You can't walk behind a lawn mower for three hours without your mind sort of leaving your body and exploring the many thoughts that appear and disappear seemingly on their own, at least I can't. Yesterday the thought of death occupied a sizable portion of my three hours. Not in a fearful or gloomy way mind you, but as a checklist of things I have done and still need to do to have my affairs in order when my time comes.
Many people are uncomfortable talking about death. If you mention to someone that you're planning for death the likely response will be, "Don't worry about it!...you look healthy...strong as an ox and will live to 100". It's like an admonishment that you shouldn't be thinking about death, the assumption being that you're afraid of dying. I'm not. Over 99% of all the people who have ever lived are dead. Everyone alive today will die. Everyone not yet born will die. It's not an exclusive club. My turn will come and to me it only makes sense to have my affairs in order. Planning for death has no more impact on me than planning a trip. Both start with a check list...GPS programed, check- gas tank full, check - hotel reservations made, check. There's no difference.
So I'm going to die, but right now I am a part of that tiny, infinitesimal group of people who in the scope of the universe's infinite past and future are alive at this very moment. But what does it mean to be 'alive'? What is life? Biologists, theologists and philosophers since the time of Aristotle in 350 BC and probably before then have been trying to come up with a working definition of life. To this day no one has succeeded, at least not to the point where there is agreement. It's easy to define life by its attributes and characteristics - what it looks and feels like, what it has and what it does, but that doesn't describe what it is that has those attributes and characteristics. It's like describing an elephant by saying that its big, makes a trumpeting sound, eats foliage and poops a lot. That doesn't get it.
I was about two hours into my lawn mowing task when the epiphany occurred. I came up with a definition of life, one that is so simple that I'm certain many people have thought of it and discarded it. And yet I can't think of a way to refute it. The definition I arrived at is:
Life as we know it is a self-sustaining chemical process.
That's it. That's all there is. You can try to go further but before too long you'll find yourself getting wrapped around the axle on the attributes and characteristics path. What you can say is that at some point that self-sustaining process breaks down on the individual level. Armed with my definition of life, defining death is easy. Death is the cessation life. Just like dark is the absence of light and cold is the absence of heat. Dark, cold and death are the normal state of things. Light, heat and life are transitory.
Having satisfied myself that I had come up with some good, practical definitions I switched my focus to mowing around that pesky sapling cedar that I intend to cut down when it occurred to me that I had ignored the big question. What is it that is thinking these thoughts? Is it that same self-sustaining chemical process that powers life? Somehow I don't think so. Bacteria have life but apparently not awareness. Many of the lower life forms don't exhibit the ability to reason.
Googling words such as awareness, consciousness, senscient only lead to definitions that begin with...consciousness, awareness, etc is the ability to blah blah. Again, trying to describe something by it attributes and characteristics, rather than focusing on what it is.
I think that it is going to be a long, long time before we determine the source of consciousness. I'll probably take another shot at it during my next mowing session, but I'm not hopeful of finding the answer.
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