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| The title section to Ferris Jabr's 2013 "Why Life Does Not Really Exist" Scientific American article, wherein he explains how he independently arrived at the view that "life" is something that does NOT exist; a view retrospectively defined, categorically speaking, as "abioism" in 2015 by Libb Thims, one of six main things one has to deny in mentally switching from theism to atheism. [1] |
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| A 2015 Yahoo Answers query (Ѻ) about Libb Thims’ version of the “life does not exist” view, intermixed with discussion of Spinoza's god; see: defunct theory of life (2009) + life terminology upgrades (2012); see also: Thims' “Lotka’s Jabberwock” (2016) talk given at BPE 2016. |
● Alfred Rogers | Idea: 1990s; Published: 2010Rogers, to note, states that he came up with the idea that life is something that does not exist, when he “reasoned that there was no difference between life and non-life and that the perceived difference was due to a difference in complexity.” [1] He did not, however, publish on this view until the 2010 launch of his website: LifeDoesNotExist.com.
● Jonathan Dowling | Idea: 1998-2004; Published: 2013
● Libb Thims | Idea 2007; Published 2009
● Ferris Jabr | Published: 2013
● Jeff Tuhtan (dependent | Thims, 2011) (Ѻ)
● Patrick Fergus (dependent | Thims, 2014) | Atheist
● Inderjit Singh (dependent | Thims, 2015)
| A 2016 video by American philosopher Alfred Rogers speaking on his 1990s discerned view that “life does not exist”, aka abioism. |
“If we continue to use the word life, this is merely a matter of convenience and does not imply any departure from the point of view set forth in [Regarding Definitions].”
“There is no thing endowed with life — from man, who is enslaving the elements, to the humblest creature — in all this world that does not sway it in turn. Whenever action is born from force, though it be infinitesimal, the cosmic balance is upset and universal motion result.”
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| A 2017 "word of the day" definition of abioism, by atheist blogger Annahilate. [7] |
“An online article by Ferris Jabr is titled, ‘Why Life Does Not Really Exist.’ While at first, the premise (life's non-existence) may seem absurd, it raises an important question, one without which we cannot understand what life really is, why it exists, and why it is one of the basic foundations of reality. In our previous discussion of life", we noted that one biologist lamented that the more in depth he studied living things, the less life he found. We also mentioned that the mistake being made by materialist biology is that it confuses the chemical processes of life with life itself.”
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| On 27 Jun 2018, Twitter user Jim Crawford (Poetry Polly) started a blog (Ѻ) on abioism, aiming to be a layman’s take (Ѻ) on abioism to be specific, the second blog of which was on “thingness”. |
“I have always considered thermodynamics to be the most beautiful subject that I have come across. I independently thought of an idea linking life and thermodynamics when I was going through a difficult time during my early twenties. I later discovered that Schrodinger had the same idea 60 years earlier, essentially the idea was that life evades the decay to thermodynamic equilibrium by maintaining negative entropy in an open system. Thanks to you I now understand my previous line of thinking to be flawed, and I appreciate the content you are producing on abioism.”— Dan Pohl (2017), site message (Ѻ) to Libb Thims, Sep 11
“Kudos to Libb Thims, who I understand is the coiner of the term ‘abioism’. I haven't read any of his work yet and so cannot comment on it, but the term rocks! :)”— Jim Crawford (2018), “Introduction” (Ѻ) to new Abioism Blog, Jun 27
“Oderberg’s idea of immanent causation is a good description of what I mean by ‘self-movement’ [see: self-motion]. If we could not privilege the imminent causes of self-movement above non-imminent ones, then we could not even say that living canines are any more alive than robotic dogs, an assumption that is taken to its logical end in the writings of those who espouse abioism (e.g. Jabr 2013) — the idea that life does not really exist. Moreover, we see how the difference between causes internal to a thing and causes external to a thing can matter apart from their necessity in a functional process. For example, we recognize that a car battery, which cannot hold a charge and is in need of a jump, is “dead” in contrast to one that can turn the starter when prompted by the ignition. While the faulty battery might be able to still complete an electrical circuit and permit the circulation of current so the driver can make a pit stop at the auto parts store, he dare not turn the engine off before he gets there, unless he wants to jump the battery again. By saying this, I do not mean to draw an analogy between human death and the death of car batteries, but to highlight an important feature of the causal story about a thing, which can in turn provide us with knowledge about the condition of a thing.”— Adam Omelianchuk (2019), “The End of a Human Organism as a Self-Moving Whole” [8]
“I must have watched that Alfred Rogers [abioism] video (Ѻ) at least five times.”— Ram Poudel (2019), comment to Libb Thims over lunch, Chicago, summer
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| The abioism position resolves the above perplexing conundrum, as stated by Henry Bray (1910), i.e. it is the solution to the great problem of natural philosophy (Saint-Hilaire, 1836). |
