Comment on Does Consciousness Disappear in Dreamless Sleep?
pjhenry1216@kbin.social 1 year agoyes, the definition changes. it used to mean one point. now it means a point 10 miles away. come on. simple substitution. if you define it only with relative terms then its poorly defined as there's no actual concrete meaning. so you either have a poorly defined term or you have a term that has changed meaning over time. which still makes it poorly defined. i don't know how else to explain it. so i'm going to leave it here. this is going in circles.
jarfil@lemmy.world 1 year ago
I think I know what you mean, but plenty of terms have relative definitions (“behind”, “bright”, “x+1”, “etc”… etc). If you’re looking for an absolute point, you won’t find one, because their meaning is the relationship itself.
Both “life” and “death” define a state relative to another. The definition of “life” is a particularly tricky one, because it includes multiple relative definitions like “growth”, “reaction”, “functioning”, and a “reproduction” that includes both cloning and “imperfect” cloning. Being “death” the opposite, it’s necessarily as relative and tricky too.
pjhenry1216@kbin.social 1 year ago
Which is the crux of this whole conversation. We don't have an actual definition of death. It's all relative and changing over time.
jarfil@lemmy.world 1 year ago
What surprises me, is you wouldn’t accept the relative/changing definition as a valid definition itself.
Guess that could be an interesting conversation, potentially shedding some light on different worldviews… but I don’t really know where to begin. Curious.
pjhenry1216@kbin.social 1 year ago
I refer you back to my original comment involving the impact of not having a good definition of death and what that causes.
Your definition does not clarify any of the resulting problems arising from trying to define all the other concepts.
It's a good definition for some scenarios, but not at all or in any way, this one.