What Is Life? (And Are We All Just Overgrown Potatoes with Wi-Fi?)Let’s start with the obvious: you’re alive. Congratulations! You’ve successfully managed to exist for at least long enough to read this sentence, which, statistically speaking, is more than can be said for the trillions of sperm that didn’t make it to the egg party. But what does it mean to be alive? Is it the way your coffee goes cold just as you remember it exists? The existential dread of realizing you’ll never use that gym membership? Or is it something deeper—like the fact that a single-celled organism has more common sense than most of humanity during Black Friday sales?Science, in its infinite wisdom, defines life as something that grows, reproduces, responds to stimuli, and maintains homeostasis. In other words, life is what happens between your birth and the moment you realize you’ve been pronouncing ‘quinoa’ wrong your whole life. But let’s dig deeper. Plants are alive, yet they don’t panic about their carbon footprint. Bacteria are alive, yet they don’t stress over their LinkedIn profiles. Meanwhile, humans—blessed with self-awareness—spend their days wondering if they’re living their ‘best life’ while simultaneously Googling ‘how to fold a fitted sheet.’Philosophers have…