We're not talking about claymen here. We're talking about chemical reactions.
If you look at very simple cellular "life", you'll notice there's not much to it but a large chain of chemical reactions. Multicellular life isn't much different, though several orders of magnitude more complex. Same with all other lifeforms, essentially. It's just that at some point the reactions become so complex that it isn't very useful to talk about them on the same scale anymore and instead we move to larger scales like neurology and biology (and once we talk about the interaction between organisms, eventually, ecology, etc).
What I'm saying is that the concept of "life" doesn't make any sense the further you "zoom in" on it. It's the same problem with all such concepts, really. If you look at individual genetics, "species" suddenly becomes less helpful than you'd first expect instead parent/sibling/child relations become more relevant than, say, when looking at ecologies.
If you look at very simple cellular "life", you'll notice there's not much to it but a large chain of chemical reactions. Multicellular life isn't much different, though several orders of magnitude more complex. Same with all other lifeforms, essentially. It's just that at some point the reactions become so complex that it isn't very useful to talk about them on the same scale anymore and instead we move to larger scales like neurology and biology (and once we talk about the interaction between organisms, eventually, ecology, etc).
What I'm saying is that the concept of "life" doesn't make any sense the further you "zoom in" on it. It's the same problem with all such concepts, really. If you look at individual genetics, "species" suddenly becomes less helpful than you'd first expect instead parent/sibling/child relations become more relevant than, say, when looking at ecologies.
