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Comment by perfTerm | Hacker News Reader

I think he (she?) is trying to explain zen in a confident manner which makes it sound silly (it is!) and a bit off.

It is just reasoning in favor of Occam's razor. It doesn't mean it is true (people here are sufficiently smart to figure that out for themselves). However, reasoning against the razor, now that's what I call silly!

If "alive" is some set of complex chemical reactions a system is experiencing then when they stop, that system is not alive by any standard definition of the word. "dead" would be a term applied to a pile of stuff that used to be doing the "alive" thing but isn't anymore. The pile keeps the term "dead" until the pile has reshuffled much of its original mater. For some reason living things face the Ship of Theseus paradox, and dead piles don't.

(I almost think I could make a board game from the above.)

The paradox is easily resolved if you consider everything to be part of the same object (i.e., the universe).

But when we use the word "fox" it does not include the ground under the animal. And if I look at the moon and say "that is part of a fox" I am using the language incorrectly.

Of course the word "alive" is ambiguously defined semantics applying to a loose hodgepodge of phenomenon (is a virus alive?). It may be convenient to use, just like the term "sunrise" is useful. But looking for the real phenomenon behind it is like looking for the caloric fluid or the land north of the north pole, they are words for ideas invented long before we knew much about anything.

Your notion too might be useful, that everything is part of a single grouping like the observable universe. But I think we'd be in error to suppose there is something real to either of these groupings beyond being useful names.

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