Whats life?

Question

Whats life?

Answer 1

Anagram of file

Answer 2

Being not dead.

Answer 3

"Life is a process of self-sustaining and self-generated action." Ayn Rand

That sums up all that has ever been said about it. I have seen lists, usually numbering 7 items, that include such things as "aspiriation," "cell division," "digestion," "generating biological waste," etc.

But it all adds up to what Rand called it--a process that a thing which does not possess life cannot do--sustain itself and do so by self-generated volition.

"Only a living entity can have goals or can originate them. And it is only a living organism that has the capacity for self-generated, goal-directed action. On the physical level, the functions of all living organisms, from the simplest to the most complex—from the nutritive function in the single cell of an amoeba to the blood circulation in the body of a man—are actions generated by the organism itself and directed to a single goal...

"When applied to physical phenomena, such as the automatic functions of an organism, the term “goal-directed” is not to be taken to mean “purposive” (a concept applicable only to the actions of a consciousness) and is not to imply the existence of any teleological principle operating in insentient nature. I use the term “goal-directed,” in this context, to designate the fact that the automatic functions of living organisms are actions whose nature is such that they result in the preservation of an organism[ ]..." Rand

Answer 4

a word, a concept that can have indefinitely many meanings and definitions.

take this one as an example:

according to physicists such as John Bernal, Erwin Schrödinger, Eugene Wigner, and John Avery, life is a member of the class of phenomena which are open or continuous systems able to decrease their internal entropy at the expense of substances or free energy taken in from the environment and subsequently rejected in a degraded form

Answer 5

the story of separation, the voice of silence