[Ichneumon]

But the living vs. non-living question is not a question of this type. There is a specific answer, and only one specific answer to the question: Is the organism dead or alive? It seems you are trying to change the subject, RWP.

You say there is a "specific answer". If that's true, then you should have no problem answering the following questions:

1. Is a quiescent anthrax spore in a vacuum bottle alive or dead?

2. Is a human body in DHCA (Deep Hypothermic Cardiac Arrest) for two hours alive or dead? They have no heartbeat, no brain activity, the blood has been drained from there body and is in a bucket on the floor, and their body has been cooled to extreme lows. Their cells are undergoing the kind of progressive damage seen in refrigerated meat.

3. If your answer to question #2 is "alive", how about the same human body after three weeks?

4. If your answer to question#3 is "dead", then at what moment or event did they instantaneously cross the line from "alive" to "dead", and how is that instant determined?

5. Is a million-year-old pollen grain alive or dead?

6. Sperm in liquid nitrogen?

7. Frozen embryos?

8. Dehydrated brine shrimp eggs?

9. Henrietta Lacks, whose body was buried in in the cemetery across the street from her family's tobacco farm in Virginia in 1951?

10. A crystallized Tobacco Mosaic Virus (TMV)?

11. A TMV decomposed into its constituent parts?

12. The viral parts in question#11 decomposed into their constituent molecules?

13. The molecules in question#12 decomposed into their constituent atoms?

14. The atoms, molecules, or parts in questions#11-13 reassembled back into a virus?

In your answer for each of these questions, please state the specific reasons for your "alive" or your "dead" answer in the particular case. Make sure your criteria are entirely consistent in all cases, and are specific enough to allow them to be applied to new cases I have not yet mentioned without giving answers which fly in the face of the common sense assessment for those additional cases.

[PatrickHenry]

If you continue with this relentless, remorseless, uncompromising, and horribly insensitive line of rational questions, I shall soon find myself questioning that the luminiferous aether functions as a cosmic medium; that flammable materials contain phlogiston; that angels move the planets across the sphere of the heavens; that the four humours permeate the body and influence its health; that there is a mystical relationship between numbers and the physical world; and that the stars have an astrological influence our lives

If you take all that away, I shall have nothing except the nymphs that lurk within every tree, and the naiads that inhabit every brook. And that is not enough for a meaningful life. Therefore, to preserve all that I am, I shall oppose you and all your evil works. You have been warned!