I've always found it amusing how in our day-to-day lives we speak with such completely assured confidence of highly complex interactions, problems, phenomena, etc. that we know something is or isn't, yet we still struggle with far more basic/fundamental questions like "what is life?"
The thing I've always loved about pure science is that the best work is approached with much humility. We do not know what something is or why something is. We have a lot of data, may be able to predict a secondary behavior or predict a primary behavior fairly consistently, but that's a bandaid at best--we know it (hehe) and try to dig deeper. Outside of science, we tend to just "know" and brush off deviations from what we know as mysticism or something else.
Sometimes I wish I wasn't aware of how little I really know compared to what I'd like to know. When you peel away the facade of certainty in a lot of aspects of life, it's a bit disheartening to see how people treat each other based on the assumptions they often make of such falsely placed certainty.
I don't think struggling to define the definition of life is a matter of not knowing or knowing. It's simply us attempting to impose our invented taxonomy on nature and reality.
Indeed. I really like the way Feynman explained how nature doesn’t care about what models or descriptions we come up with. Nature just is. This made me look at physics and science in a whole new perspective.
There are so many phenomena that are beyond human intellect, intuition, and language that the best we can do is to observe and marvel. It doesn’t mean that we should give up trying to seek explanation or modeling of observed reality, just that don’t be dogmatic about it.
I think it's more an issue of how language and human brains work, than features of the world around us.
The concepts behind words in human languages are extremely fuzzy and ambiguous. That is why progress on computational linguistics was stuck for a long time, until researchers started using statistical models.
This fuzzy and ambiguous way of modeling the world seems to better fit whatever it is our brains do. The definition of what is or isn't "life" is fuzzy and ambiguous, because however the concept is encoded in our brains is fuzzy and ambiguous.
The thing I've always loved about pure science is that the best work is approached with much humility. We do not know what something is or why something is. We have a lot of data, may be able to predict a secondary behavior or predict a primary behavior fairly consistently, but that's a bandaid at best--we know it (hehe) and try to dig deeper. Outside of science, we tend to just "know" and brush off deviations from what we know as mysticism or something else.
Sometimes I wish I wasn't aware of how little I really know compared to what I'd like to know. When you peel away the facade of certainty in a lot of aspects of life, it's a bit disheartening to see how people treat each other based on the assumptions they often make of such falsely placed certainty.