Did Schrödinger solve the mystery of life?

We can’t find life without knowing what it is

From Aristotle to Darwin and Schrödinger to Marie Curie, understanding life has been a scientific and philosophical goal since humans were first able to conceptualise their subjectivity. Sam McKee argues that there is no point in searching for life in other worlds when we do not know what it is on our own planet. Many a debate today centres around a dispute over the definition of life, whether that be abortion politics, assisted suicide or evolutionary biology. McKee argues that we must focus on the definitional question of life before we look for it elsewhere, and to do so we must ask new questions.

 

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Michael Cassady 12 August 2024

What life is, or is like, express false dilemmas born of grammatical confusion. Once you import an homunculus to stand impossibly outside sentience, you create a "gap" between brain and mind (the same explanatory separation between Descartes' I think and his thought). We are acquainted with the fact of sentience in being sentient: you have yours and I have mine, and I make a point of never being without it; but sentience is pre-reflective and is individual, not a kind; sentience is what distinguishes what it means to be alive. Sentience is electro-chemical, not material: meaning it consists of stimulated electro-chemical states born of influences from circumstantial conditions in the contingent experiential environment. Metaphorically speaking, as a life-force, sentience gives form, gives sense, to environmental material content. The "disjunctive" understanding of perception currently of interest to philosophers like M.G.F Martin is a step away from sense-data, representationalism and intentionalism. i.e., free of the third person interference of an imported homunculus. I'm not waiting to be alive, or sentient until an explanation is found for what is already working just fine.