For at least 2,500 years, philosophers debated the "Hard Problem of Life". Plato said life was about nutrition and reproduction, Aristotle that it was resisting perturbations, the Chinese talked of qi and the Indians of prana. 'Élan vital' was coined as late as the 20th century!
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Uhh I do. It’s a superset of the hard problem of consciousness. Just because viruses form a fuzzy edge case doesn’t mean there is no set interior. Just because biologists study details (they did in antiquity too— humors, anatomy) doesn’t mean the gestalt is somehow meaningless.
"are forest fires kinda alive" is an interesting philosophical quandary to ponder, but no one really thinks that this question has much bearing on whether science can in principle explain life the way Hard Problematics imply for science's ability to explain qualia
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