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Comment by bjourne | Hacker News Reader

Some microbiologists think they are alive: https://www.nature.com/articles/454677a Others don't think so: https://virology.ws/2020/12/03/pandoraviruses-are-not-alive/

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I find that these conversations are almost always backwards, as "is X alive" actually handled as "should we consider X as alive".

That is we are not trying to discover whether a thing is alive or not, we are trying to decide what Alive means.

This confusion creates the illusion that terms like Life, consciousness, emotions, reflexes, etc. are well defined while they in practice are not.

There is no such thing as alive, the word is a human invention. We can decide what the word means.

That was my the point, these conversations are linguistically phrased as trying to estabilish if something is alive but are actually structured as a debate on what "alive" means

Its a semantic argument. People agree on how these things work, they don't agree on defining it as one way or another. I'm in favor of viruses being a form of life. The argument against them being a form of life is that they can't replicate themselves without a host. To that I say, neither can us humans. Go on, sit in a field and try and replicate yourself without a host. It can't be done. Ergo, according to some virologist, you are not alive. Whether that host is a cell or another parent is semantics, since its the same situation just at a different level of abstraction essentially (whole organism vs microbe).

I think it’s just a discussion about terminology. Finding something like a virus on mars (and actually recognizing it), would be a huge breakthrough.

> Finding something like a virus on mars (and actually recognizing it), would be a huge breakthrough.

I hope it wouldn’t be a huge breakthrough for the virus

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