What is Life?

The dominant issue of the EvC debate concerns Life but there seems to be no consensus on what Life actually is. It would seem helpful to define what Life is - what is it?

Thread copied here from the What is Life? thread in the Proposed New Topics forum.

The definition of life was a massive extinction event and was not able to recover to evolve a new answer.

Life imo is a emergent property of energy.

TTFN,WK

It will be hard to find a consensus on a definition of "Life" since one does not exist.Everyones own pet definition can be shown to harbor inconsistencies, anomalies, omissions and absurdities.But since you asked:Life is complex chemistry in continuous action.Totally inadequate, but there you go.

I can definitely point to areas that are green, and areas that are not green, but there are also areas that are kinda green or kinda not green.

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Anyone so limited that they can only spell a word one way is severely handicapped!

What life "is" is important to creationists because they want to claim that anything that can self-assemble from simple chemicals isn't life. It isn't very important to scientists because they're interested in both living and non-living chemicals.

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Life is like a Hot Wheels car. Sometimes it goes behind the couch and you can't find it.

depens on who you askim guessin the simplest and closest exsplenation for a sientist would be somthing is alive if it reproduces itself naturaly in some wayif you ask a creationist clay that got breathed on by godthe meaning of life though is much simpler its 42

That's because this isn't really a scientific question.We begin with a naive idea of life where some things are definitely alive (me, a goldfish, a rosebush) and some things definitely aren't (rocks, bicycles, the Moon). When we study this matter more closely, we find that there's a number of properties common to the first set and absent from the second. "Aha," we say, "so that's what life means."Now the problem comes when we observe or imagine something which has some of these properties but not others. Is that life?And this, as I say, is not a scientific question --- it's a question about how we want to use language, which is a matter of social convention not to be solved by scientific inquiry. Fortunately, we don't have to solve it. We can just discuss what properties objects have without ever deciding which of those properties add up to something that we'd like to call "life".However, the word "life" is convenient: thhat's what social conventions are for. I would suggest that we should define it in the way that is most convenient for whatever particular situation we find ourselves in.In the context of these boards, the convenient place is that point at which the (short) answer to any given question is "evolution". That is, the significant features defining "life" should be reproduction with variation.

I posted this thread and left it to stew for a while to see what would emerge. Firstly I must state that I am not, in any way shape or form, a creationist/IDist but I am of the opinion that the reductionist method may not be as all encompassing as it appears to be.
Part of science is to provide a description of reality and, in my opinion, Life is a fundamental feature of reality, particularly when discussing something like evolution. To suggest that trying to define Life is outside the arena of science seems preposterous to me and I find it truly shocking that there seems to be no scientific consensus on what Life is but it is understandable.
Reductionism cannot touch something like Life which is why the question must be treated as non-scientific, brushed aside or sniggered at. The only alternative is to imagine that Life is an emergent property of physical/chemical interactions. An optical illusion created by complexity.
I would like to put this thought forward:
What if Life is an independently existing, NON-PHYSICAL phenomenom? How could reductionism describe something like this?
As Frank Yurco stated "Life should be taken as a given, like energy or matter."

As I pointed out in Message 7, life appears to be a spectrum as opposed to some discrete point. But even when we look at matter and energy there is no discrete point. There are things we can describe as energy or as matter depending on our perspective.

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Anyone so limited that they can only spell a word one way is severely handicapped!

You are living. It is one of the most fundamental aspects of your existence. Rather than talk generally about Life let's get specific - the Life in YOU. Could we say you are Matter, Energy and Life? Matter and Energy are scientific but Life is not? Matter exists, Energy exists but Life does not? If Life does exist surely it MUST be described specifically by science.

Well, not the most extensive definition of life I have seen.
Any chance you could be more explicit, so that we know what you are referring to? How would you identify this non-physical phenomenon?
How would you detect it?

So you are saying that Life is as 'real' as Energy and Matter?