Truly, I am not upset that we have been unable to arrive at a broad consensus of "in nature, what is life?"
It is the smoke-bomb assertion of the fallacy of quantizing the continuum which has me in the mood to lob it right back at 'ya. If it is a fallacy, it applies everywhere.
And, btw, I disagree with your requirement to know origin or intent in order to define life v non-life/death. But that is a subject for the Plato thread.
Well obviously it isn't a LOGICAL fallacy. It's a fallacy in the sense that you cannot categorize things as living or dead if you do not have agreement on a definition.
It is rather easy to predict that a large animal flattened by a steamroller will not spring back up like a LooneyToon. It is somewhat less certain that a tree is dead when cut down.
But I don't believe the discussion was about legal, clinical death. It was about defining that particular set of criteria that distinguishes life from non-life, in the abstract.
The very fact that we argue about viruses, prions, computer viruses and such indicates there is no clear set of commonly agreed upon criteria. The problem could get much more complex if someone discovers a bootstrap sequence for synthesizing DNA, RNA or proteins.