The Animals That Exist Between Life and Death

This is what comes of trying to define binary, all-or-nothing categories in a world of continuous variation. Any sharp boundary you try to draw between "life" and "death" is going to have exceptions. Making heavy weather out of this, instead of recognizing "life" and "death" as approximate categories that are useful for many purposes but can break down at the edges, is just muddled thinking.

Why wouldn&#x27;t seeds also be considered in the same category?<p>Seeds also do not change or exhibit life, and can remain in that state for years, even centuries. But then, with water, they start to grow.<p>Could it not be considered the same mechanism, except that as these organisms are simpler than seeds and retain their shape (ie do not grow and change) and it is possible for these microscopic creatures to revert to the initial &#x27;seed state&#x27; then animated life repeatedly?

At some level, if you are capable of being revived, I think your death was prematurely reported, defined by being revived. But, if you are not revived from a quiescent state, now or into the future, is there a functional difference between being quiescent, and being dead?<p>Down at the viral level, if they crystallise, they&#x27;re stable. If they managed to get into rock in a crystallised state, how long would they remain stable? Do we define viruses as &quot;not alive&quot; now? or prions? or mitochondria?

Those rotifers might have inspired the 3-body problem&#x27;s concept of dehydration&#x2F;rehydration as a skill to survive cataclysms.

Is this different than wood frogs, whose heart freezes and stops beating until it thaws again?

The World of Null-A is a book where the binary vs non binary way of thinking is a core theme

“Philosophers are still grappling with the idea that life and death may not be the only states of being.”<p>Death isn’t a state of being. It is the <i>absence</i> of being. When something dies, it ceases to be. It loses its identity as the thing it was. That’s why, strictly speaking, when something dies, what we are left with is not a body, as only a living thing is or has a body, but the <i>remains</i> of what was once alive. So, in the case of rotifers, if they are alive, either they are hibernating or suspended, or reanimation really is the instantiation of a new rotifer. I am curious what kind of metaphysics these philosophers are leaning into, or why “living thing” entails the actual function of respiration, metabolism, etc. and not just the potential for these things, for example. A rock has no potential for these, but a desiccated rotifer does. (Modern philosophy has a problem dealing with potentiality, so this is not necessarily surprising.)<p>“At the time, fear of excommunication or condemnation by the Roman Catholic Church for publishing scientific observations that challenged Church doctrine impacted communication about new scientific findings.”<p>The perennial boogeyman of the Enlightenment. Publishing scientific findings did not get you excommunicated. Indeed, fundamental to Catholicism is the recognition that reason and faith cannot contradict. If a scientific finding could or would authentically contradict Catholic doctrine, then Catholicism would be undermined and there would be no meaning to excommunication. (Some will point to the punishment of Giordano Bruno, but he wasn’t charged for his scientific findings —— he was a crackpot —— but for his heretical theology. Others will bring up Galileo, but again, he wasn’t excommunicated and the whole affair concerned a decades-long conflict of a personal or political nature that Galileo himself enjoyed provoking and which ended with a cozy house arrest in his old age at a time when Protestants were burning witches in Northern Europe.) A tiresome cliche. Frankly, I’m not sure how rehydrated rotifers and tardigrades are supposed to threaten Catholic doctrine. Because someone used the word “resurrection”? So what? Sloppy thinking.