In all the universe, is it possible that a life form can exist without a physical body?

Question

(Posted before at another site.)

Answer 1

Look at all these people pretending that they actually know.

Answer 2

Eternal life is a core belief of many of the world's religions. Usually it is extolled as a spiritual Valhalla, an existence without pain, death, worry or evil, a world removed from our physical reality. But there is another sort of eternal life that we hope for, one in the temporal realm. In the conclusion to Origin of Species, Charles Darwin wrote: "As all the living forms of life are lineal descendants of those which lived before the Cambrian epoch, we may feel certain that the ordinary succession by generation has never once been broken .... Hence we may look with some confidence to a secure future of great length." The sun will eventually exhaust its hydrogen fuel, and life as we know it on our home planet will eventually end, but the human race is resilient. Our progeny will seek new homes, spreading into every corner of the universe just as organisms have colonized every possible niche of the earth. Death and evil will take their toll, pain and worry may never go away, but somewhere we expect that some of our children will carry on.

Life thrives on energy and information, and very general scientific arguments hint that only a finite amount of energy and a finite amount of information can be amassed in even an infinite period. For life to persist, it would have to make do with dwindling resources and limited knowledge. We have concluded that no meaningful form of consciousness could exist forever under these conditions.

Answer 3

When you use the term "life form", that implies life of this world (i.e., not an after life or some other form of supernatural existence). Obviously a life form cannot exist without a body, because what defines the term "life form" is that it must have a body. This is a scientific term, and science doesn't deal with matters of the supernatural, only with things made up of some combination of the elements on the periodic table.

Answer 4

It depends on what you call "life" is.
The term "life" has two meanings, I suppose.
One is the physical life. As for this life, it is functioned with the combination of our body and brain. Because the brain is also a cell-made organ, when we die, the brain also stop its function. This means that there is no more physical life including "thought" and "soul".

The other term of "life" is "social life". By this term, I mean, we all have lived in a given society as a member of social being and hence we have various social contacts with other member of the society. Now, when one dies, one remains various traces of his or her life both tangible and intangible forms. It is precisely here that I think "life" exists without a physical body. For example, if a beloved person dies, he or she will be remembered by a lot of people even after his or her death and, in this sense, he or she still alive in the hearts of those people. In this process, one can have an eternal life without a physical body.

Answer 5

I think that a life form that had no physical manifestation at all would be out of my definition of life in our universe, but don't rule out that objects and particularly groups of objects that we assume do not posses awareness may well do so. We are composed of a multitude of cells and bacterias and yet we have one collective consciousness that we call I. Perhaps a hive of bees has the same, it to my point of view is quite probable that the earth has a sort of consciousness and many of the complex electromagnetic and gravitational interactions that take place on macro and micro scales could produce flickers of self realisation. For me due to it's immensity and infinite complexity the greatest of all life forms that exists must be the universe itself. I find it all most inconceivable that it is not aware.

Answer 6

yeah like a computer program
it can - grow, learn and adapt, do errands, get emotional, get virus, be your friend - hey but it will need the hardware to have any effect on you. This still is simply organisation of matter.

next try - Energy - energy that has a life of its own. The magentic / gravitatinal energy of the Earth is what is keeping us together. We do not know everything about it - it could be a living thing - again it is influenced / possessed by matter.

Now think of an astray packet of energy travelling through space at its own whim - that would be life without a material form. But why and what are its intentions - we can only wonder as we still do not know the purpose of life forms as we see everyday.

EnJoy

Answer 7

There is a theory about some sentient beings in the universe that having no physical body of their own reside inside of other less intelligent life forms. We can therefore speculated that some time in our early evolutionary history such beings actually housed in our body thus causing us to evolve into sentient human beings quite differently from the rest of the fellow animals. We can also imagine that those intelligent beings are still living in our brains, may be as electric charge in our brain or life energy in our body. We can then say that our thoughts are in fact the instruction given these intelligent beings inside us. But rest assured, as this could only be just a theory stretched to far to get too close for comfort. The fact is that if this would be the case then we are those aliens ourselves, living in a physical form, our body, that we found suitable here on this planet.

All the scientific definitions of life are the definitions in relation to, or in comparisons to, and sometimes also in contrast to the life on upon earth, the life, as we know it. And since the main visible structure of the universe is physical in which all things have their distinctive physical characteristics, all things alive therefore must have their physical characteristics of life, like movement, growth, and reproduction, in order to be recognised as a life form. One can say that our thoughts, or ideas, are alive because they cause things in the physical world, and that they influence our mind. But the fact that ideas and thoughts have no physical presence, that they are dependant upon a physical organ, the brain, for the conception and development make us believe that they are not a form of life in themselves, but instead just a characteristic of an intelligent life that has a definitive physical presence.

And as I said before life to us means the life, as we know it, and that for something to be called alive a physical form is the first requirement. There cannot be a life form without a physical body, but there can be consciousness in most ethereal of forms ever known to man. Our minds, for example, are built upon fairy tales, legends, myths and actions heroes of various kind right from our childhood, and then we have our beliefs in things that cannot be explained or defined scientifically, as they have no proof to support reasoning in an intellectual system of knowledge. If these things are in our mind as images, extraordinary people, angels fairies and demons then they must have their existence somehow, somewhere in the universe that we cannot physically related to, but that we are only too deeply and consciously aware of.

Answer 8

Quote*
I hope so!!! *thinking*
If are bodies are @ 98degrees, when we die that heat goes somewhere as energy?? ie do we survive as energy outside of the body, seeing as the body is no longer warm after death???
I like to think so.
Not on a "religious" level so much as a spiritual/scientific level. just a random thought! :-)
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------
heat has nothing to do with it. The reasons are bodies are warm in the 1st place is from our normal bodily activities, blood pumping through veins, heated by the usage of energy (food and sugar) by our bodies etc. This stops ofc when we die. The reason our bodies then cool down from 98 degrees to the temperature of its environment ( lets say 70, room temp) after death is because the heat is just transfered to the air around the body. Its like if you left a cold soda can outside on a summer day. Just because it cools down doesn't mean the "soda survives as energy outside the can." Same thing for "newly dead" bodies. The body stops producing heat cause ur dead, and it cools down in a few hours or so, (under normal circumstances.) The bodies temperature doesn't drop the second it dies (not by more then a percent of a degree at least), it takes a few hours, just like a soda can, or anything else that had a temperature different from the environment it was placed in (that couldn't maintain it's temperature on its own, like a heated stone, cold soda can, etc..

More relevant to the point though, sorry I just had to point the above out...

Scientists have recorded a mysterious loss of 5 grams from a person's body, right at the moment of death. (No it was not an exhalation of air, they took that in to account.)

Anyways what that 5 or so grams might be is still unknown to them, and yet to proven as something by anybody else. It might be our "soul," or w.e u want to call it, leaving our body...

Answer 9

Life requires the representation of information.

If something is something is represented in a meaningful manner, the only known method requires something physical. The spiritual is mere speculation, and may have a physical explanation. We can ignore the non-physical spiritual because we can not be sure that it exists.

Information can be scattered, so we don't need a body as such. For example, if I decode your brain and then run a simulation, but network it over 1,000,000 different computers over the Internet, you don't have a body, but you may still feel alive.

So in short, you need to get phsyical but you don't need a body.

Answer 10

Interesting that I should see this question, after watching an overwhelmingly profound astrophysicist on CSpan last night.
In the vast universes, galaxies, how presumptuous it would be to make assumptions about ANYTHING. He stated no absolutes, but very LOGICALLY opened awesome doors. I would say, of course it's possible. It's more than possible!

Answer 11

Of course it depends on your exact definition of 'Life Form' and 'Physical Body'.

But in any event my answer is a unequivocal " Yes ".

Try the Seth books by Jane Roberts, probably the best explanation of exactly this topic.