How is it that scientists see something happening the same way all of the time and understand it as necessarily happening that way? Light must travel at the speed at which it travels (then again, who "sees" light travelling?). Could it be that necessity in nature, is a common sense notion, one that is derived, like the notion of identity through time, reliability of the senses, etc. from our life-world? But where in our everday, not-necessarily-scientific experience do we encounter necessity? In the relation between moments (the term "moments" here used as Husserl used it).
How about defining it as an instance of functional complexity? And treating the list of properties as following necessarily from this definition? Okay, this is very diamond-in-the-rough (or perhaps zirconium...) but here goes my thoughts on the matter: (Complexity) Many diverse parts (functional) acting for the sake of the whole I think I need to add something like "not as the instrument of another" or something like that. Given that they act together as one whole and given entropy, etc., the organism will need to posses more order than its surroundings (homeostasis). It will therefore need to take in energy (nutrition), which it will use to sustain its readiness to interact with its environment so as to preserve its own being (homeostasis again?), but which will eventually break down (death), so that in order for that life form to continue it will need to duplicate itself (reproduction), which, upon occurring, will involve both development (growth) to maturity and...
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