I have shown in my books the absence of a boundary between non-living and living for the upward look, that of processes. The notion of ‘life’ only makes sense for the downward look. But then this belvedere really does exist! And it needs a way to define itself. Pitfall: how can it define itself alone when it defines life by its look on what surrounds it? Is it possible to say that life is an acquired identity? No, because the downward look also gives an identity to the non-living.
In fact, the conscious belvedere needs to include the upward look to define itself. Thus it can identify organizational ruptures likely to be the transition from non-living to living. Ascendance organizes and descent defines the ruptures. Ascendance is content to evoke the living as “highly organized”, which is hardly identifying. While descent eagerly seeks its foundation, its ancestor! Is it the ability to move, to multiply? The memory of the genome? Here is my best answer in 2024:
“Life is everything that reproduces itself almost identically —thanks to a memory of its own that falters slightly.”
This definition eliminates materials that multiply under the influence of the environment and not of an intrinsic memory. It eliminates simple self-replicating molecules, which reproduce themselves identically and do not create diversity by themselves.
The major advantage of this definition is perhaps to include the temporal dimension of life. At each moment the Self reproduces itself almost identically in the next Self…
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