I personally get better mileage out of Ziz posts when thinking of them as “this is way of thinking / series of metaphors that make sense to Ziz” as opposed to “this is an attempt to form a canonical new jargon term.” (I don’t have much idea how strongly Ziz intends things in one direction or another)
In this particular post, I initially had a reaction of “Alive is a super loaded term that I already have a bunch of intuitions about that have nothing to do with what you’re describing here.” (My intuitions were also different from the thing Davis linked)
But after finishing the article, I found a) it was getting at an important thing, b) at least to some degree, it was importantly contrasting with my default intuitions/connotations about the word, c) I had an easier time working with the post if I mentally inserted a sentence at the beginning going something like:
I have an important concept I want to get at. I think it’s easiest to think about the concept with a metaphor—being alive, being dead, and being various kinds of undead.
Upvoted for minding long-term evolution of the structure. On the fence about whether it’s worth it. Maybe “livingness”? (Would that help much or be almost as confusing?) I don’t think I could pick anything but a synonym and not obscure the concept.
Can I suggest picking a different name for this term? A similar but relevantly different concept exists in martial arts and has been discussed here before.
I personally get better mileage out of Ziz posts when thinking of them as “this is way of thinking / series of metaphors that make sense to Ziz” as opposed to “this is an attempt to form a canonical new jargon term.” (I don’t have much idea how strongly Ziz intends things in one direction or another)
In this particular post, I initially had a reaction of “Alive is a super loaded term that I already have a bunch of intuitions about that have nothing to do with what you’re describing here.” (My intuitions were also different from the thing Davis linked)
But after finishing the article, I found a) it was getting at an important thing, b) at least to some degree, it was importantly contrasting with my default intuitions/connotations about the word, c) I had an easier time working with the post if I mentally inserted a sentence at the beginning going something like:
Upvoted for minding long-term evolution of the structure. On the fence about whether it’s worth it. Maybe “livingness”? (Would that help much or be almost as confusing?) I don’t think I could pick anything but a synonym and not obscure the concept.