@frostyflowers if you ask me the wording is semantics. Either way you slice it the thing that has made me question what life is (in terms of your metaphor) the ash alone is considered dead but when organized in such a way it is considered alive by virtue of being a part of something that is alive and that is inconsistent. Also when I think of the specific rules that we attribute to life biologically, would that mean if we created a machine that filled those requirements it would be alive or if a human couldn't fulfill one of them they wouldn't be? I feel like perhaps it would make more sense to define life as an complex organization of dead things that performs some function. Or at the very least life needs redefining to match new information about our own existence
