From: James Buddenhagen <jbuddenh@gmail.com> Date: 5/17/20, 11:22 AM
Perhaps alive/dead is a false dichotomy. At best it there is a line it is blurry. See: https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/are viruses-alive-2004/
Maybe seeking the key to the distinction is a remnant of vitalism, or of the ages-old bad mental habits that led people to find themselves clinging to elan vital, the non-material substance that had to exist. It was like purified wistfulness. The probabilistic, informational, and thermodynamic definitions of life, or the more DSM-V-like lists of required features, sort of but don't really capture just what we mean. The bad mental habit is roughly to think as if any human concept comes from heaven, and so there must be a perfect form of it. Mathematicians can think of (e.g.) numbers as real without embarrassment because we have found workable kinds of perfection to work towards. --Steve