Virus

With the virus in the news every day, there is the old question of where the boundaries of living things are. Put simply, what exactly is alive and what is not alive?

Remember my concept that living things, unlike non-living things, must have meaningful definable dimensions. A plant has one definable dimension, a definable difference between it's top and bottom, but no meaningful difference between front and back or side-to-side. A living thing with free will, such as a human, also has a definable difference between front and back, but not side-to-side.

The human brain, more complex than the body, has a third definable dimension, side-to-side, as the right and left sides of the brain are different. We know that the brain must be more complex than the body because we would not be able to recognize other people if it wasn't. If the brain and body were of equal complexity, we would be able to recognize another person but have very limited ability to tell one person from another.

Non-living entities do have a dimension that is more significant than the others. A magnet has a north and a south pole but, unlike a plant with a definite top and bottom, we cannot meaningfully say that one of the magnet's poles, the north or the south, is the top while the other is the bottom.

The same goes for a rotating planet. By convention maps of the earth have north at the top and south at the bottom. But this is not a meaningful dimension because it could just as easily be the other way around.

With this in mind we can see that the virus in the following image has no definable dimensions.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coronavirus_disease_2019#/media/File:SARS-CoV-2_without_background.png 

This means that, while the virus resides in living things, and depends upon them for reproduction, the virus is not itself alive. It is merely a set of genetic code.