What is life?

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Now I couldn't actually find a real meaning of life topic, so I've decided to post one up here.

Not only should we discuss what the meaning of life is, but what exactly is life.

In school, you are taught clear definitions of what features life must have, but these are observations of life on our world and even then, there is the subject of whether a virus is alive or not, whether a prion protein is alive or not.

We are all taught that life must have exhibited all of the following qualities at least once in its existence:
1. Growth
2. Metabolism, consuming, transforming and storing energy/mass; growing by absorbing and reorganizing mass; excreting waste
3. Motion, either moving itself, or having internal motion
4. Reproduction, the ability to create entities that are similar to itself
5. Response to stimuli - the ability to measure properties of its surrounding environment, and act upon certain conditions.

Yet, clearly these definitions are not enough. By these definitions, a sterile animal incapable of producing sperm is not alive. By this definition, a virus is not alive.

Which brings me on to the subject of viruses. Yup. They're the weird guys, all right. They cannot be considered alive when outside of a cell, but once inside of a cell, they can be (according to the definitions above). Yet if they enter a cell where the translation mechanisms have been destroyed, an effectively dead cell, a virus can replace those mechanisms and technically bring the cell back to life.

The viruses have no organelles. It has nothing except its own genome and maybe a protin and lipid capsule. Yet it clearly must be alive, because it has a survival instinct and behaviours that allow it to escape detection in a host organism.

And don't get me started on ants, where an individual ant has no intelligence whatsoever but a colony of ants does. That just boggles the mind.

So what is life? What is alive?

Are we really sentient beings or are we just a bunch of ordered chemicals, a huge sack of chemicals with the delusion of life? And can artificial intelligence be called alive?

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Anything a self is life. But it takes being aware so that the self notices that. It takes a mind so a self can be aware of the fact of it being a life. Or else, the self is sleep in some dormant state/stage. And so life may "live" (yes, life and live are different in my book) because there is also a matter of 'the ego'. If you look up the definition to "I" you dont just see "the self", you see "the self; the ego". If 'the self' is without an 'ego', then you can just imagine how that would be. But if 'the self' has an 'ego', and is kept from expressing its 'ego', then you can just imagine that it would have been better if that 'self' had never an 'ego'--How come? That would defined gloomy and anguish and confinement.

There are some persons right now saying to themselves: "This aint living". I tell you they wouldnt be saying that if they had no ego since being aware.

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Yet it clearly must be alive, because it has a survival instinct and behaviours that allow it to escape detection in a host organism.

The "behaviours" are responses to stimuli but this, in biology, might not be sufficient enough to be called life.

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Are we really sentient beings or are we just a bunch of ordered chemicals, a huge sack of chemicals with the delusion of life? And can artificial intelligence be called alive?

"We" are the on-going patterns that resulted from neural interactions.
Even if we do have delusions, then we are alive still because delusions arise in the brain.

I can see a wooden table, and if I don't have eyes or any neural interactions, then the image would probably not exist.