What Does it Mean to Be Alive?

Guess what, you are most probably alive. Have you ever stopped to think about what that means, have you thought to stop thinking about what it means to think? Regardless of your belief about life, existence and the nature of all things, you are alive. How does one know one is alive and what does this mean to you? might be the next question worth answering. The answers are clear once one assumes one very important thing, life. Yes life, once you make that first hurdle of knowledge, you are well on your way to doing things, knowing things and being things. Do you think you can do that right now, think to yourself and say, "I am alive". A lot of people know it and believe it, but fewer recognize it, and to recognize something instead of just knowing it as being there are two very different things. So the first important step of knowing you're alive is to recognize you are in fact alive by understanding what it means to be alive.

To be alive involves several different things in terms of several different criteria. If one is a scientist life could mean being a biological organism composed of cells. Or if one is a Christian, being alive could mean being subject to the relationship of the son, the father and the holy ghost. Or if one is a layperson, one could be alive because one eats and sleeps. Still other signs of life are breathing, thinking, and the possession of limbs such as arms and legs. The perception of things, self-awareness and the hunch' that you are' can also trigger one to believe that he or she is indeed alive. In sum, what I'm trying to say is there is a high probability that you are in fact alive.

Skeptics may argue that 'ontologically' there is no evidence of such a thing as life, but who are they kidding besides themselves? The nature of being that created life is evident from its effect; even if no resolute cause can be drawn from the effect of life, the cause that created life can be logically induced. It can be deduced mathematically as well as the numbers themselves rest on one very important thing, namely the perception of numbers. Such a perception of numbers makes several assumptions, life, existence and the ability to perceive anything in particular. To induce alone leaves room for doubt, but this does not imply that the doubt within induction is not a sign of a living thing. Even if one argues that doubt itself does not exist, to argue this in the first place strongly implies the existence of the argument itself. In other words, whether one claims existence or not is irrelevant because we do exist or we wouldn't be able to make such claims.

To make a long story shorter, it is very, very, likely that you are alive. Pinch yourself, breathe the air, think about your thoughts, remember the past, measure' the electromagnetic energy coming from your body, feel the machine that does the measuring and test it to verify it is real. You are alive, especially when you are alive as a human being. So yes there is another level to all this, get ready when you are dead, you are still alive. According to some Christians eternity is a gift from God. How is this so? When one's body dies, so does one's brain, what is left? The soul? Just because the existence of the soul is not clearly verifiable by science does not falsify the existence of the soul. The soul is a possibility of life, and it would be logical to claim that the criteria of logic, or that which logic encompasses is unable to incorporate the soul in to its understanding due to a lack of evidence. This does not mean that one cannot logically state the soul exists through non-fallacious argument. Rather it means that such an argument would be considered unsound or unsupported. Such a belief itself is reasonable as it leaves the burden of proof up to the soul. Should one simply believe in something as the soul, one bypasses the need for such proof, and gambles per se on life. Non-believers and/or agnositcs often take a proof position rather than faith position in light of this uncertainty of evidence. For arguments sake then, let as call human life 'de-facto being' and spiritual life 'non-defacto being and/or non-being' as we do not know for a fact that exists. Let us then make the statement that since we do not know that it is not true that a soul exists either, the possibility of life after death also exists. Non-being then is differentiated from non-existence which is absolute certainty or the belief in an absolute certainty that complete non-existence is possible. This is so as non-being is the not being alive in the common sense, whereas non-existence is the not being alive in any sense.