I tend to consider the lexicon of language use that people apply to various topics. Language is a structure with lexical applications for conveying meaning-to-others and for-oneself. What is life is a phrase that exists within a given language structure and that within an ontology expecting certain correspondent information. One may enumerate a list of words saying ‘this is life’ or those qualities comprise life, yet it does seem that life is a thermodynamic process compiling change or increase faster than non-living mass.
Plainly if Leibnitz’s one-dimensional monads (made of spirit) were at the heart of energy or fields that support existence of sentient beings encased or associated with physical bodies, life exists at a very fundamental level. I asked CHatGPT (an artificial intellect) to write an avante-guard play today. It popped out quite a good brief five page play instantly. It is a human conciet to believe that the Universe is itself a product of design and purpose. One need use parallel thought processing to work science and philosophy simultaneously.
Garrison Gibson: books and blog 