what are the requirements of life?
autonomy, power, self-control?
cloning, genetic engineering, transplanting, plastic surgery, surgery, drugs, pills that you take, food that you eat, exercise, nutrition, prosthesis, eyeglasses and hearing aids. you are what you eat. you are what you do. every minute decision has a direct effect on your reality. forget goals. what you are doing right now is making you who you are. there is a reality feedback.
a live creation interacts with the environment. life changes the environment and the environment changes life. ideally, a balance is created. ideally, a harmony exists. like a sheet drying in the wind. an entropic redistribution of water into the wind. there is an interaction with the wind. a certain degree of randomness is allowed. the ends are allowed to flap in the breeze while the other ends are held in place. within the sheet there are varying degrees of control. the wind is unpredictable. a certain degree of control is maintained: by the clothes pins and by the fact that if it rains we can take the sheet inside. but an interaction is involved with the sun and wind which can not be predicted. it is impossible to predict exactly what forms the sheet will take, or how long it will take to dry. an interaction is allowed. for a moment, the sheet lives its limited beautiful life. but now we have dryers. we still plant seeds in the ground, but we irrigate and drain the fields and spray them pesticide and harvest them with machines. but this is only a continuation of our original choice to plant a seed rather than gather. inherent in our choice of planting a seed is where we plant it. by giving life certain limits are imposed. you could make the argument that some limits are natural, like that seeds can’t grow in a river. but this sort of argument is irrelevant. the point is that we inherently economize based on the limits we perceive. we believe seeds won’t grow in the river so we don’t plant them there. (but if you drain the swamp… then you have some really good land). what is the definition of life?
LIFE:
1 a : the quality that distinguishes a vital and functional being from a dead body b : a principle or force that is considered to underlie the distinctive quality of animate beings — compare VITALISM 1 c : an organismic state characterized by capacity for metabolism, growth, reaction to stimuli, and reproduction
VITALISM:
2 : a doctrine that the processes of life are not explicable by the laws of physics and chemistry alone and that life is in some part self-determining
(m-w.com )