained in complex adaptive systems theory and the complexity sciences and life, which exhibits those same properties. CAS encompasses it all.

And here's why, philosophically, why i'd disregard, in some cases, the distinction between a thing and its mimic.

and here's a philosophical question that has direct bearing on this.

If an illusion is a perfect representation of a thing, how is it meaningfully not the thing?

I believe a fully articulated illusion is as good as the real thing.

the reason i do is because our entire perception is filtered through our senses and our cognition, meaning everything we see is not real, but a reflection perhaps, of real - the shadows on the wall of Plato's cave.

Ergo, reality as we understand it, is an illusion of reality to varying degrees of perfection. Because cannot truly, directly examine reality, but only indirectly. We see the shadows - its reflection.

But if we treat those as real, then mustn't we also treat any other exquisitely formed illusion as real - absent any meaningful material difference?

So what do you all think?

B&B orig: 1/3/19