How do you guys define life? What constitutes "being alive"?

>Crystals do one of those things. Are Crystals alive?

only in the host

Life is just a convenient idea for the sake of those who are alive. Just like sapience and sentience, it's subject to the biases of the species that creates it. You may as well ask what defines a species or a continent.

The truth is that there's no hard, definite line that will satisfy everyone. Life was much more of a common sense thing before we learned about stuff like viruses, cells, and mitochondria. If I had to give a definition, though, I would say it's loosely defined, self-replicating patterns that work to avoid entropy -- but it's still way too vague.

It's a heuristic term.

what lol.

life is yolo

you only live once.

my life begins at ULTRA rave party

my life ends when I leave Ultra rave party

fuk da police

marijuana

>Science falls under Philosophy.
Welcome to Veeky Forums, where the only "real" science is physics, and even chemistry is seen as a liberal-arts degree.

staying alive not been alive
Ah ah ah ah staying alive staying aliveeee

Life is nothing but an electron looking for a place to rest. --Albert Szent-Gyorgi.

I know that mentality is silly, but in its defense, physics has always been the science people use to define the nature of reality based on perceivable phenomena.

But come the fuck on. Chemistry and Biology are as scientific as anything else. Fuck off with your pseudoscience to either /pol/ or /x/. I hate that the demarcation problem is hard enough as it is, and idiots only exacerbate it.

depends on how you define living

That seems like an obtuse, reductive definition.

Nothing constitutes it, biological beings do technically live but the concept of life was create by humans... so in a way it's literally whatever you want it to be because it isn't bound by any universal laws

Life is a meaningless process of waiting for death. Being alive means suffering.

Ability to self-optimize.

The degree to which a system models the environment it exists in and acts to change the future toward some preferred state, determines how alive it is.

The information/model may be in the DNA or dynamically aquired using a brain, or some other mechanism (like the immune system).

Obviously applies to any information pattern, not just biological ones.

Living is having subjective experience by my definition. Fuck the standard definition, it's purely arbitrary.

crystals don't metabolize, respond to stimuli, or adapt. Even reproduction would be a stretch anyway

Fight, flight, fuck