Thread:User talk:Armondikov/Life, the Universe and Everything/reply (3)

I don't think you need to get particularly new-agey to think about it and perhaps get your mind blown by possibilities. Perhaps it is "alive", as indeed scope limits our understanding a lot so we might not be able to observe the properties of life in a way we'd recognise any more than a single individual cell could recognise our emergent consciousness. Perhaps, although I wouldn't worry about it too much.

Of course, I think this works best if we keep the hardcore rationalist hat firmly on to think about it. Because if you think "ah, but the world is alive!!" you get a woo-flavoured Gaia Hypothesis that's meaningless because you haven't quite figured out what you mean by "alive" yet and are simply triggering you "life" category without triggering the properties... on the other hand, if you think that emegent properties can appear on larger scales, think China brain, then we have some really interesting possibilities to the universe we can explore.

Also, obligatory: http://xkcd.com/505/