A modern molecular formula (see: human molecular theory) depiction of the "rock vs. human" comparison that often arises on what is life or mind from matter debates, and or reductionism vs. anti-reductionism discussions, eliminative materialism objects, etc. The difference between the two, a rock and human, contrary to historical patch attempt solutions, e.g. "one is conscious one isn't", "one is alive one isn't", one responds to stimulus, one doesn't, etc., is the difference in the atomic structure or average molecular formula of the two entities, shown above, according to which each has different properties, the latter tending to have more dynamic, animate, and reactive than the former—neither, however, being alive.

Common elements: H, O, K, Na, Fe, Mg

Rock elements: Al, Si - based

Human elements: C - based

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Matter | Thinking & feeling

In 1729, Jean Meslier, in his §91: “The Thoughts, Desires, Will, and Sensations of Good and Evil are only Internal Modifications of the Person or Animal that Thinks, Knows, or Feels Good or Evil”, of this The Testament, engaged in an attack on Cartesian-themed views of Nicolas Malebranche (The Search after Truth) and Francois Fenelon (The Existence of God), and one point of which he first cites Horace and laughing at humorous work rule:
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“Could you, my friends, contemplating this work, hold yourselves back from laughing?”

— Horace (c.19BC), Art of Poetry (5)

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An image of a stone with feelings from the Stones Have Feelings Too! (Ѻ) Card deck set, as a representation of the view of Jean Meslier that feelings derive from matter as contrasted with the view of Francois Fenelon that a “feeling stone” (see: rock vs human) is something that children will laugh at.

Then he cites how Fenelon said the following about "laughing children" (see: laughing children rule) and people who would attribute feelings to stones: [1]
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“Matter cannot think or feel and the people, even children, cannot be persuaded otherwise. People and children are far from believing that matter is capable of thinking and feeling in anyway, so that they could not help laughing if you told them that a stone, a piece of wood, a table, or their dolls felt pain or pleasure and joy or sadness.”

— Francois Fenelon (c.1690), On the Existence of God

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Meslier rebuts this logic as follows: [1]
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“Now that is a lovely argument for a person of such rank, merit, and erudition! People and even children could really have a reason to laugh and make fun of those who to amuse themselves would like to make them believe that stones, tables, boards, furniture, or dolls had knowledge and sentiment because they know, indeed, that these sorts of things cannot know or feel anything. But, their laughter would not come, as Fenelon would like to make them understand, from the fact that these kinds of things are only matter or made of matter, but because they would see that these things are not ‘animate’ and do not have life like animals and consequently they cannot think or feel.”

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Here, this is good rebuttal logic. The children can understand that while a stone and a human and a human are both types of matter, the difference between them is a difference of "animation" properties, a human being carbon-based being animate thereby, and a stone being aluminum-based being inanimate thereby.

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“Stones grow; plants grow and live; animals grow, live, and feel.”

The Linnaean classification (1735) scheme of nature. (Ѻ)

“How do stones, or mineral substances, grow? Not as plants, shrubs, or trees. Whenever they grow at all, it is by accretion. It is as if a new layer or coating were added to, or plastered on, to them. They grow, in general, very slowly.”

— William Alcott (1859) (Ѻ)

“Objections: Stones do not grow, but increase in size by accretion. Feeling may be said to exist in the lower classes of both plants and animals, provided that contractility be accepted as a property of sensitive tissue. If it be surmised that pain is a result of feeling (i.e. sensation), it may be attributed to Oethalium with equal propriety as to Ameba. Were every act of fissuration, evisceration or amputation accompanied with pain, it becomes difficult to understand why self-mutilation should be so frequently imposed for the preservation of both individual life and that of the species. It is probable that at such times an organism feels no more pain than is experienced by the contractile contents of an ovum undergoing segmentation.”

— Harrison Allen (1869) (Ѻ)

A depiction of William Paley's 1802 "watch analogy", the gist of which is that if you were walking along a heath and came across a stone and a watch, and asked yourself how they came to be, you would say the stone came to be their by natural forces, but the watch had an artificer (aka watchmaker) who designed the watch with parts that produce motion for a purpose; the watch is analogous to a human, who must have been designed similarly, and that "designer" must be god.

“In crossing a heath, suppose I pitched my foot against a stone, and were asked how the stone came to be there; I might possibly answer, that, for anything I knew to the contrary, it had lain there forever: nor would it perhaps be very easy to show the absurdity of this answer. But suppose I had found a watch upon the ground, and it should be inquired how the watch happened to be in that place; I should hardly think of the answer which I had before given, that, for anything I knew, the watch might have always been there. Yet why should not this answer serve for the watch as well as for the stone?

Why is it not as admissible in the second case, as in the first? For this reason, and for no other, viz. that, when we come to inspect the watch, we perceive (what we could not discover in the stone) that its several parts are framed and put together for a purpose, e.g. that they are so formed and adjusted as to produce motion, and that motion so regulated as to point out the hour of the day; that if the different parts had been differently shaped from what they are, of a different size from what they are, or placed after any other manner, or in any other order, than that in which they are placed, either no motion at all would have been carried on in the machine, or none which would have answered the use that is now served by it.”

A depiction of George Scott's 1969 thought experiment, taught in class, wherein he tried to argue that the rock falls via natural physical law, but that humans have free will, or something along these lines.

“By degrees it is found that the chemistry of organized substances is not widely separated from, but is rather continuous with, that of earth and stones. Life itself seems to be nothing but a special form of that energy which is manifested in heat and electricity and mechanical force. The time may come, it almost seems, when the tender mechanism of the brain will be traced out, and every thought reduced to the expenditure of a determinate weight of nitrogen and phosphorus.”

“What shall we now say to this prime classification of science into animate and inanimate branches? Do living beings possess traits which the rocks do not possess, or are the same traits possessed in different degrees? Indeed, are all distinctions in kind reducible to distinctions in degree? These questions are hard to answer.”

“The ‘motion’ of an energy system is its ‘behavior’. Various types of organization of system produce on that basis various types of behavior. A gray rock, said Ruskin, is a good sitter. That is one type of behavior. A darting dragon-fly is another type of behavior. We call the one alive, the other not. But both are fundamentally balances of give and take of motion with their surround. To make ‘life’ a distinction between them is at root to treat them both artificially.”

“The effect of any form of materialism is to treat all men—including oneself—as objects, which is to say as a set of predetermined reactions indistinguishable from the properties and phenomena that constitute, say, a table, a chair, or a stone.”

“In general, an object in a given force field will, of necessity, behave in a calculable and predictable way. For any object, whether a stone, a plant, or a human society, force means movement.”

American economist Murray Rothbard’s hilarious 1960 comparison of a human vs stone vs molecule vs planet, among which he says the human is unique in that it possesses a “rational consciousness” and can “choose” the course of its actions, unlike the other three of his entity classifications. [10] The inherent problem here, naturally enough, is that humans, according to ecologically stoichiometry, are now textbook-defined as “molecules”(see: human molecular formula); hence the so-called “moral” distinction between a human molecule (left) and any other animate CHO-based molecule, that shown (third from left) being the retinal molecule, or CHNOPS+ based molecule, becomes blurred, after which former dichotomies become fictional or rather in need of great correction and reform.

“What is life may be subject of dispute; but it is far from true that we are no better able to answer this question to-day than last century. For ourselves we hold that life is immanent in substance; and we think it may be safely stated that modern science does not believe that it needs a truly organized structure for the manifestation of life. It is true we do not recognize conscious stones, nor conscious trees; but this does not prove that life is not universally diffused, and that the whole of nature is not indeed and in truth alive.”

— Henry Bray (1910), The Living Universe (pg. 204)

“Scientism is the profoundly unscientific attempt to transfer uncritically the methodology of the physical sciences to the study of human action. Both fields of inquiry must, it is true, be studied by the use of reasons—the mind’s identification of reality. But then it becomes crucially important, in reason, not to neglect the critical attribute of human action: that, alone in nature, human beings possess a rational consciousness. Stones, molecules, planets cannot choose their courses; their behavior is strictly and mechanically determined for them. To ignore this primordial fact about the nature of man—to ignore his volition, his free will—is to misconstrue the facts of reality and therefore to be profoundly and radically unscientific.”

American philosopher Bernard Rollin’s 1981 rock (and pebble) vs spider vs car comparison, which he employed to ferret out his system of moral treatment of animals. [14]

“Let us consider three categories of things: a rock, a machine, and an animal. For the sake of simplicity, let us look to a living thing—say, a spider—whose pleasure and pain many people feel is at least highly questionable for us to discuss, but who possibly has some rudimentary awareness. Clearly, in the case of the rock, it is senseless to speak of any real intrinsic unity to its being or any needs. If the rock is split or eroded, it remains a rock. If it is ground into sand, it is perhaps no longer a rock, but there is nothing to tell us that it has jumped a metaphysical barrier and become a totally different sort of thing, nor would we say that something undesirable has happened to the rock. There is nothing about a rock that resists the change to sand; the change is from dead matter in one form to dead matter in another form.

In contrast, consider a spider. It has an intrinsic nature connected with being a spider, one that requires that it be alive. When it ceases to be alive, it is like the rock, and there is little difference between a crushed dead spider and a dried-up dead spider. The change from living to dead is far more profound than the change from rock to sand, and it is sensible to call it understandable from the point of view of the spider. But when the spider is alive, it has what Aristotle called a telos, a nature, a function, a set of activities intrinsic to it, evolutionarily determined and genetically imprinted, that constitute its ‘living spiderness.’ Furthermore, its life consists precisely in a struggle to perform these functions, to actualize this nature, to fulfill these needs, to maintain this life, what Hobbes and Spinoza referred to as the conatus or drive to preserve its integrity and unity.

This is not of course to suggest that the spider or any animal need be conscious of its nature and all of these needs, any more than a man need be conscious of his need for oxygen or calcium. It surely makes sense to speak of conscious needs. Even wants and intentions perhaps need not necessarily be conscious—many analytical psychologists speak of unconscious wants and intentions, though whether or not this is sensible is the subject of much philosophical debate. It is enough that we as moral agents can sensibly assert that the spider has interests, which are conditions without which the creature, first of all, cannot live or, second of all, cannot live its life as spider nor fulfill its telos. Third and most important, as we shall shortly discuss, it is necessary that we can say sensibly of the animal that it is aware of its struggle to live its life, that the fulfilling or thwarting of its needs matter to it.

Once again, we must stress that a man may not be conscious of his need for oxygen, but thwarting that need certainly matters to him. This sort of talk is senseless vis-a-via a rock. Further, we are aware that it is in our power to nurture or impede these needs and even to destroy the entire nexus of needs and activities that constitute its life. And once this is recognized, it is difficult to see why the entire machinery of moral concerns is not relevant here, for it is the awareness of interest in living (human) beings that we have argued is constitutive of morality in the first place. We may of course decide that the interests of the spider are insignificant compared with our desire for a spider-free living room, but the key point is that such a decision logically must be considered a moral decision, quite unlike sweeping up a pebble one finds in the living room. We are of course not considering the details of the moral decision, but simply pointing out that as a living creature with interests, the spider enters the arean of moral concern.

Contrast this with a machine. Someone might argue, cleverly, that machines also have a telos or functional nature and, correlatively, have needs. The telos of a thermostat is to regulate the temperature in a room; the telos of a car is to run. Connected with this telos are needs; the car needs oil, gas, antifreeze, air in the tires, and so forth. Must we assert then that cars fall within the scope of moral concern? If so, the entire theory must collapse under its own weight for it violates our basic moral intuitions to consider a car in itself an object of moral concern?”

“Everything you do is ultimately done to enhance the quality of someone’s experience. We generally [however] regard things that have not experience, things like rocks, as beyond the scope of moral concerns. Thus, it’s plausible that the goodness and badness of everything ultimately cashes out in terms of the quality of people’s experiences.”

“When I kick a stone, I give energy to the stone, and it moves with that energy … When I kick a dog, it responds with energy [it received] from [its] metabolism.”

A comparison depiction of pendulum versus a human, to bring into view Cuban-born American philosopher Alicia Juarrero's 1999 human differs from stone (bob) assertion that: [7] “Pendula, too, ‘tend’ to achieve an end state of rest. But stones and pendula have neither goals nor ends; nor do they act in order to reach them.” The correction here, of course, is that the they both tend to "seek" equilibrium, each, however being quantified by a different force function, gravity and free energy, respectively.

“For the explicandum [salivation] can only be adequately described by means of concepts like ‘relevance’ and ‘appropriateness’ to an end. Processes, on the other hand, like melting of ice or the movements of glass when struck by a stone do not require such concepts in their description. They just happen. They are not recognized or describe in terms which related to them to some kind of means-end nexus. For they do not vary in light of situations related in this sort of way to them. They therefore cannot be sufficiently explained in causal terms.”

“Goals and ends, however, differ from end states, those internal states of quiescence and satisfaction that psychologists often postulate as ultimate motivators. The difference between goals and end states is basic to any teleological account of action. Stones and avalanches persist in rolling downhill no matter what obstacles they encounter. Pendula, too, ‘tend’ to achieve an end state of rest. But stones and pendula have neither goals nor ends; nor do they act in order to reach them. Moreover, purposive human behavior is not always followed by such end states; sometimes, despite trying their hardest, agents fail to achieve their goal. Goal-directedness is thus not a generalizing tending toward and end state.”

A rock (inanimate) vs. bird (animate) comparison by American ecological engineer Jeff Tuhtan, from his 2012 dissertation “A Modeling Approach for Alpine Rivers Impacted by Hydropeaking Including the Second Law Inequality”, wherein he employ’s the Bauer principle, i.e. “animate systems are those whose internal flow configurations allow them to resist equilibrium, whereas inanimate systems possess forms which are incapable of resisting equilibrium; both systems are however subject to equilibrium as an attractor”, to compare and contrast the behaviors of the two different types of matter. [5]

“To elaborate further, to explain what I'm getting at, you’re not going to be able to look into a chemistry textbook (or physics textbook for that matter) and hear chemists talking about how the noble gases are ‘dead’ or ‘dead systems’ because they are inert or non-reactive, owing to their stability, which is based on their filled outer valence shell electron configuration; whereas, conversely, acids and bases are ‘alive’ or ‘living systems’ because they need or have extra electrons, respectively, and can thus react with each other or with other varieties or species of chemicals, whereas the noble gases, generally can't react, but only float around "mindlessly", we might say. This same type of logic extrapolates upwards to humans, often differentiated into a nonsensical dichotomy (especially in the mind-body philosophical debates) when we hear people using the argument that ‘well what separates a rock from a human?’”

"Re: “[we] can[’t] deny that bio/whatever-ology is different from a rock, a table, a chair, glass...”, watch the following chemical party video. The carbon atom is the central entity of your “whatever-ology” subject, i.e. “carbon-ology”, being that carbon is a light-sensitive atom, meaning that it has the property of flexibility and hence animation and as such is very “reactive” or the “life of the part” as the video shows. The argon (Ar) is like the “rock, table, chair, glass”, notice how she is very non-reactive (although, technically, glass is silicon-based; rock can be seen has having a certain amount of reactivity, in the big history geochemical view of earth structure change). More correctly, however, I would say that “CHNOPS-ology” (chnops-ology or chnopsology), is the namesake you are looking for; e.g. Erik Andrulis’ 2012 abstract (panbioism):

“This theory is based upon a straightforward and non-mathematical core model and proposes unique yet empirically consistent explanations for major phenomena including, but not limited to, why living systems [animate systems] are predominantly CHNOPS (carbon, hydrogen, nitrogen, oxygen, phosphorus, and sulfur).”

Notice how the questionable term "living system" easily drops out of the definition, and can easily be rewritten using the updated substitution of "animate systems", a term we all agree upon. I’ve used the CHNOPS mnemonic as well before, back in circa 2003, when I wrote out a memory crick to help memorize the human molecular formula. I’ll start an Hmolpedia CHNOPS article soon, to help with the matter (being that there are numerous CHNOPS articles around [the internet])."

“As a runaway horse is better than a stone which does not run away because it lacks self-movement and sense perception, so the creature is more excellent which sins by free will than that which does not sin only because it has no free will.”

— Augustine (c.410) [17]

“In crossing a heath, suppose I pitched my foot against a stone, and were asked how the stone came to be there; I might possibly answer, that, for anything I knew to the contrary, it had lain there forever: nor would it perhaps be very easy to show the absurdity of this answer. But suppose I had found a watch upon the ground, and it should be inquired how the watch happened to be in that place; I should hardly think of the answer I had before given, that for anything I knew, the watch [analogy for human] might have always been there.There must have existed, at some time, and at some place or other, an artificer or artificers, who formed [the watch] for the purpose which we find it actually to answer.”

— William Paley (1802), Natural Theology

“How do we know that that form of atomic and molecular motion we call ‘life’ is the highest of all forms? Perhaps the dominate creature—the most rational and god-like of all beings—is an invisible gas. Or perhaps it is a flaming and effulgent mass of molten stardust. Who can say that men have souls while rocks have none?”

— Howard Lovecraft (1916), “Letter to Rheinhart Kleiner, Ira Cole, and Maurice Moe”, Aug 8 [19]

“Another fatal obstacle to a full-fledged natural science of human social phenomena is alleged to be the presence in the latter of a unique and mysterious something called motives. What is meant by motives? The word is used to designate those circumstances to which we find it ‘reasonable’ to attribute an occurrence. The motive we impute to an act is accordingly entirely relative to the frame of reference we adopt and accept as reasonable. To a scientist, the motives of a stone rolling downhill or of a boy murdering his father are simply the full set of circumstances resulting in either event.”

— George Lundberg (1947), Can Science Save Us? (pg. 22)