3.B. The Nature of Life

The Crater vs. The Snowflake: Johannes Kepler on Signs of Intelligent Life / Sarah ReynoldsJohannes Kepler discussed the possibility of extraterrestrial life multiple times throughout his published work in the early 1600s. While Kepler’s ideas about extraterrestrial life were tied to his theological understanding of the universe, he also took the circular lunar features (now known to be impact craters) seen through the telescope as possible evidence of such life, bringing his speculations into the realm of science. His analysis of the lunar craters provided one of the first scientifically-grounded and evidence-based arguments for the existence of extraterrestrial intelligence. However, Kepler’s discussion raises the question of how he saw the lunar “circles” as different from other phenomena, such as the six-sided snowflake, that he believed reflected a divine intelligence expressed in nature itself. We’ll consider what this early historical example reveals about the challenges of interpreting possible signals of extraterrestrial intelligence and the underlying assumptions embedded in such analyses. Re-imaging the Concept of Life: William James, Hans Driesch, and Swami Vivekananda / Chris Zajner Inquiries surrounding the question of what constitutes life have waned tremendously since the beginning of the twentieth century as a result of the productive success of mechanistic scientific investigation. Explorations beyond our planet have however opened up a new front to repose these types of questions. A novel scientific precipice, with little else but imagination to mediate its possibilities, confronts humankind with radical possibilities of extra-terrestrial ‘life’ forms. Assuming the inevitability of coming into contact with novel extra-terrestrial entities, profound questions on how to interact with them are pressing. In this paper, I wish to investigate the notion of ‘life’ in multiple aspects through the thought of the early 20th century philosophers William James, Hans Driesch and Swami Vivekananda. The pansyschist leaning of James provides an enlightening investigation into what entities may be conscious and our responsibilities to various types of consciousness. On the other hand, the vitalist ideas of Driesch provide the most thorough alternative to imagining a different perspective to life outside of the modern mechanistic model in science. And the Vedantic thought of Vivekananda provides a greater examination of the interrelation of life and spirituality. Looking into these thinkers is particularly productive as it allows reconstituting the question of life, through thinkers where the ‘scientific’ evidence of the day was an open question. With the possibility of encountering future entities which challenge the modern framework, having the imaginative capacity to creatively reconstitute our conception of life will be potentially very fruitful and there is no better way to do so by building upon past thought. Life on the Edges: A Neo-Eliminativist Approach to the Definition of Life / Shawn SimpsonOne of the central questions of biology is “What is life?” or put another way “What is it for something to be a living thing?”. The question has obvious importance for research in biology generally, but it becomes uniquely relevant when we start to ask questions about whether life exists on other planets. Humans and tigers are clearly living things, so are trees and algae, but what about cases on the borderline such as viruses? Many definitions of life have been proposed over the years. Some lean on growth or metabolism for identifying life (Miyakawa et al. 2002); others on the idea that a living thing must be part of the process of natural selection (Dawkins, 1976). Even NASA (2021) has proposed a rough definition. In this talk, I’ll look at the most prominent proposals for a definition of life and present some problems for each of them. In the end, I’ll argue, it turns out that none of these definitions will withstand careful scrutiny. What we should do instead is take a sort of “spectrum” view of life. In other words, there are paradigm and less paradigm cases of life but no real hard-and-fast boundaries. This view takes a sort of eliminativist approach to the concept of life but still leaves room for use of the term in less- precision demanding contexts. What this ultimately entails for astrobiology i a reorientation in the way we investigate the question of whether there really is life on other planets