In your local store there are probably strawberries.

Are they living or dead?

I've been thinking about this and i have a whole thing, but i didn't want to muddy the water first...

what do you say?

johnson1010 wrote:In your local store there are probably strawberries.

Are they living or dead?

I've been thinking about this and i have a whole thing, but i didn't want to muddy the water first...

what do you say?

Theyre still alive long after theyve been picked.
Suffcate them in whip cream before eating them.

Or death by melted chocolate.

It's dead. It can absorb no more nutrients, can't grow anymore, can only decay. It contains probably 100 or so seeds that could become living things under the right conditions, but currently they're not alive, either.

I think this is sort of like asking when wind becomes a storm. There are chemical processes continuing after fruit is picked, like a human living for a minute after having his carotid cut.

I don't think a sharp demarcation can be found. It's a gradient. Take a fruit at full function, with 100% of it's chemical processes, and it's fully alive. Take another fruit that's been picked and has only 5% of it's chemical processes, and it's nearly dead. Both have life, to varying degrees. I don't think a strawberry normally falls below this, due to the seeds, which sprout back to 100% again with the next generation. There's a lower plateau with some fruits, where the seeds have to decay before it's 100% dead.

The strawberry is the fruit of the plant, so it's only part of the living organism while it's still receiving nutrients. Once the fruit is severed from the plant, it is no longer receiving nutrients. But it was neither dead or alive per se. It's just the fruit.

Meanwhile, the strawberry plant is still alive even after you pick its fruit (or if the fruit falls off on its own).

When is a human dead? The ability to revive someone has only gotten better, if only by minutes, who knows how far you can really go?

What if you transplant someone's brain?

What if you recreate all those synapses in another medium?

What is consciousness? What is the self? What is life? What is death?

The fruit of the plant will eventually ripen to a divinely tasty state of being at which point it should be cut from the host plant and be eaten or preserved, once picked, it does continue producing sugars, it could be argued the it has a life of its own during this process, it will at some point stop producing sugars and be a mushy glop that will fertilize some of the seeds which will germinate and produce other plants, a continuing circle of life.

Are strawberries concious in other universes?
How likley is it that a strawberry, at least one, is in orbit?
If i dont believe it's possible that a strawberry is in orbit, am I engaging in A-strawberryism?

I think there needs to be three categories here.

Dead

Living

Alive

The strawberry plant is alive. It seeks out and uses resources to perform all the activities of a strawberry plant.

The actual berry is an appendage of the plant which has evolved to stay active for a while after being seperated from the main organism. It works exactly like a severed foot. The severed foot will continue to live so long as the resources are in the system to keep the cells doing the business of foot cells.

Once that oxygen is used up, or the blood runs out the foot dies. The severed foot is composed of living tissue but is not alive. So too with the strawberry.

Dead is relative. A dead organism which was once alive may still be filled with living cells, but it will not be able to obtain new resources to continue the chemical cascade of life and eventually all the cells that were part of the alive creature will die.