Extended Definition of Life.
The brain is not a living organism, it is not alive nor dead; it is a pseudo-organism structure of living cells, comparable to a bee-hive or an ant-hill. A pseudo-organism is something like an organism but not necessarily having a metabolic system but characterized by organization of the energy flows and interactions with the surrounding world fitting is strategies for continuing existing. Viruses as well as organized groups of cooperating organisms are the main examples.
The living organism depends completely on pseudo-organisms, organelles, organs,…,constructed in its evolution,the building plan is in the genetic information and those pseudo-organisms depend on independent living organisms ,cells for example, in some strange way doing what the “organism” wants.
In a similar way the human species is a pseudo-organism consisting of people, it is fitting also in the larger pseudo-organism Life. In a person the equivalent of the Life is the collection of all substructure pseudo-organisms, that is the body as a biological entity. But the organism ‘human’ is more than the body obviously.Then what is for Life the equivalent of what is the complete human to the body, in other words how is the human abstract world realized in a “living” structure built on Life. It is not hard to realize that this requires another, better, definition of living, living bigger than Life… and this definition has to have a ‘spiritual’ component. It is true that the definition of living was long ago given from a materialistic point of view, spiritual components were often seen as superstition or free fantasy. Nowadays spirituality still has ambiguous meanings.
In my model based on states of the universe defined at moments in a totally ordered set called Time, where existing things appear as strings of non-existing pre-things being at moments in zero time,reality extends beyond existing reality which in turn extends beyond observed reality. Yet abstractions like the meaning(!) of our concepts are non-materialistic and outside reality,hence outside Time and Space. So we may assume Life has created an abstract part outside reality (we contributed to that), let us call it Abstract Life (AL.) and together with Life it makes ALL. Our new definition of life should thus be “ALL”, that is not everything and also not conscientious things, it contains every human being together with the abstract world created by it. The concept of living should then be interpreted as the exchanging of interactions between abstract(a) and existing (e )in different combinations, interactions of type: a-a, a-e, e-a, e-e, and it is easy to give examples for every type.
a-a. For example an application of mathematics on an engineering plan.
a-e. The effect of Islam on daily life in a society.
e-a. The effect of the sun on the philosophy in Egypt.
e-e. The effect of pollution on arctic ice.
With these organized(!) interactions ALL becomes a ‘living’ entity in the new definition as an enriched pseudo-organism. The notion of food existing in the life of all living organisms also transfers to the abstract part of Life, for example via human concepts ,but also via the fact (!) that food or feeding is an ingredient of all life forms-perhaps in slightly different interpretations from our points of view-but as a factual property present in Life. Our senses have put us in contact with ‘Life’ and reality but the problematic consciousness remains more vaguely understood.
I would say the conscience is an abstract structure the species constructed from some moment on in its evolution, in order to do”abstract sensing”, so we made sense out of AL and then ALL. Just like we also have some interface ‘sense’ allowing us to draw memories from the memory we the have a ‘sense’ to become conscientious about the deeper structure of the reality without being able to observe the reality directly,only indirectly through our senses registering intermediate interactions. Applying this to ourselves we immediately rediscover the trinity structure of our Self, the biological Being existing in reality as a living organism related to sensing, the Observer part using consciousness to analyze the biological structure by observing it, the Image constructed by the observer using learning processes. The three parts together define a structure in ALL and so we can say that an awareness of the ALL came to us via sensing, observing conscientiousness and learning processes about meanings in the abstract world..
The interactions in ALL define effects in Life and more particular in all species, in humans with the largest abstract component of all living things (so far) the impact of ALL is strongest and also conversely we are the species with the strongest impact on the abstract part of ALL. If we would likewise define a union of the universe and an abstract universe, fittingly defined,and obtain something like AUU then ALL would be the equivalent in the extended universe AUU to Life in the Universe.Religious people will immediately adapt the definition of ALL to some god-figure and AUU to heaven perhaps,but no religion is needed in finding such structure which is organizing Life-we are all related to-from its abstract part. If you want to embellish your relation with ALL you can add some beliefs, but if you must, do that respecting logic.