"In the same arrangement" is the key issue with your premise. Exactly what has been rearranged to turn your live petunia into a dead petunia will vary depending on the particulars of its COD.
Sure, but from a materialist pov the matter is still there. It just isn't moving, homeostating, growing, developing, et al. "It's dead, Jim."
At this point, the dedicated materialist must start to pretend that immaterial things like "processes" or "osmosis" or the like are just as material as the limbs, petals, cells, etc. That would be like saying that the three-sidedness of a green, felt triangle is just as material as the felt. Or that the arrangement of electrons into shells is just as material as the electrons themselves. That's why so many have rechristened themselves as "physicalists."
"In the same arrangement as a live petunia." When you make this statement, you explicitly claim that the ion gradients are intact, proteins are not denatured, substrates for reactions such as Kreb and Calvin are at homeostatically copacetic concentrations, DNA is undamaged, metabolic poisons are not binding electron transport chain components, cells have not committed to apoptosis, lipid bilayers are intact, and so forth.
Organisms do not simply "give up the ghost" for no reason. An event occurs (matter is "rearranged," in your terminology) and the chemical reactions that maintain homeostasis are inhibited. If the insult to homeostasis is not recoverable, then a variety of "rearrangements" continue to accumulate until we call the organism in question dead.
If its matter has not been "rearranged," then your petunia is frozen, not deceased.
Exactly. "Rearrangement" implies a change of form, not of matter. The same stuff is still there. Most of the arrangements you note are not material, much like noting that the murder victim has a bullet hole in his head. (I am not entirely sure whether living organisms might not suffer from some of the maladies you list. Surely DNA is damaged all the time; otherwise the Darwinian engine shuts down.)
I am not sure where you think I said organisms "'give up the ghost' for no reason." What Aristotelian could say such a thing. It is the Late Modern/Post Modern who routinely insists that things can happen with no cause.
But I see where you are using "arrangement" in the extended sense of "formal cause."
When you say "in the same arrangement," then, assuming I am translating your terminology correctly, you are claiming that the dead petunia has the same "formal cause" as the live petunia, however some efficient cause has moved the petunia from the state of being alive to the state of being dead, much as an efficient cause might move the petunia from the state of being on the floor to the state of being on the tabletop
( ... )
Only in part. The form of a living being is much more complex than that of an inanimate one, though it is clear the body possesses its powers from its form, and not from its matter. A living petunia has the so-called vegetative form and possesses the four powers of homeostasis, metabolism, growth/differentiation, and reproduction in addition to the inanimate powers of gravity, electromagnetism, nuclear, and weak.
Once an entity is dead, its vegetative powers cease. It no longer maintains homeostasis, no longer metabolizes, no longer grows or differentiates, no longer reproduces. This should be clear. From now on the petunia acts like an inanimate object: a bag of chemicals, as it were. Its proteins become denatured, and so on. Once this begins to happen the matter is transformed through decay and other processes.
However, the matter of the petunia is the same immediately after death as it was before death. It is all the same parts, as I have said, and still (at least for a time) in more or less the same arrangement. As
( ... )
So in your model, the death of the petunia precedes the loss of these vegetative powers?
More precisely, the death of the petunia is the loss of these powers, which are proper to the form (or entelechia, iirc). The form is called in Latin "anima" (a quo "animate").
Not quite, because the petunia, dead or alive, is also a bag of chemicals, and the inanimate form possesses its own powers. The petunia's form is a unification of the inanimate and the vegetative. And we might also note that it is specifically a petunia and not a generic vegetative being, so the generic form is not all she wrote. Aside from those and similar considerations, the form is what gives a thing its powers.
Then, to translate from your Aristotelian model, what you call the "form" of the petunia is more specifically a particular spatial configuration (position and orientation, energy and bonds) of all of the ions, atoms, and molecules in the petunia. The continuous rearrangement of these particles as they react (or simply interact) with one another (and with the non-petunia world) comprises the "powers" (i.e., particular array of autocatalyses) of the petunia, derived from a combination of its current spatial configuration and the "inanimate" chemical properties of its constituents. When the petunia falls into a configuration that fails to support its vegetative powers/autocatalytic reactions, we call the petunia dead.
Not exactly. Matter must also be understood in context. But the point remains that what you call an interaction is not itself matter. Like gravity, it is something else than matter per se. Perhaps I should do a full post on this issue.
I used the word "interact" to differentiate between chemical reactions where traditional ionic, covalent, and hydrogen bonds are formed and those based on (for example) properties like hydrophobicity which organize the lipid bilayer of the cell membrane and anchor membrane proteins in a functional orientation
( ... )
But such things are in fact immaterial. Something material is liklely to have mass or weight, location or place, dimension, and so on. Gravity, for example, is known through the behavior of matter, but gravity is not itself a material thing. Or take the arrangement of pool balls just before the break. The pool balls are material, but their triangular arrangement is not a material thing. Or to riff on Billy Ockham's famous example: a father exists and a son exists but the relationship "fatherhood" does not have material existence. Molecules are material, but the vibration of molecules is not itself a material thing. (Otherwise you run into the Vibration-Molecule interaction problem, a parallel to the Mind-Body interaction problem.)
If we define "material" entities in the sense that materialists do--as entities with detectable properties from which their interactions proceed--then gravity belongs to a material understanding of the universe. It is readily detectable. I'm detecting it right now. Your other examples are similarly detectable by various methods. In fact, one might go so far as to say that gravity is known not so much through the behavior of matter as that matter is known through the behavior of its properties and interactions (including gravitation
( ... )
Reply
At this point, the dedicated materialist must start to pretend that immaterial things like "processes" or "osmosis" or the like are just as material as the limbs, petals, cells, etc. That would be like saying that the three-sidedness of a green, felt triangle is just as material as the felt. Or that the arrangement of electrons into shells is just as material as the electrons themselves. That's why so many have rechristened themselves as "physicalists."
Reply
Organisms do not simply "give up the ghost" for no reason. An event occurs (matter is "rearranged," in your terminology) and the chemical reactions that maintain homeostasis are inhibited. If the insult to homeostasis is not recoverable, then a variety of "rearrangements" continue to accumulate until we call the organism in question dead.
If its matter has not been "rearranged," then your petunia is frozen, not deceased.
Reply
I am not sure where you think I said organisms "'give up the ghost' for no reason." What Aristotelian could say such a thing. It is the Late Modern/Post Modern who routinely insists that things can happen with no cause.
But I see where you are using "arrangement" in the extended sense of "formal cause."
Reply
Reply
Once an entity is dead, its vegetative powers cease. It no longer maintains homeostasis, no longer metabolizes, no longer grows or differentiates, no longer reproduces. This should be clear. From now on the petunia acts like an inanimate object: a bag of chemicals, as it were. Its proteins become denatured, and so on. Once this begins to happen the matter is transformed through decay and other processes.
However, the matter of the petunia is the same immediately after death as it was before death. It is all the same parts, as I have said, and still (at least for a time) in more or less the same arrangement. As ( ... )
Reply
Reply
More precisely, the death of the petunia is the loss of these powers, which are proper to the form (or entelechia, iirc). The form is called in Latin "anima" (a quo "animate").
Reply
Reply
Reply
Reply
Reply
Reply
Reply
Reply
Reply
Leave a comment