The Meaning of "Life"

I'm the compiler of  <www.Clockworks2.org>, a wiki on "The Human/Machine Interface in SF," which is based on Clockworks: A Multimedia Bibliography of Works Useful for the Study of the Human/Machine Interface in SF — that "Multimedia Bibliography" phrase is the publisher's; we called it a "List" (Greenwood Press, 1993). 

The end of the 20th century was a time when literary studies were getting a heavy dose of Philosophy, and respectable scholars by God were to Define your terms! My writing partner, Thom Dunn, and I hadn't always done so and had taken a little guff for the failure. So in the Introduction to Clockworks, toward the end of our Introduction, pretty safe from the eyes of most readers and, we figured, all those unpaid academic reviewers, we wrote this, defining the last part of our subtitle:

In SF. In our Abbreviations, we differentiate between "SF" and "S.F." "S.F." is "science fiction," and SF is "science fiction" plus related genres such as eutopias, dystopias, some fantasy, and some horror. In our earlier volumes The Mechanical God [Greenwood 1982] and Clockwork Worlds [GP 1983], we declined to define "science fiction" and noted the comparable inability of biologists to define "life," of attorneys to define "tort" let alone Justice, of mathematicians to define "point" — and we noted the generations of literary critics who have discussed comedy and tragedy without ever coming up with standard definitions of those terms. Here, we recommend a definition of "life" Erlich heard somewhere and liked: "The process by which entropy is reversed, locally and temporarily, in a volume both in contact with and set off from surrounding space-time"; but we still decline to define "science fiction."

Although we did give some indications of where we set the SF borders.

It was a joke, with a bit of a "Screw you" to the pedants: we won't define "science fiction," but we will tell you The Meaning of Life.

Over the years, a close friend or two with strong backgrounds in the relevant sciences, and strong tendencies toward the wise-ass, has or have suggested an example or two that fit the definition but are obviously inorganic (crystals forming in a sack or "sac" that's a semi-permeable membrane ... and such). 

Okay, but this much in my defense, sort of, and to complete the story with the probable source of the biology-lore I passed along. From Jessica Riskin's The Restless Clock: A History of the Centuries-Long Argument over What Makes Living Things Tick, a work I'm annotating for the wiki: "'When is a piece of matter said to be alive? When it goes on 'doing something,'" and that "the most salient 'something' that organisms characteristically did was to resist entropy, to avoid decay into equilibrium" (Restless Clock, p. 369; ch. 10). And the source of the quote? Edwin Schrödinger's What Is Life? (Cambridge U Press, 1944).

Ah ha! Sort of. At least the lore I passed on — and I got it as academic folklore, word-of-mouth, a kind of rumor — at least the lore I passed on had a respectable genealogy.

Treason in America

18 U.S. Code § 2381 - Treason: "Whoever, owing allegiance to the United States, levies war against them or adheres to their enemies, giving them aid and comfort within the United States or elsewhere, is guilty of treason and shall suffer death, or shall be imprisoned not less than five years and fined under this title but not less than $10,000; and shall be incapable of holding any office under the United States." 

That law is based on the U.S. Constitution, where Treason is the only crime defined (3.3) because of a bloody history in England and elsewhere of accusations of treason being used for the (judicial) murder of political opponents and to punish excessively what were really lesser crimes, if crimes at all. 

President Donald Trump's joke (?) about treasonous, non-lovers of America (or Donald Trump) included a threat of death or, minimally, loss of office, a hefty fine, and hard time in a Federal prison. As with any figure of speech, it should be understood first literally — an effective metaphor should get hearers picturing it — and then walked back into the figurative to establish a range of meanings.

E.g., "I demand 110% dedication to the team" is obviously hyperbole: there can't be more than 100% of anything, and people who'd give 100% dedication to any one thing would need an impossible amount of spare dedication on their hands. But how much dedication does Coach demand? Unclear. S/He wants a figurative blank check.

If Trump doesn't literally want those who don't applaud him at the State of the Union Address tried for treason and executed, what punishment does he want for them? Another (figurative) blank check, of the bullying-threat variety.

Defining "American"

            In a letter to the editor of The Ventura County Star for February 15, 2017, Ray Sobrino Jr. of Newbury Park, CA, ended with the admonishment to "remember we are all Americans in the end." I won't argue with the letter or even the sentiment of this clause, but I will reword it to, "we are all Americans if you pull back and take a long-distance view of ourselves" — because close up we see important differences.

            One set of differences is political, and nowadays that's pretty obvious with continuing support for Donald Trump from most of the 46.1% of voters who votedfor him and continuing opposition from many of the 48.2% who voted for Hillary Clinton — and at least some of the nearly 6% of the electorate who voted for someone else and the large number of people who just didn't vote. 

            More important, there are deep and long-stand differences you can analyze in many ways, but my current favorite is Colin Woodard's American Nations: A History of the Eleven Rival Regional Cultures of North America (2014) and the idea that there is no single American nation but either none or up to eleven, depending on how you define "nation."

            Most of us on the territory of the United States are citizens of the American Republic, and we mostly agree on loyalty to the Republic. What holds us together is our agreeing to argue over what the Republic should be, who should be members, and what sort of society we should try to build.

            "We are all Americans" — and then we fight over what that should mean.

Cold-Blooded Statistics (25 Dec. 2014)

            Tying together some stories in the news at the end of 2014, from police shootings in the sense of police shooting "civilians" to police being shot, to "the campus rape crisis": We need to bring back the word and concept "disinterested," and we need more disinterested research in areas of social conflict. This is a truism, but it's difficult to achieve; recall that for years, maybe decades, there was little research on the medical uses of marijuana because the Congress of the United States — folks who weren't convinced that nicotine and ethyl alcohol (cigarettes and booze) are drugs — said that there were no benefits to marijuana, and, therefore there was no cause to spend public money looking for medical benefits.
            We need news reports where the first couple paragraphs aren't with some touching, human-interest "for instance" anecdote but a statistic: Number of times something horrific happens per 100,000 ______ (fill in variety of human) per year, or some more relevant unit of time.
            For instance ….
            How many civilians are justifiably or otherwise killed, maimed, wounded, or otherwise harmed each year by police? Assaulted or just hassled? It's hard to get statistics even for just the US, let alone for comparison across a number of countries and cultures.
            How many police officers are killed each year in the line of duty? A friend of mine in the justice system says he's pretty sure that most on-job deaths are from accidents, but he's not sure of much beyond that. Some years, police work makes the top ten for most dangerous jobs in the US, some years not. What are the dangers of police work, and how do the risks vary from role to role, from area to area in the US? In countries similar to the US
            I taught on a Midwestern college campus for 35 years, and it was a pretty safe place: one B&E at my house during the time, and I met the burglar and wasn't overly threatened. We had a couple murders near campus, and one major problem ca. 2000 with one of my students who was a serial rapist — convicted on six counts and imprisoned. And one of my students ca. 1990 had a run-in with police because of the rifles and automatic weapons in the trunk of his car (he was a gun collector and weird but licensed and not an immediate danger).
            By one definition of the word "rape" that has been applied on campuses, I've been raped by two women, but, possibly because of an insufficiently raised consciousness, I still don't believe I was in a legal or moral sense raped. Manipulated maybe; raped?, no. So I want to see some numbers on the rate per 100,000 per year of rapes and other sexual assaults on US campuses, and see how those figures vary given different legal, ethical, and colloquial definitions of the crimes or ethical lapses. And I think every reporter and pundit covering campus sexual assaults should check carefully how those rates compare with similar crimes among young women not in college. Among that overly large US prison population?
            On the torture issue — also big news in December of 2014 — we need popularizations of historical research. "Torture is not who we are," said President Obama; an article in The Atlantic suggests, nah, that's us. The historical record indicates that we Americans are currently doing better than many peoples over the centuries, but that's a distressingly low bar. What's the record of torture in US periods of fear — hanging witches and terrorizing Blacks … for instance — and what is our record during periods of imperial expansion, as in the Philippines? How often were "enhanced interrogation techniques" used in the US historically? What are the best guesses at the rate today?
            (In 1692, Giles Corey was "pressed with heavy stones" to force him to enter a plea in the Salem Witch Trials. He didn't plead but died after a couple of days, so he couldn't be found guilty, so his property wasn't confiscated and could go to his heirs. Corey may be unique in US history, but milder torture such as waterboarding and "the third degree" are not.)
            Personal stories are extraordinarily useful to put human faces on statistics; but for policy we need the numbers. Especially on controversial issues, US universities and the gov't of the United States need to get out reliable and disinterested stats, and a wide swath of people need to read and understand those numbers.

            "I feel your pain" is a decent enough thought, but it's always more or less a figure of speech and/or a lie if you're talking about pain on a large scale. Compassion is the core, the metaphorical