Why are we alive if everything that makes us is "dead".

[Doughboy]

I think about this a lot, the fact that we're just mistakes in chemistry

mistakes or great successes

[Ad Bot]

[Maxwell.]

mistakes or great successes

unplanned mistakes

[Jubel]

your soul has nothing to do with your body but make it live and inhabit your personality and w/e

if a soul has nothing to do with my body then why does it control it; thats a paradox.
it also doesnt make sense with any laws of how things work.

However the soul does exist. Maybe not in the same sense youre thinking, but moreso to help explain our apparent freedom of action. It exists as a concept, but is it an actual physical thing?

Granted the big answer is "we don't know" but it is fun to think about.

[McZealot]

Life is something that progresses towards complexity and maintenance rather than chaos. The universe makes no progress over time. A rock does not become more complex. A mouse can turn into a human though. It preforms maintenance, grows, becomes more complex.

Eg; life is somethings that preforms maintenance in order to evolve.

But I guess you could then argue a complex computer program is alive. Maybe it is.

[Snoop Da Dogg]

[Headcrab Zombie]

A mouse can turn into a human though.

wut

[phflack]

I think of it more like an atom
atoms are the smallest unit that retain their properties, split it further and it no longer retains those properties
kind of like life in a way, one subsystem (ie digestive) doesn't retain the properties of a full live system (ie person)

a person is really just a lot of smaller subsystems put together, like an atom is a lot of smaller bits put together

Since everything in itself is a chain reaction of chemical reactions, does that mean the future is pre-determined by the reactions going on in your wang cells right now? Is there actually a free will because of that?

I view the universe as on a loop, the big crunch theory
eventually gravity will pull everything back together, and if it has the same orientation as it once had before, with the same velocities and energies and everything, then it should have the same lifecycle going forward
and because of that everything is predetermined
but at the same time, I view free will as being able to do what we want, but what we want is predetermined, so we do have free will to do what is predetermined

[Bluesax]

Fallacy of composition

[McZealot]

wut

It's an example of something called Evolution.
For more information: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evolution

[Refticus]

how can mirrors exist if our eyes aren't real

[MYST]

calm down jaden smith

[77x5ghost2]

my brain is jammed

i think it crashed

[ultimamax]

In biology, something qualifies for life when it meets these criteria
heredity
response to stimuli
able to reproduce
homeostasis
evolution
metabolism
growth

As for philosophically, it gets tricky. Are viruses alive? They're essentially DNA/RNA delivery devices, almost like automatons, where is the line drawn? Viruses also can't reproduce with eachother (they rely on infection) but they meet most of the criteria. If we ever discover alien life I imagine it'll nullify our definition somewhat I bet as well.

I don't really find this question "mindblowing", this seems like Philosophy 101 stuff.

[ZombiLoin]

Life and death are, on the biological level, just a difference in states. If we're able to (see post above) then we're alive. If we're not we're dead.

[SeventhSandwich]

What makes humans human is our organization. If you took all of our molecules and mixed them up randomly, we would be dead instantly. However, what keeps us living isn't the molecules we're made of but the way they're arranged. We're just little complex jigsaw puzzles fighting against the inexorably rising tide of entropy in the universe, and we're humans just so long as the picture on the puzzle is recognizable.