ok so sorry if this sounds like a nonsensical rambling to you, i’ve just had an enlightenment
so for a while now i’ve known about the aristotelian 4 elements worldview that says that the world is composed of consecutive layers laying on top of each other.
there’s at least two variants of it: for the living and for the dead world. i.e. when you have living beings in the world or not. when there are living beings, the four layers are (from bottom to top): rocks, plants, animals, spirits (i.e. ideas / politics). each layer needs the lower one to feed itself, i.e. animals feed off plants. meanwhile they give resources to the upper layer to get their services, i.e. plants get their fruit eaten but get their seeds carried around.
for the dead, there’s four layers: rocks, water, air, energy (i.e. fire / sunlight). for example, the water corresponds to the plants because in every pond, algae start to grow etc.
now, what has bothered me is that rocks appear in both listings, which is weird. i think that the dirt is alive kinda solves this, because rocks (dead) and rocks (living) are not the same anymore. one is settled with microorganisms, the other one is not.
eh, idk whether that makes sense to you. have a nice day.
Reminds me of all the other quasi religious, nonscientific vibe-feelings for truth.
Word salad; sound and fury signifying nothing
Here this will give you a more reality-based picture of what we actually know about life and non-life
dude, i study biochemistry. you don’t have to tell me what is life and what isn’t
although there is an interesting philosophical question in it. are crystals (that grow in an aquatic solution) a form of life? they grow, anyways, therefore reproducing their pattern.
If you’ve ever done a cave tour (at least at the caves in California) they will very often ask you do not touch any of the walls or stalagmites because it’s “living rock” and oils from your hands can fuck up the formation of the minerals; essentially “killing” the rock.
The ability to categorise and tease out common attributes is one of the foundations of science because it lets you make predictions. If something is true of most plants then it is probably true of this specific plant. The next step beyond this primal science is to formulate a hypothesis and test it. If I combine these two metals they should have some of the properties of both sources. Let’s test that at different ratios and temperatures. The problem with Greek proto science is that it’s as much theology and guessing as observation, and they thought they could reason out nature without experimenting.
eh, there’s non-experimental science such as math.
yeah i’m aware of the benefits of experiments. still, claiming that all science is about doing experiments is … not accurate. there’s a whole lot of things such as literature reviews, where person B reads books that were written by people A1, A2, … so instead of having to perform their own experiments, they rely on the data of others.
now, an important point in this kind of literature review is that a secondary reader can often find aspects in the data that the first original author missed. and therefore generate new knowledge, without doing experiments.
now, i’m not saying that this is happening here. just adding to your comment.
No no, it’s the hills that are alive with the sound of music
In this framework, there are rocks of the living world and rocks of the dead world…. I think. If I understood that properly. As others have pointed out, this kind of 4 element framing isn’t very realistic or useful, but that’s beside the point. Let’s just work with within the confines of the concept to see where it takes us.
I would argue that the rocks of the living world don’t necessarily have to be alive. They just have to support the layer above, i.e plants.
Realistically though, plants don’t require a solid foundation at all. Hydroponic farming exists too, you know. Plants can grow on rocks that have been autoclaved, but usually they grow on natural soil that is full of living things.
yeah … i’m still not fully convinced. the model has its uses but also its weaknesses. a good use case is that it demonstrates both evolutionary history and short-term history.
like in evolution, microorganisms (that probably fed of rock) were the first living beings with a high likelihood (RNA world hypothesis). this is represented by the bottom layer in the model. then developed plants/cyanobacteria that could utilize sunlight (great oxidation event). only after that it was possible for complex life, including multicellular animals, to develop, which feed off the copious amounts of biomass that the plants produce. so the short-term dependency of animals on plants is in fact reflected in evolutionary history, where (complex) animals could also only develop after plants.
it is no accident that eukaryotes developed after cyanobacteria. also all complex (multicellular) life is based on eukaryotes.
and only then were rites and spirituality (or just call it brain) in animals developed.
When you view that concept as a timeline, it fits pretty well.
Microbes can utilise rocks to make life, but that doesn’t really make the rocks alive. There’s a layer of primitive life sustained by dead rocks, or elements leached off them. Hydrothermal vents are a good example of that.
even with hydroponics the plants need minerals
Not just any random minerals. Specific elements need to be dissolved in the water in order to be utilised as nutrients. Originally, they may have been in a solid form, but only ions are allowed into the cells.
Is it useful to be that reductive?
see my comment here: https://feddit.org/post/30902209/13377789
This sort of categorization doesn’t need to make sense or be consistent because it’s not real. Don’t try and figure it out. Just accept that rocks are in both.
If you’re going to go around thinking and applying logic to things, you’re going to just end up back at science.
Why isn’t water on both? That’s far more important to plant life than rocks.
I don’t think your layers make much sense.
