Re: What is life

chhenry@VAXSAR.VASSAR.EDU
Fri, 24 Feb 1995 08:50:03 -0400

Life as stability: but one could view this from another
perspective. A dead world, composed of rocks, saline water, and an
atmosphere of gaseous mixtures, without any life at all, can be termed
quite stable. The introduction of life is the introduction of instability,
of birth, death, evolution, inter-dependencies, and perhaps system
transition itself. Knowledge comes about only because of instability, I
believe, an extension of life.

Wouldn't it help to leave our Aristotle at the 21st century door and begin
to recognize, vis a vis the work of much cognitive neuroscience, for
instance, that life and knowledge are terribly messy, erractic, repleat
with breakable categories, and only tenuously stable at best.

The neurological firing patterns for an event perceived and an event
imagined are almost identical. This is not what I would term stability--or
perhaps a more fascinating kind of stability in which disruption and
uncertainty and the division between world and self is a most permeable
border.

C. Henry