For most of my life, I pondered the nature of the distinction between things that are alive and things that are not alive.  Whatever definition of life I devised, I could always think of an exception.  Mobility?  Some living things don't move.  Some non-living things do move, although not necessarily under their own power.  However, some living things also move only under the influence of external forces.  So, mobility isn't a good distinction between what is alive and what isn't alive.  Breathing? Plants and animals transfer gases very differently from one another.  Even if you ignore plants and consider only animals, eventually you have to reduce the concept of breathing down to the process of respiration — consuming a fuel, releasing energy, and producing waste in the presence of oxygen. A burning log does the same thing.  Reproduction? Some living things don't reproduce.  Mules and some women that I've known come to mind.  The fact is that a general and unambiguous definition of the distinction between what is alive and what isn't alive remained elusive for many years.

Eventually, sometime during the year 2005, I reduced the idea to the simplest form that I could imagine.  I sat aside all of the various characteristics by which we intuitively decide if something is alive or not alive.  I based a tentative definition on the simplest and most pragmatic feature of life that I could imagine.  I speculated that if a thing can die or be killed, then it is a living thing.  If a thing cannot die or be killed, then it is a non-living thing.  It's such a simple test for life that it took me decades to think of it.

After that, I spent some time thinking about the nature of killing something. You can crush a man or you can crush a rock.  To crush the man does kill the man.  To crush the rock doesn't kill the rock.  Thus, to merely disrupt the form of something doesn't necessarily define the killing of the thing. Furthermore, you can disrupt the form of a man at least to some extent, as for example with amputation, and still not kill the man.  So, the essence of killing a thing doesn't reside in changes in or destruction of its form. The essence of killing a thing resides in terminating the process that exists within the form.  After that, I had my definition.  If a thing has a form in which a process is under way, and if the process can be terminated without necessarily disrupting the form of the thing, then the thing is alive.

The definition was a good one.  It was general and unambiguous.  However, I failed to consider all of its consequences.  Eventually, I mentioned the idea to Sir James the Bold.  It took him only a few minutes to notice either a problem with the definition or a startling consequence of it.  That is, my definition applies exactly as well to a running automobile engine as it does to a man.  Thus, according to my definition, a car is a living thing. At first, I was a little skeptical.  Then, I got to thinking about his point. It's a fact that we've long applied the terminology of life to our artifacts. When an automobile engine stops running, we say that it died.  If we want somebody to turn off a light, we might tell him to kill it.  We talk about our computers remembering things.  We refer to malfunctioning appliances as getting sick.  Not only that, we frequently communicate with our artifacts. Consider that a man is just as likely to talk to his lawn mower as a woman is to talk to her geraniums.  It isn't even a new idea.  Science fiction is rife with tales of machines taking over the world, of electronic systems becoming self-aware, and so forth.¹

I documented my thoughts in the January 2006 Frontiersman in an article titled Gods Ourselves. In that article, I suggested that maybe there's more to it than terminology.  It's as if we've unconsciously recognized the existence of a life form without consciously admitting it.  In that case, we've actually created life and we're Gods ourselves.  After I published the article, I continued to ponder the notion.  I can't think of a better definition than the one mentioned herein.  Since it's the best definition presently available, and until a better one comes along, we must necessarily accept all of its implications and consequences.  Thus, we must accept the idea that our artifacts are alive.  They're alive in a different way than we are but in a way that's just as real and just as valid.  We've created a new form of life.  My acceptance of that idea opened the way for yet another clarification of previous pondering.

Some time ago, back during the 1980s, Sir Donald the Elusive and I characterized corporations as overcreatures.  By that name, we intended to indicate the many life-like features of corporations.  They seek resources and consume things that they need in order to sustain themselves.  They produce products and generate waste.  They grow.  They compete with others of their kind. Sometimes, they die in the competition.  The winners might consume the losers or maybe just leave them to rot.  Sometimes corporations reproduce.  The form of reproduction is asexual but it's nevertheless a form of reproduction. Corporations have sense organs.  They detect and respond to stimuli from outside of themselves.  They communicate with one another.  The people who work within them serve functions that are analogous to the functions of cells in a biological organism.  Those people don't have any more control over the corporations of which they are a part than the cells in your body have over you.  The various departments within a corporation serve functions that are analogous to the functions of organs in a biological organism. In almost every way, corporations behave as if they are alive.  Thus, Sir Donald and I coined the term overcreature.

My definition of a living thing requires that in order to be alive a thing must have a form in which there is a process under way that can be terminated without disrupting the form of the thing.  A corporation satisfies the definition.  Granted, the form of a corporation isn't as contiguous as that of an automobile engine or of an amoebae.  The nuts and the bolts (or the vacuoles and the cytoplasm) don't always touch one another.  Nevertheless, the form exists and it is tangible.  It consists of people, buildings, land, equipment, and so forth.  Not only that, it's possible for a corporation to stop functioning without any loss of any part of its physical form. Thus, a corporation entirely satisfies my definition of a living thing. Corporations are therefore alive.

So, we're accompanied on this planet by at least two other forms of life.  At last, we know that we are not alone.  Given that, it's reasonable to speculate further.  What other forms of life exist on this planet that, so far, we've failed to recognize?

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Also, see my essay The Lone Raver Writes Again.   Back