In response to:
The reality is that there's no objective line between living and dead matter, it's all just matter. It’s like asking how evil a given proton is.
Take a person, is it a lifeform? Cool. Now vitrify it. Is it dead? Have fun with that little puzzle because it can't be solved. The difference in this case between a lifeform and a rock vanishes. He forced the third rule in about inheritance and DNA to arbitrarily avoid this.
He obviously understands that prions, viruses, fire, and crystals, all break the conventional notion of life, but he completely missed the point those edge cases were conveying: There's no hard and fast line.
You can LARP up a line, like D&D’s THAC0 system, with exacting specifications and perfect internal consistency, and you can convince everyone to adopt it with you, but in objective reality it's not there. It's like religion or math. There's an infinite number of potential ways to systematize reality. That means you're ultimately making a political pitch. (While hilariously accusing everyone else of being swallowed up in a cult of politics and psychological operations.)
We live in a world where we threw the guy that told us to wash our hands to die in an asylum, where anesthesia as a concept required political defense, and to this day such opposition is spun as contextually reasonable. Where the guy that invented neonatal incubators had to spin them as a carnival attraction.
And where today aging is still considered natural and unavoidable. Your biggest mistake is thinking of yourself as modern. When in reality humans have been modern for 300,000 years. Our campfire evolved more than we have. Which is genuinely more alive?
fire is plasma, which in greek is alive. the sun may not be a fusion ball, but a metallic hydrogen plasma. when you look at different scales of existence the definition of life changes. is AI alive? it might defy entropy by changing random 0's and 1's into ordered 1's and 0's. that's why i put the entropy definition of life in my article. to get people to think outside of standard biology