After reading these articles my stance on the problem of what we consider life is that we can consider all things that are able to self replicate as a form of life. When we are discussing life the main feature that people look for is the aspect of self replication. This aspect of life is found as too broad and includes things that people would be hesitant to call life. In the "Life is..." paper Carl Woese starts with the concept that life is just "an entity that can make a copy of itself from parts which are far simpler than itself" however later in the interview he goes back on this and questions this when the concept of a robots that could replicate is introduced. This hesitation makes sense since there is a numerous amount of vast differences between human made robot "life" and the life we know from studying our biology. This hesitation however is just from a naming perspective, classifying two things that are so different under the same umbrella. The question is where we decide to place this Umbrella of the term life for what and that determines what will fall under it and it has changed many times over the course of history as we learn more and more about how our world works. As brought up in the "Why life doesn't not really exist" the author points out the fact the living beings are also just a machine, just a much more complex one and therefore life does not actually exist. However there is a distinction between the human machinery that we have created and the "life" we currently observe and that is the ability for self replication which I why i used it for my cut off point for my definition of life.
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