gwax's rumblings

I real­ized, this morn­ing, that I objec­tify yeast. Sure I objec­tify meat, veg­eta­bles, trees and, heck, even some peo­ple but, even when I’m doing so, I don’t lose sight of the fact that these things are or were liv­ing beings. Yeast, how­ever, I treat a great deal more like a chem­i­cal or tiny machine. Yeast is some­thing that I add to wort to make beer; sure I need to tem­per­a­ture con­trol it and keep things clean but that’s the case with lots of wet chem­istry. If I didn’t know bet­ter, I might think of yeast as lit­tle more than a cat­a­lyst for con­vert­ing sugar to ethanol and car­bon diox­ide; there are nuances and yeast imparts other pro­cess­ing to the wort but those are minor details. Continued think­ing, com­bined with var­i­ous old thoughts of mine and some of my per­sonal philoso­phies led me to ques­tion the nature of life.

If I could replace yeast with a sin­gle chem­i­cal or mix­ture of a few chem­i­cals that were capa­ble of con­vert­ing wort to beer, would that mix­ture be alive? By most def­i­n­i­tions, prob­a­bly not, but what then makes yeast alive? Is it per­haps that yeast sep­a­rates its innards from the outer world? What if I made mem­brane bub­bles filled with wort-to-beer chem­i­cals that let reac­tants in and prod­ucts out, would that be alive? Perhaps it’s self-replication that makes yeast alive? What if I put nano-machines in the mem­brane bub­ble that were capa­ble of dupli­cat­ing them­selves and the chem­i­cals in the bub­ble as well as increas­ing the bub­ble size and split­ting it in half? Now we’ve prob­a­bly stepped well past the gray area and have either made some­thing that is either alive or nearly impos­si­ble to dis­tin­guish from some­thing alive.

What if we extend our self-replicating ethanol bub­ble notion? Would a self-replicating min­ing robot be alive? Are com­puter worms alive? Is a lathe that can be used to make more lathes like a virus in being almost alive, save for its need of host (lathe oper­a­tor)? If I write a piece of soft­ware that sim­u­lates yeast at an atomic level, is that piece of soft­ware alive?

Of course, already fol­low­ing pathetic and weakly emer­gent hylopathism, I’m of the opin­ion that every exam­ple I’ve given, from enzyme to yeast, from lathe to myself, is alive. My hylo­pathic view of alive­ness, how­ever, is quite at home coex­ist­ing with con­cep­tions of other people’s def­i­n­i­tions of alive­ness in my head. I find that allow­ing con­tra­dic­tory and, pos­si­bly, mutu­ally exclu­sive memes to live side by side in my head makes for some very inter­est­ing phi­los­o­phiz­ing and inter­nal dialogs.

I’m won­der­ing though, Internet, where do you draw your lines? What makes some­thing alive?

This entry was posted on Thursday, August 7th, 2008 at 11:34 am and is filed under musings. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.