A conceptual analysis published in Zenodo concludes that science lacks a universally accepted definition of life because one word is being asked to do several incompatible jobs at once: classify entities, express a theory of living organization, and guide searches for unfamiliar biology. The paper surveys four major theoretical frameworks, including NASA's working definition, autopoiesis, the chemoton, and autonomy plus open-ended evolution, and finds that each captures certain features while missing others. Standard checklist definitions fail at familiar biological margins: sterile organisms are alive, dormant spores become nearly inert, viruses evolve without autonomous metabolism, and viroids or prions reproduce patterns without being cells.
The paper also raises a sampling problem. Earth provides only one deeply related cellular biosphere, so traits that look universal may be historical contingencies rather than genuine necessities of life as such. The author proposes 'disciplined pluralism' as the most defensible current practice: explicitly state the task, the unit, and the criteria being used, then subject them to empirical test. Life detection, on this view, requires context, controls, and converging evidence rather than a single criterion.
The study is entirely conceptual and philosophical. It reports no new empirical data and runs no experiments. The counterexamples it marshals come from existing biological knowledge. The normative recommendation of disciplined pluralism is itself a prescriptive conclusion derived from the analysis, not an empirically validated method. Readers should treat the paper's conclusions as a contribution to definitional reasoning, not as an experimental result.
For consciousness studies the paper matters because basal cognition and sentience are typically attributed to living systems and are tied to their degree of organization. If the boundary between living and non-living remains genuinely contested, the question of where mind or cognition begins is correspondingly harder to anchor. Any framework that assigns mentalistic properties to living systems inherits the same edge-case problems the paper documents.
Source: https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.22336210