what is life

Defining life is a complex and multifaceted task that has been approached from various perspectives. From a scientific standpoint, life is often defined as self-organizing chemistry that reproduces itself and passes on its evolved characteristics, encoded in DNA. It has the ability to reduce local entropy or disorganization, thus locally contravening the third law of thermodynamics. However, recent observations show that context-dependent meaningful communication and network formation (and control) are central to all life forms. Some philosophers have suggested that we need to think more carefully about how we give a word like life its meaning. Instead of building definitions first, we should start by thinking about the things we’re trying to define. We can let them speak for themselves. Ultimately, life is a process characterized by the coordinated organization of complex interactions that we see as protein-based organisms of three domains of life, their reproduction, and metabolism all mediated by complex interwoven gene regulation as a result of communication.