Might as well start a thread running for inanimate sentience, intelligence, whatever.

I start with the concept that the biosphere is the only individual entity on the planet, all other life subsumed as component parts, Under Vernadsky's definition, inanimate matter modified by life is considered a component.Just as my teath and bones have mineral like qualities but are intimately part of me, so too, some elements mistakenly identified as inanimate may be part of the larger, unseen,living/thinking "reality".

-- Anonymous, March 21, 2000

Answers

I beg to differ. Consider the following conception: ============(begin snip) Once upon a time there was (and still is) a Professor of biology named Humberto Maturana. He teaches at the University of Santiago, Chile. He had a student named Francisco Varela who is now Director of Research at the Centre National de Recherche Scientifique and Professor of Cognitive Science and Epistemology at CREA,(Centre de Recherche en Epistemologie Appliquee) Ecole Polytechnique, Paris. They are very clever and about twenty five years ago came up with the neologism 'autopoiesis' (greek for self-production) to characterize the necessary and sufficient organization of living systems'. The idea of metabolic self-production being the particular characteristic of iving systems is not new (Spinoza, Kant, Jonas, Canguilhem, Ruyer... to cite just a few names) but Maturana was the first to invent one word for the process.

Living machines ('desiring machines' for Deleuze/Guattari, where product and production merge) are (i) involved in a network of processes of production of components that produce the components which continuously regenerate and realize the network of processes that produced them; and (ii) constitute it (the machine) as a concrete unity in the space in which they (the components) exist by specifiying the topological omain of its realization as such a network.

A molecular autopoietic system specifies its own space by constituting its own boundary. It does not fill a space, it realizes one. ===========(end snip. source is http://jefferson.village.virginia.edu/~mplanet/submit/spacing/vm.htm)

The thesis is that something that is alive is autopoietic -- it has processes which are engaged in making itself. It stands in its individuality, to whit (same source):

An autopoietic system defines the space in which it exists thru the continuous production of its components. In this way autopoietic systems are autonomous, that is they maintain an identity (or internal difference, Deleuze) that is independent of their interactions with an observer.

Now, if you have a collection of co-evolving, and codependent autopoietic units, then I think that an ecology emerges. Again from the same source:

The environment is not a reservoir of information but a 'plane of consistency' on which individuals (organisms), interact and are 'coupled' together.

So - I think that there are a lot of individuals on the planet, but the concept of "individual" is emergent from having an autopoietic structure. The components that it uses (minerals, proteins, lipids, ...) are just that - structural components. "Life" happens when you have an assemblage that recreates itself. New properties emerge that aren't "in" the stuff anymore than "wetness" being in either hydrogen or oxygen or even in hydrogen monoxide.

Viruses? Not autopoietic when in dormant mode. Maybe only "alive" when working within a cell, and "alive" entity is is combination of virus and other cell mechanics.

As far as biosphere as individual entity goes, I'm aware of the Gaia hypothesis, and have worked through some of the articles that Lovelock and Margulis wrote and find it persuasive from the mathematical point of view of system dynamics stabilizing itself. I guess I wonder what you mean by "subsumed as component parts". My guts are full of bacteria, and there is a structural coupling going on between them and "me", however I kind of have the sense of separate realities - more of a co-evolutionary cooperation or symbiosis than a subsumption. My liver cells --- now maybe we're talking subsumption, but in some sense my liver cells have a much different developmental history than the separate lineages of my gut bacteria.

The persuasive factor that caught my attention was the maintenance of an internal milieu. Thought experiment: we duplicate someone and shoot the duplicate and put original and shot duplicate in sauna. Both bodies have same chemical elements subsumed (ok have non-shot person swallow a lead slug...). Difference is that the living one maintains internal body temperature in face of rising external temperature but dead one doesn't. The maintenance of the internal milieu is evidence of life going on. And - the planet does that in the face of increasing solar flux -- maintain an average temperature such that water remains liquid. So -- I think something lifelike is going on.

The "animacy" issue - what would you recognize as an alive entity? That's what we're trying to get after?

-- Anonymous, March 21, 2000