Aliveness

[bralbovsky]

Out in Captain Picard's Universe, this is a slippery question, what with viruses and gardi bears, and whatnot. I'm not wrestling with that today.

More mundanely, and closer to home, what parts of us are alive?
Hair, no. outer layers, etc, all dead (maybe once alive?) All cells are alive, of course, animal cell. plant cells, until they're not. Heart cells, liver cells, and muscle cells, all self repair and self replicate, just like an amoeba.
Blood cells, however, don't make other blood cells. That's done by special structures in the marrow. And brain cells don't replicate. (I could have 1970s bio information on this, help me) They're replaced by some stem cell process. Is there a special classification for a kind of cell that if you segregate it and slide it into a supportive media, it just sits there?
And is this a different classification of aliveness than the traditional amoeba one?

[mimekiller]

only tangentially connected to the topic but I was always curious of the tech behind Star Trek ships "scanning for intelligent lifeforms"

[Bonefish]

Man, what is intelligent? Language? Crows and Whales got that. Great apes too.

Tool making? Crows, great apes, octopi.

Problem solving? More stuff.

Hell, crows can be BARTERED with

[bralbovsky]

Elephants too.

My modified Witcher definition of sentience includes any creature that demonstrates attachment, expectation or awareness of relatives more than one generation way, so ritual and caregiving and memorials and transfer of knowledge would include any but the octopi in that list, although I'm sure they belong to the cthulu branch of civilization, I think they'd require a different metric.

The cell thing grew out of trying to figure out what the smallest unit of personhood would be, given amputees, thalidomide and a deep uncertainty about brain death.

[Mike]

Is a seed still alive? Like, I picture life as this constant cycle of life begetting life, but what about the seed that has lain inert for years but can still produce life. Is it alive?

[bralbovsky]

So in the biology I recall, the properties were
growth (I'd take potential for growth),
respiration (which can be expanded to include any exchange with the outside world for the purpose of maintenance, outgoing as well as input)
Sensitivity or response to outside stimuli (I' put internal stimuli as well, so homeostasis)
Reproduction (Even if it means hijacking some other mechanism)

I think I'm missing one or combined, but that was pretty much the test. How many points equals a legal ID?

something being part of a larger organization, like a blood cell that lives for 90 days and then it's done, might qualify. It does perform other pieces of the test, but if this fragmentary quality is real, what's to say that there aren't pieces of things that are so huge we can't conceive or measure them, or things we simply don't understand as organisms (Agent Smith, I'm looking at you)

Several computers can be said to pass these tests.

[bralbovsky]

A viable seed, therefore, yes, because we also haven't established a period of response.