We discussed what constitutes life.  From a paper by David Kraklauer (PDF) The Multiple Paths to Multiple Liferesearchgate.net, we got a definition of life as “an autonomous system that can metabolically extract and encode information from the environment of adaptive/survival value and propagate it forward through time.”  One might quibble that a reasonably conducive environment is required, i.e. it can supply the energy and materials required for a sufficient timespan, but the question to be addressed is whether this is an adequate definition, and do we like the conclusions as to what constitutes life?  We watched Blaise Aguero y Arcas on life and intelligence at  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=75PAyV83YqE&t=437s.  He went through von Neumann’s assertion that robots can reproduce themselves given an instruction set as to how to build a robot and a machine to carry out those instructions.  He also described a simple computer program (Turing machine equivalent) that links two random “tapes" from a library, runs them through the program and returns them and any output tape to the pool.  Eventually longer tapes are generated.  So by the definition, robots and computer programs are life forms.  We also noted hierarchies of life: viruses - cells - organisms (and that much of our DNA is symbiotic viruses), or individuals - communities - cultures.