Scott McCloud goes on about this at length in Understanding Comics, and posits that one of the reasons that you rarely get real art in the medium is that both mastering writing and mastering art take a lifetime and result in diametrically opposite worldviews -- the artist's expressionistic view and the writer's synaesthetic. He then goes on about how great comic creators have learned to reconcile the worldviews through a six-step process of self-examination and learning (and how bad ones get mired along the way).
I think the invention of writing is about half of the puzzle; the toxic meme of dualism is a big part of it too. Simplistic classification is easier for the mind but inaccurate, and you lose a lot of the ability to see conglomerate life in the inanimate.
I would say that one could consider an amusement park (or, as Pratchett suggested, a shopping mall) to be alive. It is a parasite, which uses lures to attract prey, feeds off them and then releases them into the wild to be preyed on again at a lower date. It constantly changes and reacts to outside stimuli, and competes with others of its species, staking out a "territory" and defending it. It excretes wastes that come about through its daily activities, which are carried away by the saprophytic sanitation companies. It sleeps, and its antibodies (in the form of security) keep intruders away while it is vulnerable.
Where is the creature, though? It exists only as a metaphor, as a combination of the park per se and its surroundings, and only when seen from a God's-eye view. There is little or nothing to suggest that it is a single entity from the point of view of a parkgoer, just as there is little to suggest that a human being is alive from the point of view of E. coli.
I think that many of our ancestors would have personified such a place quickly, and perceived the inherent differences between such places and other forms of life (such as libraries and museums) that serve very different functions and "live" in entirely different ways. (Libraries are more like coral ...) And yet, there are probably practical, down-to-earth business lessons that can be learned by viewing an amusement park as a living thing instead of as a pile of metal and pages and pages of numbers.
That's just it, ultimately. We confuse the word for the reality, and think denotatively; then, dualism strips down options to two, "alive" and "not alive," causing us to fail to recognize the qualities of life in that which our peers say lacks it.
I hope that made some sense, reading over it again I'm not so sure ...
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I think the invention of writing is about half of the puzzle; the toxic meme of dualism is a big part of it too. Simplistic classification is easier for the mind but inaccurate, and you lose a lot of the ability to see conglomerate life in the inanimate.
I would say that one could consider an amusement park (or, as Pratchett suggested, a shopping mall) to be alive. It is a parasite, which uses lures to attract prey, feeds off them and then releases them into the wild to be preyed on again at a lower date. It constantly changes and reacts to outside stimuli, and competes with others of its species, staking out a "territory" and defending it. It excretes wastes that come about through its daily activities, which are carried away by the saprophytic sanitation companies. It sleeps, and its antibodies (in the form of security) keep intruders away while it is vulnerable.
Where is the creature, though? It exists only as a metaphor, as a combination of the park per se and its surroundings, and only when seen from a God's-eye view. There is little or nothing to suggest that it is a single entity from the point of view of a parkgoer, just as there is little to suggest that a human being is alive from the point of view of E. coli.
I think that many of our ancestors would have personified such a place quickly, and perceived the inherent differences between such places and other forms of life (such as libraries and museums) that serve very different functions and "live" in entirely different ways. (Libraries are more like coral ...) And yet, there are probably practical, down-to-earth business lessons that can be learned by viewing an amusement park as a living thing instead of as a pile of metal and pages and pages of numbers.
That's just it, ultimately. We confuse the word for the reality, and think denotatively; then, dualism strips down options to two, "alive" and "not alive," causing us to fail to recognize the qualities of life in that which our peers say lacks it.
I hope that made some sense, reading over it again I'm not so sure ...