ABSTRACT
The central thesis of this chapter is that life, at all levels of organisation, consists of processes rather than things, or substances. After a brief account of the nature of processes and their differences from standard conceptions of things, arguments for the processual view of life are developed with relation to the concept of an organism on the basis of three undisputed premises: organisms are in thermodynamic disequilibrium with their environments; organisms have life cycles; and organisms (typically) are dependent on many symbionts. Since organisms are processes, so, a fortiori, are humans. I conclude by exploring two issues with considerable importance for humans: the possibility of immortality, and the ontological nature of pregnancy.
