Tales From the Third Lobe - That's Life

About the author: Descended from old English money, Vidicon was raised by spiny echidnas in the mountainous rainforests of the North American Southeast. Lured back to society by time-traveling gray/reptiloid alien hybrids posing as renegade Jesuits, he has managed to maintain his outsider's perspective and an appetite for crunchy insects. Today, Vidicon is a world-class synchronicity surfer and an unlicensed quantum mechanic. He has a fourth-degree black belt in weird. About his bi-weekly column: Tales from the Third Lobe are the unfocused meanderings of the World's Smartest Moron. Topics range widely over the sciences, religion, philosophy, technology, modern culture, mysticism, Vidicon's personal history and viewpoints, and whatever pissed him off in the media last week. View all articles by Laszlo Q. V. St-J. "Vidicon" Xalieri, 2HC Columnist...

Stuart Kauffman says, in searching for a new minimalist definition of "life", that living agents replicate themselves and perform some sort of work-cycle. I have to admit that on the level of microscopic and/or tiny artificial entities, his definition seems to cover all the bases.

If he hadn't gone on to say that mules are marginal cases, I could have passed on being a little bothered. Clearly he was just talking about the tiny things, right? Cutting edge biochemistry and artificial life and such, yes? So why did he mention mules, the infertile offspring of horses and donkeys?

It occurs to me that most macroscopic living entities cannot replicate themselves without assistance. For instance, parthenogenesis is quite rare in female humans and even rarer in males. But basically, his definition seems to imply that if you can't (or don't even bother to) participate in the reproductive process, then you are "a marginal case". At least half dead.

And males (of species that rely exclusively on sexual reproduction) merely contribute redundant code to a female's replication process. Which pretty much leaves us men on the sidelines holding our dicks.

Imagine how I must feel. My cells are alive, but I am not. At best I'm a marginal case. Like a mule.

I admit that Kauffman isn't quite convinced that his definition fits the bill. I got it from his essay, "What is life?", speculating that the question may actually be satisfactorily answered inside the next fifty years—with the imbedded assumption that his definition was merely an attempt. One among many.

A family could be considered to be a living agent, according to Kauffman's definition. So could a small nation in that stage where they send off colonizing parties. Companies that split and merge probably count.

But individual people? Not so much. Especially if you don't have much to do with bearing or raising children.

I mean, it's not like you can say that a sebaceous gland in your right armpit isn't "alive" because it isn't associated with your testicles or ovaries. And when you get into the idea of sustainability—the smallest amount of self-organizing/self-replicating material that can sustain itself without outside help—then suddenly you're biting off a huge chunk of the food web and a piece of the sun and bucketfuls of ocean and dirt....

And suddenly you can see why Kauffman is spending his time trying to define a word that's already in very common usage. Because "life" is simply too complex to define scientifically in terms of individual entities outside of their environment (which often includes other living creatures in dynamic relationships). Using our current language, anyway.

Kauffman was trying in his definition to add the "performs a thermodynamic work-cycle" to the existing "can replicate itself" mode of thought, thereby restricting the definition of life to only include things that actually do something instead of just turn raw materials in their environment into copies of themselves. I approve. I think most of us are more comfortable thinking that living things do stuff other than form crystalline copies of their own molecular structure.

My issues are with the part of the traditional definition that he didn't concentrate on. That replication part.

Mules work their asses off, so to speak. That ought to count for something.

It's easy to correct the definition to favor "natural" life by stating that autonomous agents should be the products of a replication process. That covers a lot of bases—including the second (and future) generations of artificial life forms. It handles mules (and those who are unable or choose not to breed) just fine.

But what it doesn't handle are those first-generation artificial life forms, which might or might not be designed to never participate in replication.

I think I just heard a voice out there say, "So what's your point? Why do you (or anyoneo else) think it's so important to get the answer to this question written in stone? 'Alive' is just a words, isn't it?"

Sure. These are semantic games. But there are reasons to play them. Legal, ethical, and moral reasons.

We have laws that prevent cruelty to animals. We have laws that provide and protect rights for sentient beings (currently defined as "people"). We, as a "people", have a lengthy and shameful history of fucking over other "people" by not legally considering them to be "people" until massive amounts of damage has already been done. Similarly, if we want to avoid cruelty to living things in advance then we should make sure we know who they are before we create them.

Otherwise our only choice is to apologize to them afterwards, saying, "That's life."

Kauffman believes we'll come up with a good definition of life that we can stand by inside the next fifty years. I agree. Because we'll need to in order to address the upcoming legal and ethical problems coming out of our labs. And very soon, garages.

My own prediction for the upcoming fifty years? "Aibo" will become a racial slur.

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Vidicon has been the buddha, but the pay was lousy.