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An organic machine can exist and mask as life.. but is and was not life at all... the package is not the contents.. But merely the packageing.. of Life..

Thank you for sharing your insights, dear brother in Christ!

Here again, I shall present my understanding of the matter which is rooted in Judeo/Christian theology and relates well to Information Theory and Molecular Biology. Scripture and Jewish tradition speak of the soul/spirit in four levels:

1. nephesh – the will to live, the animal soul, or the soul of all living things (Genesis 1:20) which by Jewish tradition returns to the “earth” after death. In Romans 8, this is seen as a whole, the creation longing for the children of God to be revealed. This is what betty boop and I have often described here as being field-like because it exists in all points of space/time.

2. ruach - the self-will or free will peculiar to man (abstraction, anticipation, intention, etc.) – by Jewish tradition, the pivot wherein a man decides to be Godly minded or earthy minded (also related to Romans 8, choosing)

3. neshama - the breath of God given to Adam (Genesis 2:7) which may also be seen as the “ears to hear” (John 10) - a sense of belonging beyond space/time, a predisposition to seek God and seek answers to the deep questions such as “what is the meaning of life?"

4. ruach Elohim - the Holy Spirit (Genesis 1:2) which indwells Christians (I Cor 2, John 3) – the presently existing in the “beyond” while still in the flesh. (Col 3:3) This is the life in passage : "In him was life, and the life was the light of men..." (John 1)

I suspect only the first two on the list would be manifest in such a way that science might be able to detect them - the last two are specially given gifts of God.

The first, the nephesh is the “will to live” which permeates the entire biosphere and perhaps the entire universe. It can be observed in plants and animals, in creatures which go into dormant phases of their life cycle and in the simplest of life forms (e.g. cell intelligence)

It is also observed in collectives of organisms which act as if one mind – swarm intelligence (ants, bees, etc.). The “will to live” also permeates throughout the molecular machinery of higher organisms. For instance, if a part of the heart dies (myocardial infarction) – the molecular machinery will continue to struggle to survive, routing blood flow around the dead tissue. A person can be “brain dead” and yet the rest of the body will struggle to survive and will succeed if a machine (respirator) is used to simulate the cyclic instruction of the brain. Plant life will overtake most structures and acreage if not continually maintained.

The second, the ruach is what we also might call consciousness or mind and is the subject of ongoing inter-disciplinary studies.

Those who believe in strong determinism – or even strong predestination – would consider the mind to be an epiphenomen, a secondary phenomenon which cannot cause anything to happen. These would believe that everything is unfolding involuntarily – on the one hand by physical laws and constants (the physical brain caused you to press the “post” button, the mind is an illusion) – and on the other, according to God’s will from the beginning (free will is an illusion.)

IMHO, one of the strong evidences against either of these is qualia, the properties of sensory experiences that are epistemically unknowable in the absence of direct experience of them and therefore are also incommunicable – things such as likes, dislikes, pain, pleasure, love, hate, good, evil. IOW, if the mind were actually just an epiphenomenon then “pain” would be programmable. But AFAIK, artificial intelligence cannot spontaneously experience an incommunicable, epistemically unknowable, phenomenon.

And again, using successful communication (Shannon, information) as the definition of life, the definition applies at all levels in the hierarchy.