If it seems easy to tell them apart, it is still the same nature of judgement as distinguishing a good from an evil act, or a beautiful from an ugly object. And just as an unreflective person may have a black and white view of right and wrong (and not be aware of their inconsistencies) so does an unreflective person think the distinction between life and non-life straightforward. The only difference is that there such a very dominant social narrative about the difference between life and non-life that we are almost blind to the perspectival nature of the judgement.I couldn't disagree more - a) that there's any difficulty telling the animate from the inanimate,
I explored this a little above. If we don't know what's alive and what isn't the organism and the environment would tend to blend into one. We would have an unstbale sense of what is 'adapting' and what is 'being adapted to' and the organims would be seen as increasingly continuous with its non-living surroundings (a little like Dawkins' 'extended phenotype').I couldn't disagree more - a) that there's any difficulty telling the animate from the inanimate, and b) that even if there were it wouild pose a problem for evolution.
Interestingly, Lovelock has gone down this road a little way when he allows for the fact that Earth (including both 'living' and 'non-living' components) is best understood as a single living organism. From my perspective the problem still remaims: if planet Earth is living, then what is not-living - and why?
All the best, Nikolai