quote:
'Life' is indeed a clumsy label but I am trying to reach some kind of mutual understanding about this label as it seems very nebulous at the moment. If we were to take as an example a rock and a tree we could say with some kind of certainty that one is living and one is not. One has Life one does not.
Would you say that the Life in the tree is an emergent property of incredibly complex electro-chemical processes? If so, would you agree that this implies that Life is a by-product of this complexity?
One "has" life? Kind of a silly way to put it.
Semantic response: You seem to refer to life as an physical entity, much like matter and energy. I would strongly disagree with you on this. Life is a pattern, not an object. When a man loves a woman (music), there is no place you can look to see their relationship. The word relationship describes something about them.
Life is a description of those complex processes, not a product.
Realistic response: Jar's point is obvious and valid, but his picture will also show my point. There's plenty of fuzziness around the green areas, be we can surely exclude the colors that ARENT green. You may not find the solid line that distinguishes green and not green, but you can narrow it down a very appreciable amount.
It would help if you gave some sort of context.
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