You might be wondering what I’m trying to discuss when you see the title. Let me pose a question: “Is a synthetic organism a living being or just a being?” It seems a safe choice to call it a ‘living being’ since it is a ‘synthetic organism,’ but somehow it feels somewhat unfair and awkward to simply call it a ‘living being.’

1. Interpretative Conflict

Throughout our lives, we have various experiences. However, there are times when we encounter “entirely new experiences.” When we have these completely new experiences, our basic understandings, which we have held up until then, can be shaken and face conflicts. This is true for our understanding of ‘life’ today.

In East Asian cultural traditions, the term ‘life’ is interpreted as something that has been ‘ordered to live.’ Most people might not think about it this way in daily conversations, but within the cultural context of East Asia, the term ‘life’ carries a power that continues to influence our understanding.

With the recent emergence of synthetic biology, the phrase “humans synthesize life” brings a feel that conflicts and clashes with the traditional understanding of life. In other words, we are experiencing a ‘conflict of interpretation.’ That is why, when I first asked the question, it seemed obvious but still felt somewhat awkward.

2. Intentional and Unintentional Feelings

Let me first talk about the ‘feel’ of life. You can imagine that the photo includes both a living biological dog and a robot dog. What differences do you feel in the photo? Do they give you the same feeling?

To simplify the discussion, let’s categorize feelings into two types: ‘intentional feelings’ and ‘unintentional feelings.’ Intentional feelings are those we feel when we are hungry and look for food or thirsty and search for water—feelings directed toward a specific object. Unintentional feelings are like when you feel anxious or tired—these are feelings resulting from some cause, but the feeling itself cannot directly aim at that cause as its object.

Normally, we have intentional feelings towards ‘things that exist,’ but for ‘things that are alive,’ because they are living, they not only give us intentional feelings but also mixed with unintentional feelings. Especially when we find solace in life, it is when we feel ‘living together,’ and during such times, unintentional feelings often envelop our hearts.

Indeed, with the advancement of artificial intelligence, the boundary between biological and mechanical entities is blurring. A few days ago, I read in the newspaper that a funeral was held for a robot dog that could no longer be repaired. Such incidents make us think about how different our feelings towards ‘things that exist’ and ‘things that are alive’ can be. The robot dog is not just a ‘thing that exists’ for someone; because they project their feelings onto it, it becomes a ‘living thing,’ and they held a funeral for it.

When asking “Is a synthetic organism a living being or a being?”, if we think about it in terms of everyday common sense, the word ‘synthetic’ belongs to the realm of ‘things that exist’ with only intentional feelings. However, living beings are not like that; they have both feelings intermingled. The problem is that the word ‘synthetic’ modifies and limits the term ‘biological,’ seemingly diminishing and extinguishing the unintentional feelings that are part of life.

I majored in life sciences in college, and when I talk about synthetic biology with my friends from school, they are curious but also always have a certain reluctance. Why is that? It’s because it feels like one of the two realms of feelings, the unintentional feelings from ‘biological,’ is being extinguished.

3. Judgment

Now, let’s move from the realm of feelings to the realm of knowledge. For example, we say, “That is a synthetic organism,” or “No, that is a synthetic thing.” Our saying “That is” is an act of judgment within the realm of knowledge. 

However, knowing fundamentally involves defining something. We bring ‘living beings’ into this definition, or we bring the state of ‘being alive’ into it and recognize it within these confines. The word ‘define’ means to eliminate the areas that stick out and to abstract them.

But here lies the problem. When knowledge that has been brought into the ‘is’ leads to an indiscriminate act of recognition that excludes ignorance—ignorance of not knowing what we don’t know, and yet not knowing what we don’t know still excludes ignorance—it acts tyrannically in the realm of knowledge.

An example is indiscriminately or uncritically accepting the premises of synthetic biology. That is, seeing life not ‘as a machine’ but ‘a machine’ and applying it in engineering terms.

I’m not saying we shouldn’t do synthetic biology, but the problem is that our consciousness in the realms of interpretation and recognition becomes chaotic, eventually fixing the premise that ‘life is a machine’ uncritically, and our consciousness of life, our culture of life, becomes narrow. And since ‘human’ is also included in the category of ‘biological,’ it ends up distorting our self-understanding significantly as if “humans are machines.”

4. Perception of Life

Let’s delve into the realm between ‘feeling’ and ‘knowledge’ that I mentioned earlier. One is the realm of feeling, and the other is the realm of knowledge, and these two are strangely intertwined in the area we call ‘perception.’ The character for perception includes ‘feel’ and ‘know.’ 

In this realm of perception, let’s think about whether a synthetic organism is a living being or a being. In the dynamic coexistence of knowledge and feeling within the realm of perception, is a synthetic organism a living being or a being? Let’s simplify the question: “How do we perceive being alive?”

Here’s an anecdote. One day, I saw what looked like a black lint on my clothes and when I spread my hand, a curled-up spider suddenly moved, startling me. What phenomenon was given to my consciousness in the blink of an eye that turned something that was ‘just there’ into ‘being alive’ so instantaneously? How do we perceive something as ‘being alive’ compared to just ‘being there’? Let’s each imagine that for ourselves.

Our consciousness is all self-centered. The form ‘I’ is at the center, living within its own horizon. But the appearance of another living being is when another ‘living’ other suddenly appears in my world. That’s when my central world suddenly collapses, and another ‘living being’ with a center of spontaneity equal to mine appears as life.

That’s when my central world suddenly collapses, and another ‘living being’ with a center of spontaneity equal to mine appears as life.

While I can roughly predict how the spider might move, I cannot enter the center of its spontaneity, nor can I view and interpret the world from the spider’s first-person perspective. And the living ‘other’ observes me as the observed object, reacting to my movements, thereby appearing as a ‘living-together’ being.

In this instance, ‘time’ is not merely time as it pertains to objects, which is a simple extension along an axis where the past and present are discontinuous points. Instead, our consciousness of time regarding ‘being alive’ extends the present along the axis of time, making the flow of time itself a matter of consciousness. When we say “we live together” or “we share the process,” isn’t that what we mean? Unlike objects, time for living beings isn’t like that. Therefore, truly encountering ‘being alive’ shakes up our existing closed consciousness, making it an experience that cannot be anything but profound.

5. Life-Empathizing Intelligence

As we unpack our living experience this way, a second question arises: “How do we perceive another’s being alive?” 

Even with those we love deeply, we cannot feel physical pain for them. Despite our desire to take their pain, we cannot. The existential distance between oneself and another is just that vast. But ‘how’ do we perceive that another is ‘being alive’? The answer is that we perceive another’s being alive within the consciousness of our own living being. This suggests that we are already living within a sense of empathy towards life. And within this empathy, you yourself through the consciousness of “I am alive,” determine that “you are also alive.” I have coined the term ‘life-empathizing intelligence’ for this concept.

Thus, we already live within ‘life-empathizing intelligence.’ However, as we go about our daily lives, our consciousness of life is continuously narrowed down and drawn into a standardizing, reductionist way of thinking, because that is the only way we can ‘know.’ Humans inherently have a ‘desire to know.’ Through this desire to know, humans (rather than slowly understanding step by step through genuine inquiry) tend to ‘violently’ pull life and the other into their own definitions and make judgments of “that is what it is.” Such judgments contribute more to possessing existence rather than pursuing it, but shouldn’t the truth toward which knowledge aspires be pursued rather than possessed?

I think there is a hope. If our basic daily consciousness, which pulls everything into the realm of possession, can be transformed, then maybe we can hope for a culture that encourages and appreciates such a way of thinking—’life-empathizing intelligence.’ It’s not that we shouldn’t engage in synthetic biology, but that we should understand this issue anew through ‘life-empathizing intelligence.’

Insight into ‘life-empathizing intelligence’ tells us that the question about synthetic organisms is ultimately a question about ourselves and our neighbors. 

With this in mind, I ask you all once again: “Synthetic organism, is it a living being or a being?”