"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."
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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."
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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.
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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."
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