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[Haspen]

Basically it's what my cousins (7 and 11 yrs old) asked me today and whilst I provided them satisfactory answers (for their interrogative young minds), I fell into 'ponder spiral' and thus have to ask others on the subject.

The questions were:

1. What is 'life', what makes a rock different from a giraffe?

2. What keeps all the people in the world from suddenly snapping and killing each other?

My answer to the first was:
Alive things are mobile, are intelligent, are able to procreate, have a definite 'starting' and 'ending' point (birth/death). Rock is unable to do anything of the above, whilst giraffe is mobile, is intelligent (to a degree), is able to procreate, and have the starting and ending point.

My answer to the second was:
Most propably the valid answer would be the fear of severe consequences that come with killing someone, consequences imposed either by the law and/or the vengeful relatives/friends of the killed person.

[kaijyuu]

1. Haven't you seen Pocahontas?

"But I know every rock and tree and creature
Has a life, has a spirit, has a name~"


No really, "life" is defined as being comprised of cells. That's it. That's why viruses aren't considered alive, by the way.

2. Not conductive to continued survival. If humanity had a disposition to do that, we would've already. Otherwise, we can pretty much assume that since we haven't, we won't.
(note that global thermonuclear war wouldn't count under his criteria, as he's asking why everyone doesn't turn on everyone)

[da_nang]

For 1:

Homeostasis: Regulation of the internal environment to maintain a constant state; for example, electrolyte concentration or sweating to reduce temperature.
Organization: Being structurally composed of one or more cells, which are the basic units of life.
Metabolism: Transformation of energy by converting chemicals and energy into cellular components (anabolism) and decomposing organic matter (catabolism). Living things require energy to maintain internal organization (homeostasis) and to produce the other phenomena associated with life.
Growth: Maintenance of a higher rate of anabolism than catabolism. A growing organism increases in size in all of its parts, rather than simply accumulating matter.
Adaptation: The ability to change over a period of time in response to the environment. This ability is fundamental to the process of evolution and is determined by the organism's heredity as well as the composition of metabolized substances, and external factors present.
Response to stimuli: A response can take many forms, from the contraction of a unicellular organism to external chemicals, to complex reactions involving all the senses of multicellular organisms. A response is often expressed by motion, for example, the leaves of a plant turning toward the sun (phototropism) and by chemotaxis.
Reproduction: The ability to produce new individual organisms, either asexually from a single parent organism, or sexually from two parent organisms.

Straight from the wiki.

For 2:
Mutual agreement for survival. Why did people start to make rules of any kind? It was the "Don't kill us and we won't kill you" mentality. Punishments may vary, from Code of Hammurabi to apologetic. But the rules only work as long as there's a deterrent.

[Darvi]

2. What keeps all the people in the world from suddenly snapping and killing each other?

Not much, which is why it's happening anyway.

[DarkWolfXV]

1. What is 'life', what makes a rock different from a giraffe?

2. What keeps all the people in the world from suddenly snapping and killing each other?

1. Life is when something is constructed from cells. It starts in mothers womb then ends when your vital organs stop functioning.

2. Dear human, morality, even if murder was lawful, i would never do it, unless as last resort in self defense. If i dont want to die, then its logical that other people dont want to die either. People kill themselves though, because different people have different moral codex, or lack of one, and some people just dont realize that what they are doing is fucking worst thing you could ever do.

[Trapezohedron]

1. Haven't you seen Pocahontas?

"But I know every rock and tree and creature
Has a life, has a spirit, has a name~"


No really, "life" is defined as being comprised of cells. That's it. That's why viruses aren't considered alive, by the way.

Kaijyuu, conquering philosophical questions with scientific remarks since 20XX!

[MetalSlimeHunt]

1. What is 'life', what makes a rock different from a giraffe?

The most basic definition of a living things as opposed to a nonliving things is that living things gather resources for the sake of self-replication and nonliving things do not.

2. What keeps all the people in the world from suddenly snapping and killing each other?

An unprovoked desire to kill as many people of one's own species as possible is the antithesis of viable life. Any such species would never get to where we have and would quickly go extinct. 

[Askot Bokbondeler]

1
as i understand it, life is when a specific combination of chemicals react in a way that allows it to gather other chemicals from it's environment to produce similar combinations of chemicals to itself.

life is also simply a word, invented to describe the complex behaviour of complex objects. as we started to observe smaller, simpler versions of these objects we started fitting them into the same word, until it started to become difficult to decide what can still be described as life, but as it is simply a word, it is more of a taxonomical problem than a philosophical one.
classification makes a rock different from a giraffe



2
empathy. people with normal(ish) brain configurations like each other, and hate to see each other suffer due to a fairly strong animal instinct. this was nature's way of making us work together and probably forms the basis of social behaviours in mammals, or at least primates


wohoooo, ninja!

[Il Palazzo]

1. What is 'life', what makes a rock different from a giraffe?

The most basic definition of a living things as opposed to a nonliving things is that living things gather resources for the sake of self-replication and nonliving things do not.

That would include crystals.

No really, "life" is defined as being comprised of cells. That's it. That's why viruses aren't considered alive, by the way.

1. Life is when something is constructed from cells. It starts in mothers womb then ends when your vital organs stop functioning.

So, according to these definitions, cells themselves are not alive.

[MetalSlimeHunt]

1. What is 'life', what makes a rock different from a giraffe?

The most basic definition of a living things as opposed to a nonliving things is that living things gather resources for the sake of self-replication and nonliving things do not.

That would include crystals.

The most basic definition. Crystals don't mutate.

[kaijyuu]

No really, "life" is defined as being comprised of cells. That's it. That's why viruses aren't considered alive, by the way.

1. Life is when something is constructed from cells. It starts in mothers womb then ends when your vital organs stop functioning.

So, according to these definitions, cells themselves are not alive.

1 cell = comprised of cells.

I can certainly call my construction comprised of 1 lego brick a construction. It's a small one, very simple, but a construction non-the-less.

[MagmaMcFry]

For 2), I'd say that life is simply much more enjoyable after you don't go around killing people.

[Frumple]

The real answer to question number two is that the divine is aiming for the highest killcount it can manage, and realized it can get a much higher score if it sets up things so we just let vast populations die of apathy and/or neglect and/or exploitation before having everyone flip out and murder each other.

Altruism and sympathy is just a way to make sure the raw yearly dead number keeps growing. Need a higher base population to get the passive death count to rise, and those things keeps the short-term growth rolling in. Divine bastard's saving the serious coup counting for a ways down the line, after it's milked that fairly stable percentile as long as it can be milked.

[Il Palazzo]

@MSH:
Viruses gather resources(in the form of cells they're invading) for the sake of replication, and mutate. So do Memes with people's attention.

@kaijuu:
So, if I ask you why is a cell alive, you'd answer that it's composed of cells? That's hardly informative. Put yourself in Haspen's situation, and imagine if the kids would accept that answer.

[kaijyuu]

@kaijuu:
So, if I ask you why is a cell alive, you'd answer that it's composed of cells? That's hardly informative. Put yourself in Haspen's situation, and imagine if the kids would accept that answer.

A single cell organism is alive, because it's composed of cells. An errant skin cell falling off my arm, is not. Barring the microorganisms within me, there is only one living thing in my body: Me. This is despite being composed of billions of cells.

Back to my lego analogy, constructions are made up of legos, just as life is made up of cells. Life is an abstract concept just as constructions are.



I'm going to ignore all the various definitions of "alive" and stick to the "life" one described in the OP (difference between a giraffe and a rock), because if we want to get really pedantic about the word, lots of things are alive. Including stuff like enemies in video games, as their "alive" flag is switched to on.