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.
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