Is there inherently anything “alive” about a singular cell? I know it fits the criteria for living but is it not just a bunch of complex chemical processes on repeat?
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I think the word you’re looking for is “conscious”.
Cells are “alive”, because they can replicate, but this is unsatisfying if you’re using the colloquial/traditional version of the word alive. Intuitively there is more to being “truly alive” than the strict criteria that scientists use for the term. You feel that YOU are alive. You are experiencing and thinking and contemplating and planning, etc.
Organisms that have this vague fuzzy version of “truly alive” are called “conscious”. Unfortunately, the idea is so fuzzy and ill-defined that testing it proves a challenge. We don’t really know how to check if something is “truly alive” and we don’t have any evidence that it is even possible to check.
After all, everything that we understand about how we work can be explained away by many many many chemical processes. It’s not awfully clear that there is any special non-chemical process going on. We all know that there we have some sort of awareness. Maybe that is special to us? Maybe all animals have something approximating what we all seem to have? Maybe you are the only one that has this separate experience and everyone else is just a convincing mindless zombie. Maybe literally every chemical process has some degree of this awareness and it isn’t special at all. We just don’t know anything about it or what it is.
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