Using 'life' as the ultimate moral point of anything. (Insofar as there is an ultimate point to anything, which there isn't.) Except, of course, that change is life and stagnation is death, no matter how it may look like from the outside.

The common schoolchild definition of 'alive' and 'not alive' does not work. There's ecosystems, of course. But really —

Houses are alive. Serialised multiauthor works of fiction are alive. Mathematics is alive. Everything is terribly interconnected.

I think that — in this broad definition — life is the foremost source of weirdness in the universe. At least, it is from what I've seen. The definition may be a bit circular, though.

There's another problem with the simple definition: it assumes a rigid boundary. Rigid boundaries are rare things. Mostly, if I can't imagine what a gradient between two points looks like, that reflects on my imagination much more than on reality.

There's a sort of subcategory of 'life', that is — 'person'. I've been thinking about it lately.

I think I find myself loving things much more readily than people. And life is all of it complicated, so I don't think it's that. Or the hard problem of consciousness — looking through someone's eyes at themself wouldn't help. It's just, I suppose, that loving non-people and loving your perception of them is one and the same, but people you assume to be an almost-absolute epistemic authority on themself. And this is good that you assume so! But how could I be so arrogant as to presume I know them enough to love them, while still keeping a respect for them?