[Right Wing Professor]

To be alive and to sustain life, an organism must counteract the law of entropy. If entropy is not counteracted, the organism will soon enough achieve the condition of "heat death." I.e., its life functions will cease.

BB, by that defintion, computer viruses are most certainly alive, as are many cellular automata, and chain letters.

He writes, “An organism lives ‘in’ its environment. It not only needs and actively occupies a territory but it turns it into a means for its self-realization, it nourishes itself on its environment. In this sense, every organism lives beyond itself. Again it becomes evident that life is essentially ecstatic: it takes place in the environment of the organism much more than in itself….

A chain letter lives in the environment of human correspondence; it propagates itself by means to a weakness in the human psyche, as most parasites live by expoliting weakness in their host's defense; it is marginally lower in entropy tham a blank sheek of paper and a bottle of ink (or paper and a toner cartridge).

I'm arguing by reduction ad absurdam here. I believe life is simply a category, and like most categories it has fuzzy edges. But most attempts to make precise demarcations of life either include things like chain letters, which don't really seem to belong in the same category as amoebas and koalas, or make unscientific vitalist assumptions, which Pannenberg apparently does with his 'energy field', or include what seem to be arbitrary requirements, for example that life must contain DNA or RNA.

[Alamo-Girl]

Er, if I may interject something...

I'm arguing by reduction ad absurdam here. I believe life is simply a category, and like most categories it has fuzzy edges. But most attempts to make precise demarcations of life either include things like chain letters, which don't really seem to belong in the same category as amoebas and koalas, or make unscientific vitalist assumptions, which Pannenberg apparently does with his 'energy field', or include what seem to be arbitrary requirements, for example that life must contain DNA or RNA.

I believe what we are struggling with here is whether artificial life (computer viruses, robots, chain letters) ought to be excluded in a definition of "life." The original challenge by Pearson came long before the information age.

OTOH, is it valid to exclude Artificial Intelligence but accept artificially created biological life forms? Or should the term always be qualified, i.e. natural life v artificial life?