Mastodawn

@jdw it looks like she looked at your binary logic example and applied it to a situation where fuzzy logic would be more applicable (if we accept that one can be, say, 42% man, 58% non-man).
A similar issue occurs when people try to use binary logic when talking whether something is alive or dead and then argue for hours whether e.g. viruses are alive. I think that it makes sense that aliveness is likewise a spectrum that depends on the system itself, it's environment, timescales we consider, etc. Here's an interesting paper on this topic: https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11084-010-9192-3

As for your question, IDK, but I came up with another analogy:
let's take a 6-sided die. 4 of them are black, 2 of them are coloured with different colours A and B, such that when illuminated with some monochromatic light, A and B are indistinguishable.
So when looking at the die under white light, you can always say which colour is up. But under the monochromatic light, if the coloured side is up, you can say it was either A or B, but not one of the black sides.

Is it Useful to Have a Clear-cut Definition of Life? On the Use of Fuzzy Logic in Prebiotic Chemistry - Discover Life

Many scientists, including one of the authors of the present paper, have devoted time to try to find a definition for life (Bersini and Reisse 2007). It is clear that a consensus will never be reached but, more importantly, it seems that the issue itself could be without major interest. It is indeed impossible to define a “natural” frontier between non-living and living systems and therefore also impossible to define dichotomic criteria which could be used in order to classify systems in one of these two classes (living or non-living). Fuzzy logic provides a natural way to deal with problems where class membership lacks sharply defined criteria. It also offers the possibility to avoid losing time with unnecessary controversies such as deciding whether a virus is, or is not, a living system.

SpringerLink