[jymbo]

I like to think of things like hurricanes as kinda proto-alive things, in the sense that they are somewhat unpredictable, though have dynamic structure and somewhat maintains that structure in the face of chaotic environment.

But, if we were to speed your brain up a million times, when you look at my brain, it might seem a lot more predictable - much more like an inert machine than a dynamic animal. So there's a kind of relativism to whether one subject perceives another subject as "alive" or free-willed, given their own context.