Emergence (NOVA 2-2)

"A property of a complex system is said to be emergent just in case, although it arises out of the properties and relations characterizing its simpler constituents, it is neither predictable from, nor reducible to, these lower-level characteristics." - Prof. Jaegwon Kim, Oxford Companion to Philosophy

http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/properties-emergent/

Category:

Education

Tags:

• emergence
• emergent
• properties
• complexity
• consciousness
• life
• simplicity
• nova
• pbs

[themilitantatheist]

Rubbish.

If we could repair the body to a state say 10 minutes before death, the correct "cascade" of states would follow from this initial state and the body would be "back alive". Life is just a process, there is no magic dust to be found inside us, or anything for that matter.

[CO2Junkie]

stevietster: The damage that you're looking to fix is on the cellular level. You'd have to study up on molecular biology. Your question cannot possibly be answered in 500 characters.

In short, damage begins to build up in cells immediately. It'd be like putting your laptop into a trash compactor & trying afterward to 'fix it'. In terms of biology, your body represents billions of miniature laptops. You'd have to fix most of them to reanimate a person... in other words, entropy is a bitch.

[thirdeyecandy]

brilliant.

[rainbowofhazes]

There also the matter of aging that needs to be taken into account. Sure if someone has a heart condition and would die because of it when the rest of their body is healthy you can prolong their life with the surgery, but once the telomeres run out the cell duplication in the body will become more and more erroneous over time leading to failures in all systems. In theory you can alter the gene responsible for telomere production so they get longer and longer, already being worked on with mice.

[DoubleDutchBust]

2:00pm Monday (CST) - Time in Mississippi, United States of America

[mosbackr]

That is the dumbest thing I've ever heard.

[PoJonez]

No.

[ericv00]

Brain death is permanent. When a cell dies it is utterly destroyed, and nerve cells do not replicate beyond a certain age. You can not repair cells, only help cells that CAN replicate reestablish and "repair" the damage done to tissue. A brain transplant doesn't work because there is nerve damage to the place you severed the brain from the rest of the nervous system. Adult nerve cells cannot replicate and reestablish a connection to the body. We can only "minimize brain damage" not repair it

[garouHH]

Did you even try to understand what I said from "However" on? This movie isn't about the life of the individual, it is about the pattern of life, about biochemistry emerging from quantum mechanics, about selfreplicators and evolution.

Also, if someone stays dead, it's because of some terminal damage in their biological system. *That* is why people die, why they stay dead. As you said yourself: We can do *some* repairs. Not all.

[garouHH]

Again, we could reanimate dead bodies if we could repair all the damage and bring it into an operating state. While for the latter some electroshocking should be enough, we can't do the repair part yet, and that's all there is to it. However, "life" here didn't refer to the individual state of life or death, but to the class of complex phenomena we humans have in hindsight labeled life.