Re: machine, organism, life

This is an interesting question and I doubt my father would say he knew the answer to it. He would be most likely to say life is a set of behaviors/properties/qualities which we recognize, collectively, as "living". So life more closely resembles a "quality" than either a "function" or a "structure". Structure is the least important of those three words, in referring to life, unless you mean "organization". The material structure of living organisms is radically different from one to the next, yet we recognize that they are all alive. One of my father's breakthrough ideas was his realization that it is possible to have entirely different material structure and yet have the same organization.

The word "function" is closely associated with life in that living systems (organisms) are rife with function; indeed, one of the hallmarks of living organisms is that their organization is based on functional entailments, unlike an atom, say (which is complex but not alive). Functional entailments pull time much more into the organization as well. Function is not separable from temporal issues like rate, sequence, simultanaiety, past, future, etc. Anticipatory behavior shows us what happens when these temporal aspects themselves are used in chains of entailment, not just the products of some temporal action. Functional entailments, as a basis for organization, and anticipation are all observable in organisms. I believe this is why it took a biologist to see the foundational flaws in contemporary physics that Einstein sensed, but couldn't pinpoint: final cause is dispensable when science is analyzing non-functional entailments. Time also "appears" to be linear in respect to systems that are not based on functional entailments.