All space and matter has some degree of life in it. This is the proposition that Christopher Alexanader makes in The Nature of Order, Book One, the Phenomenon of Life.
This life is observable and testable. There seems to be a nearly universal agreement among people when they see particular works of architecture, art, elements of nature, about whether or not a particular think has a feeling of “life.”
For example, the mineral gold feels “alive” in a way that similarly colored metals (titanium nitride) or similarly valued metals (rhodium) don’t feel alive.
This feeling of life seems to be a direct effect of an object’s structure. There is a particular type of order that seems to create this sensation of “life.”
SOURCE The Nature of Order, Book One, The Phenomenon of Life page 4, end note 1. (the example of gold, p. 32)
SEE ALSO
This idea stems from the notion that “life” is not simply a matter of biology but that there is a new idea of order that governs the existence of all things.
The life in all things is observable and measurable, primarily through the feeling of life in all things
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The universal quality of this feeling of life has strong echoes with Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi’s observation that there is universal agreement on what enjoyment is
