A Rational Cosmology: The Consistency of Life's Continuity with Its Physical Nature

Essay LXXVI

This is Essay LXXVI of Mr. Stolyarov's series, "A Rational Cosmology," which seeks to present objective, absolute, rationally grounded views of terms such as universe, matter, volume, space, time, motion, sound, light, forces, fields, and even the higher-order concepts of life, consciousness, and volition. See the index of all the essays in "A Rational Cosmology" here.

Some opponents of the physicalist view of life claim that because life is a continuous process, but the physical parts of the living organism change on a regular basis, it follows that life itself cannot be physical.

Yet, as we shall examine here, life's continuity is in fact entirely consistent with its physical nature, because a living organism is a physical system in which multiple fungible parts can perform the same function -- being successively replaced without disrupting the system's functionality.

In his essay, "Life," Mr. Reginald Firehammer further tries to bring up "evidence" as to the non-physical nature of life, volition, and consciousness:

"Continuity-whether it is life or consciousness, an organism has the same one moment to moment, day to day, and year to year. It is the same life and the same consciousness from the moment it becomes conscious until it dies. It is because consciousness and life are not physical this is true. Notice, the physical characteristics of an organism can change. Hypothetically, all of the physical parts could be changed, but it would still be the same organism, because it would still be the same life process and the same consciousness. It is the life process that is the independent existence that identifies the organism as a particular organism, not the physical components, and consciousness is an attribute of life."

This is true because what is alive, conscious, and volitional is the system and not any one component. So long as one entity in the system is replaced by another fungible entity (i.e., one capable of performing the same functions and exhibiting the fundamentally same nature as the entity it replaces), the same system continues to function.