According to Chambers' dictionary "Life is a characteristic of organisms that exhibit certain biological processes such as chemical reactions or other events that results in a transformation. Living organisms are capable of growth and reproduction, some can communicate and many can adapt to their environment through changes originating internally".
The last words written by Shelley in his unfinished poem The Triumph of Life were “Then, what is life? I cried.” Clearly Shelley meant this is the everyday sense rather than the technical usage of what distinguishes animate from inanimate. C.U.M Smith in his The Problem of Life sets out to answer Shelley's question by addressing the problem not only of how matter could be alive but also be conscious. Although conscious, living matter was a problem for Democritean philosophers, it was not for other pre-Socratics nor for Aristotle for whom living beings where paradigmatic.Descartes radically reconceptualized the problem by his dualism of matter and mind; life was a problem for which an explanation was to be sought in the mechanistic interactions of matter, and there was the question of how mind was related to the matter in living beings. I feel that it is life we are studying in biology, and not phenomena which can be represented by conceptions of physics and chemistry. Hogben rightly considered consciousness to be an integral part of the problem of life and that an inquiry into the nature of life and the nature of consciousness presupposes the necessity of formulating the problem in the right way. Indeed, “no problem of philosophy is more fundamental than the nature of life”. This by far is a wonderful definition of life i have come across. Lets ponder a while on the link between consciousness and life
