I previously identified weaknesses in my definitions, but I liked them nonetheless because they personally helped me understand the evolution of matter – from physical forms to biological ones, and eventually to intelligent and superintelligent forms. Later, I delved into specifics. I reflected on physical reactions and viruses – whether they are alive or not. I concluded that their life is facultative; they are dualistic in nature and cannot be considered independently of cells, as, outside of cells, life does not exist. For practical reasons, we often consider viruses to be alive. However, in reality, viruses do not live outside of cells. One could say they are genomes outside of cells that, under suitable conditions, modify the genomes of bacterial or multicellular organisms and compete with them for cellular organization. The goal of this competition is to win the vertical race for the transmission of genetic information.
A virus is a parasitic genome. It is not alive, just as any genome outside of a cell is not alive. As a result of evolution, some genomes learned to persist outside of cells. This is a degenerative pathway of life and likely the first degeneration to occur in the living world. Viruses did not produce the diversity we later saw in multicellular organisms, but they are still alive to this day! They are more alive than the living and often outcompete living organisms, as evidenced by the recent coronavirus pandemic. These companions of life are not outsiders; their strategies are highly successful, and they are indestructible as long as life exists.
It is clear that for life – for this chemical factory – a compartment is necessary, whether it be a coacervate droplet, a bacterium, a cyanobacterium, or some other simple organism. The orderliness of this factory is such that the chemical processes within it sustain themselves, and entropy is minimal or approaches zero. For example, the orderliness of chemical transformations at a pharmaceutical factory is also significant, but that does not make the factory alive – the chemical processes there cannot sustain themselves. Without the participation of technologies created by intelligence, the factory cannot live or reproduce. The moment the technological process halts, everything reverts to an inert, chaotic process with increasing entropy.