A question from a biologist to a conversation about the living and the non-living.

What is the difference? There are many interesting processes in nature. Mostly reduced to chemical reactions, but often - cleverly arranged in space and time. These processes just go by themselves, because they go, regardless of anything. According to physical laws, which at some abstract level know more or less everything (preservation of everything, playground with entropy, etc.)

And here comes man with his division into the living and the unliving. And he tries to embrace the immense by an intuitive dichotomic classification. We have cell cultures that have survived the people from whom they were taken for decades. The cells are alive, and man has long been gone. You can philosophize on this topic, but in fact, "living" and "non-living" are almost meaningless concepts, if they are applied beyond the domestic intuition.