Re: almost OT
Obviously you can call anything whatever you want. However, "animal" has an accepted meaning, in the same way that "mammal" does. The accepted meaning of "animal" is, I believe, well-defined.
Using the accepted meaning of words (and we're pretty stuff if we don't, I'd say), I'm 95% sure animals came after plants. If they didn't, what would they eat?
Your fire point is an interesting one. Some more modern views of life see it primarily as a means for transmitting and propagating information through time. That would be where fire fails (the only information it transmits is pretty much a binary on-fire/not-on-fire bit). Otherwise you're right that fire seems to tick a lot of boxes.
The underlying reason that fire looks like life is this. Life takes in ordered, high energy "food" and breaks it down to a high-entropy, low-energy waste in order to fuel the propagation of its own information. Fire similarly reduces "food" to waste, but doesn't couple the process to any entropy-decreasing/information-creating processes like life does.
Of course the viewpoint where life is essentially an information propagation system has quirky consequences, such as self-replicating computer programs being "alive". Similarly good jokes are "alive" in that they are adept at reproducing and spreading themselves, often even adapting to improve their performance (people change the joke a bit and the better version gets retold more often).
|
Threaded Mode