Es un pensamiento medio desarrollado que comencé a escribir en inglés porque no encontraba palabras en español en ese momento. Aún no está terminado, pero subiré la traducción después y probablemente lo continúe hasta llevarlo a un final decente.

-There is no thing we can certainly call something, besides mathematics and some other human inventions.
-The universe is a mess, there are a lot of phenomena and things that are quite hard to name and tell appart, and that is for the reason that if you zoom in and think about it enough, they make no sense, not acording to human traditional categorization, they are all either related to someting else or have a slight similitude to its 'differents' that fades away (like the whole bunch of gray shades between black and white)
-And if you have not hear that phrase before "Between black and white, there are many shades of gray" (i would say infinite, because of the decimals in the wave lenghts) i can explain it to you. The metaphor states that the black and white are certain things, unlike the huge span of gray tones, which are uncertain.
-Take as an example life. We are all made of the same stuff, both dead things and living things are made of atoms, as they are matter. But then... What is the difference between us? Even matter is not totally matter, it is all energy if you zoom in a lot.
-In order for this question to be understood by humans, we have to use deterministic human systematization and categorization to name and differenciate this two
-We know that life is a bunch of molecules constantly reacting with each other... but doesn't that works for dead things as well?
-the difference here, is the order.
-A living thing is called a dead thing whenever it sucumbs to entropy
-Life has a process called homeostasis that keeps it from being dead. So the same reactions that ocurr in a cell will always happen as long as the thing is still "alive" or, to put it in other words:
A thing will be still alive as long as the reactions that occur on it keep happening. Like a clockwork. If something changes and the clockwork is corrupted finally getting to an end to it's reactions finding some kind of chemical and energetic balance with the enviorment, then it is when we can call it a dead thing
Though living things and dead things are made of the same stuff, life seems to do more things at a macroscopic level; like being conscious and having free will.
I know free will and consciousness are some very hard and confusing topics, that, like everything, fuse and fade away as abstract ideas in a very dark but not that much shade of gray.
For starters, the consciousness is the awareness of our own experiences, and is (with that ambiguous definition) the less understood concept from all of the human functions.
To understand the theory about it (or at least my theory), we can analyse another concept more or less confusing and like it, very hard to develope, it is of course, the case of artificial intelligence.
We do not yet know how consciousness work, but if i had the oportunity to guess about the process to achieve one, i would say that sensorial input and the learning process (which involves memory, organization, and processing of information) have both a lot to do with it. Then we have language, which i also like to think about as a bunch of constants, variables and commands; like a programming language. It is also some sort of the main idea that psychoanalysts adress in their works. To psychoanalists, the brain works with abstract images and concepts, that if put in order, make information and thoughts.
Which is very similar to neuronal programming (which is some idea that i had a long time ago), and if you asked me about it, i could tell you that neuronal programming is the idea that neurons are logic gates that comunicate with electric and chemical signals, which i compare with the "code" of a computer, like binary, ones and zeros, but with a different structure adapted to neurons and the wide variety of functions. Then we have the programming languaje, which is the one with the images, variables, constants, structure and comands. I would like to develope this idea even further, but the current technology and my current understanding of both neurosciences and programation make this task very difficult.