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You can't prove that they're not alive, only that you lack the ability to communicate with them.

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They don’t meet the criteria to be considered alive, yet when they are all together in particular order and groups they do meet the criteria as a whole. Where is the line that separates alive to not-alive?

It's a good question and a line that has likely moved several times over the course of human history. We define things according to our understanding and then measure with tools that we have available. To think that either is complete would appear to be a mistake given the history.

I like your answer but leaves plenty of room for doubts. If, let’s say, carbon atoms that compose your body are considered alive, then it means that the mineral that will be formed in billions of years somewhere else in the universe - with the very same carbon atoms that make you today - will also be alive.

Why would that be a problem? For doubts, they will always exist and I kind of like it that way. It leaves room for possibility and wonder.

You aren’t constituted of the atoms that make you up, but rather the relations between them. This is why you are more “alive” than your parts individually.

Life is just a set of very, very complex chemical processes.

The disconnect here is just our intrinsic understanding of life as a holistic quality rather than as the sum of a metric fuckton of chemical processes.

But the relations between my atoms are the same as the ones between a rock’s atoms. They still exchange electrons, they still answer the physical laws in the same way. But my relations, differently from a rock, have a sense which is literally trying to go against the universe thermodynamic fundamentals: we constantly try to overcome entropy. Why a rock doesn’t do the same?

Just like I mentioned in a previous comment, there is a curious aspect about these chemical reactions. You see, a rock will decade eventually and so do we, but our reactions constantly try to adjust to the thermodynamics instead of following them. A structure in our body was broken by giving it energy? No problem, so long as I feed the system with new energy I can rebuild the damaged part and make it back to what it is not supposed to be anymore. It’s even more curious knowing that this can’t happen forever but does happen.

Your parents lied to you and told you that you weren’t just a rock. You’ve believed them since then. A rock has complex lattice systems, but no sense of inside or outside. Why run from entropy when you are the environment into which you decay? The only reason you continue being you is your decision to deny the fact that you are not (your parents made this decision before you did). You are an instance of temporary and extremely local organization and complexity, but you ultimately serve to push the universe further towards entropy with your actions after all is done.

A significant percentage of your body is alive and isn’t even technically human. Are symbiotic bacteria also you?

We are the ones that define what alive is.

When we make up the rules you can always expect there to be inconsistencies.

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To your reply which you’ve removed:

I don’t see how this couldn’t continue to be a promising discussion. I didn’t mention your parents to offend you, but to establish the fact that our maintenance of our own vitality is a tradition which begins with our community’s actions and is then taken on by ourselves.

I understand your post and that you do not think a rock is a living being. My point is that you, with enough inaction, would revert to the same inorganic compounds from which the rock is formed. In the same sense, parts of the rock could slowly become parts of amino acids, given that the reverse is happening somewhere in greater quantity.

A rock is not living yet or anymore. Nothing belongs to the category of living or non-living, and objects will become one or the other without their own volition. After this point of genesis, some level of self-awareness instilled by external objects will give the object the tools to continue this process. Alternatively, we all have the choice to go back home, to the rocks.

I am very sorry if I have offended you by making my argument in a disconnected fashion and mentioning unnecessary things, I just think it’s an interesting conversation and don’t believe in the distinction you have noted between our non-living components and our subjective selves.

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That is how emergent properties work yes. A brick is not a house and such.

We are not reacting and adjusting. We are simply a complex collection of chemical, physical, and electrical reactions transferring energy. Our consciousness is simply one of those reactions.

When water flows down a hill and runs into a rock, the water doesn't just stop, it flows around it. It didn't decide to go around the rock, it just did because of the chemical, physical, and electrical properties of the rock and water. We are unimaginably more complicated than a rock and water, but we are no different.

When the electrons from your phone screen reach your eyes and causes a chain reaction through your optic never into your brain, your brain will set off another chain reaction of chemical and electrical responses which in turn will cause other chain reactions and other reactions. Eventually your muscles will move and they will do so because of all those reactions and they will type out words, or scroll past or whatever they are supposed to do in response to all those actions....not at all unlike the water flowing past the rock.

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Says who? No one knows what ‘living’ really means. Consciousness may scale to infinity at both ends (large and small).

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A tuba player is not considered an orchestra. Nor a violinist. But when you organize a group of musicians together, all with one goal, then you can have an orchestra.

Animated clay golem Dorfl debates his nature with the city's leading priesthood.

>'We're not listening to you! You're not even really alive!' said a priest.

> Dorfl nodded. 'This Is Fundamentally True,' he said.

>'See? He admits it!'

>'I Suggest You Take Me And Smash Me And Grind The Bits Into Fragments And Pound The Fragments Into Powder And Mill Them Again To The Finest Dust There Can Be, And I Believe You Will Not Find A Single Atom of Life - '

>'True! Let's do it!'

>'However, In Order To Test This Fully, One Of You Must Volunteer To Undergo The Same Process.'

-- Terry Pratchett, Feet of Clay

(Much later in the series the elemental personification of the winter thought to make himself a human body by collecting and including a shopping list of chemical ingredients into a snowman. What Dorfl clearly understood, he missed completely. If only he'd got the idea, things might have gone differently with the witch he pined for. Too bad... frost to fire.)

Im too high for this shit

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We are made the same substance that created stars and galaxies. I think that's more comforting.

I asked artificial intelligence it's thoughts on your statement. Here is the reply:

As a machine learning model, I do not have the ability to have thoughts or feelings. However, from a scientific perspective, it is true that individual atoms and molecules that make up living organisms are not considered to be alive. Life is a characteristic of complex systems made up of these atoms and molecules, and it is the organization and interactions of these components that give rise to the properties we associate with life, such as metabolism, growth, reproduction, and response to the environment.