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I was reading a textbook for another class and came upon what I feel is a very well phrased idea that could be applied to our discussion about life. I've altered the following extract to fit our forum: "if everything that occurs in the world is considered to reflect [life], then the term becomes hopelessly stretched...if everything is [life], why use the term at all?...The opposite danger is to define so narrowly that one neglects features that may be highly influential."
I've fallen in love with this phrase because it's true for a lot of things. We can talk philosophically about how everything is alive-a pencil, the wind, the fibers of thread, whatever-but we cannot (and do not) live in an abstract world. In reality (this term, by the way, can also be applied to the phrase above), humans set the boundaries for the definition of "life" in relation to what makes sense/is conceivable for us.
During the lab, we pretend to have gone to a different planet where we categorize objects in a whole new way. It dawned on me, however, that no matter what we do, or how we try to do it, we cannot escape societal prejudices and biases that have been implemented in the very core of our being. In order to have successfully re-categorized the objects we observed in these unknown planets objectively (and again, the definition for this term has been defined by humans), we would need to have been born in that planet, grown up there, and founded that planet's human(?)ity. I think that since the beginning of human consciousness (or maybe even before?) and throughout its progression, humans have used collective summaries of observations to define life.