"Death is more universal than life; everyone dies but not everyone lives."

[MoQingbird]

Sorry, Gareth.  Not enough sleep and I realized this week that my local philosophy group is really just a dumping ground for opinions with precious little actual reading, research and thinking going on.

"I think blah, blah."

"Yeah, well I think blah, blah, so you're wrong."

"Am not!"

"Are so!"

It's making me a bit impatient with things like this:

What if you say"Life and death are two sides of the same coin, and everything must die in order for it to live

and this:

We've all had to die to be born in this world. For the first nine months of our lives we all lived in the world of the womb.

I didn't 'die' when I emerged from the womb, and 'life and death' are not flippable options - they're a one way transition.  If anyone has any evidence to the contrary then I'd be fascinated to see it.

[Gareth Southwell]

Well, I take your point, but I was just trying to encourage debate - and cut a new member some slack.

Actually, the distinction between life and death is not so unproblematic as you might imagine. This has two aspects. Firstly, there is the question of at what point something living becomes dead, which is a sort of sorites problem (when does a hill become a mountain). We face this in quite real terms relating to (e.g.) patients in states of irreversible coma.

Secondly, there is the question of what life is. Are there a set of features that define exactly what constitutes life? This is a problem concerning essentialism (that a concept must be absolutely and clearly definable). Perhaps no such definition is possible - as suggested by the case of viruses, for example - see http://serc.carleton.edu/microbelife/yellowstone/viruslive.html: "There is no precise definition of what separates the living from the non-living."

So, to return to the main question. If we can't define life, then we can't ultimately decide whether death is more universal than life - if we cannot distinguish between organic and inorganic processes, then life might be everywhere (not a very useful conclusion, admittedly). As for "everyone dies but not everyone lives", I think this is a less interesting statement - and seems a bit contradictory.

[Mark]

What I am trying to say is that life and death are different aspects of the same universal force, you can't have one without the other, And it doesn't matter what order you put them in, life/death. decay/growth, it's all part of one continuous cycle.
Death can't be more universal than life because they are both as universal as each other.

[Monsieur Vagabond]

I feel that this could be discussed rather more meaningfully, were to define strictly the use of words, as suggested at the beginning of this thread.

1) For my part I suggest the word dead could mean what it commonly refers to in science, and which is therefore accesible and intuitively understandable to all: Death is the termination of the biological functions that sustain a living organism.

2) Life, for my part could therefore be defined as: "all living organisms"

3) This obviously leads us on to the question of what is meant by a 'living organism', which we could define once again according to the definitions of science, which would be: an organism is any contiguous living system (such as animal, fungus, micro-organism, or plant). In at least some form, all organisms are capable of response to stimuli, reproduction, growth and development, and maintenance of homoeostasis as a stable whole.

4) Finally, we come to the meaning of 'universal'. This could be defined as the entire catalog of known living organisms (as defined above).

5) If we accept these definitions, then I would suggest that the question could be understood as: 'the death of living organisms is more universal than the life of living organisms', and if we include the subsequent addition, 'everyone dies but not everyone lives', we soon realise that all living organisms, bound by the laws of entropy, must die, but the 'not everyone lives' section of the proposition is absurd, given that 'everyone' must have been alive in order to have lived and in order to have received the term everyone.

Finally we come to the interesting part - which is that the author intended to be metaphorical, assigning a diversity of meanings to his terms. For more I shall come back later

[Monsieur Vagabond]

Of course we must always note that the assignment of meaning to words in any discussion happens when we 'intend' something.

In which case discussion is meaningless unless we agree on terms prior to discussing.

For example: I do not question the motives of a passerby who asks me for the time. I do not say: define time? I look at my watch and provide him with what he wants. We both know the definitions of the words we are using intuitively.

Since the intention of the original poster of the proposition is unknown to us, we must clarify this first before we begin discussion on the issue.

the issue is not what meaning to assign to the words, but what meaning one want's to assign to words, and therefore discussion.