Reclassifying Life

It's hardly possible to have any type of meaningful discourse on death and afterlife without speaking directly about life itself and what it means to be living. 

Current science models explain the universe as a physical one, where particles are interracting with gravity and other particles all the time, and thus emerges our view of the world.    This is an oversimplification of it, but for the sake of time, its the definition we embrace as covering the world with which our tactile senses interact.  Consequently, we currently define life as the quality that identifies forms of matter that have biological systems and processes from those that do not.   So in this way, we have defined the universe as a real model that contains real agents who are alive because their particles are parts of systems that containe processes and produce output that distinguish them from other non-alive agents.   

If you're scratching your head about this, then you're not alone. 

You can clearly see how this definition of life has created boudaries and limitations for us that plausibly have inhibited (or even prevented) an accurate view of the world/universe in which we live.  In other words, the above definition says "it's alive because it isn't NOT alive, and the real world is only what we can see/hear/touch/taste/smell."

Yeah. 

Um, no. 

It's time we relearn everything we thought we knew about what it means to be alive. 

Good news, though. There is already work being done in this general direction.   Christopher Kempes and David Krakauer have proposed that life is not a universal homology.      While this sounds good, it's actually groundbreaking, because these researchers go on to postulate that we may, in fact, be co-existing with multitudinous life forms on Earth, even right now.    Re-read that, please.  We may be coexisting with a multitude of life forms right now - even if we don't experience those life forms.  

This right here - this single, powerful concept - has to become the way we view life if we're ever going to move away from the tired, recycled definition of death that has been handed down to us over the course of millenia.  Life isn't just biological metabolic processes that churn out information in the form of DNA.  It isn't just electrical impulses that create equal and opposite reactions in particles nearby.    In fact, life might be something we don't even understand yet at all, and if that's the case, then you can be sure that death isn't anything at all like what it currently appears to be. 

I know I've written before about redefining life and giving it a new name, but I really do think we have to start at this most basic level if we want to progress to another.  If we want to truly understand what happens when biomechanical life wanes, we have to get past looking at life as if it is nothing more than a series of reactionary processes that are based only in biology.  And we have to stop seeing death as an ending of some type.  Because both of these premises are inaccurate. 

It isn't an accident, I suppose, that our early attempts to reclassify life as something bigger than just biological processes comes at the beginning of our twilight as a culture with the developed spirituality of selfish toddlers.   I believe (indeed, I hope) that these early attempts to look at things differently means that we're starting to understand that we don't know what we don't know, and that the possibilities this leaves open to us are virtually endless.