Life, disease, and death
a metaphysical viewpoint
pp. 233-263
in: Stuart Spicker (ed), Organism, medicine, and metaphysics, Berlin, Springer, 1978Abstract
In our ordinary language and attitudes we tend to preserve a distinction between living and nonliving things. Unless we are speaking to a very young child we do not say the car cannot go because it is sick. We say a wrist watch needs repair but a wrist needs to be healed, an automobile is damaged but a person is injured. Although the crude reductive mechanism of an earlier era is past its high tide, a new mechanistic biology puts forward the claim that a living creature and a machine can be a model for one another ([11], p. 253). Where the old mechanism barred a thinking of purposiveness in nature, the new mechanism looks to cybernetics for a notion of purposiveness applicable equally to organism and machine.1 Man-made machines are termed "self-regulating" insofar as they gather, store, and process information, monitor their own operations, and adjust their performance to a set goal. Is there any reason then why such machines should not be said to sense, remember, learn, adapt? A self-regulating machine performs like an organism. Why should not health be defined as successful performance, sickness as malfunction and death as irreparable breakdown of performance?