Defining life

Just for the sake of discussion, what do you define life as?

As for me, I think that life is no different than, say, a table, aside from the obvious fact that it is more complex. To me, life (or, more accurately, an organism) is simply a complex, chaotic system of atoms. It's a series of (almsot compeltely) self-replenishing and self-sustaining chemical reactions. I say almost because we still seek out food - but given the required intake, life is self-sustaining. I say almost because we still age and die, which shows that there must be some slight chemical imbalance causing the eventual decay of an organism.

What about intelligence? Or, to broaden the subject, conciousness?

Again, to me, conciousness is a complex and chaotic system. I say chaotic because when you look at patterns in animal behavior, you notice general trends that can be preditced, but here are specific parts of anmal behavior that cannot be predicted. To word it differently, given 100 people, you might be able to rpedict what consensus they will reach about a subject, but you cannot predict what each and every individual will decide. So, in my opinion, you are born a specific way (genetics) and generally, people will react exactly the same way at first. But, as we know, not every person is under the same conditiona s everyone else throughout his lifetime. Each conciousness has different input - for example, a different colored bed while an infant - and the chaotic system of conciousness takes that input, processes it somehow, and spits out alterations to itself. This is why people are generally similar but differ in specifics. There are general trends, eg instincts such as self-preservation, but there are specifics that vary from person to person. We notice that, broadening the sample, people who have grown up in a poor neighborhood reason much differently than people who grew up in a rich neighborhood, but eighboring children often reason similarly.

I don't see conciousness as anything special. If you look at a bucket of water being subkected to some kind of outside force, such as stirring, you my notice similairites to how I described conciousness above. You can predict the general pattern of the water (such as currents in the ocean) but you cannot predict where a specific molecule of water will end up. The only difference between a bucket of water and a human mind is complexity.

I was wondering what other people thought, and will think about what I typed above. I'm interested to see howt his discussion will turn out.