I think those are great rough criteria through which one could perhaps arrive at a distinction between virusses and other life forms.
But let's consider the original concept of the feature based tree of life, which with the advent of genetic sequencing was eventually shown to contain many errors, and to really be a graph of life with a strongly discernible spanning tree.
So if genomes turn out to be a better navigation instrument than behaviors or features, and given how modern understanding of the evolution of life through natural selection, it would appear a better definition for life forms would be to say: patterns in physical nature that can thrive in specific niches (often relying on the presence of other such patterns) having one or more nontrivial / unbounded chemical information stores (say polymers) the contents of which undergo natural selection or the evolutionary algorithm in the environment according to physics.
So prion would not be life forms since their number of chemical states are trivial or bounded, while viruses would still be lifeforms under my definition since their RNA or DNA sequences are non-trivial and in some sense unbounded (their genome could grow or shrink in size over generations).
Also consider that just like living organisms can die because of say UV-C radiation, so can viruses be inactivated by UV-C radiation...
But let's consider the original concept of the feature based tree of life, which with the advent of genetic sequencing was eventually shown to contain many errors, and to really be a graph of life with a strongly discernible spanning tree.
So if genomes turn out to be a better navigation instrument than behaviors or features, and given how modern understanding of the evolution of life through natural selection, it would appear a better definition for life forms would be to say: patterns in physical nature that can thrive in specific niches (often relying on the presence of other such patterns) having one or more nontrivial / unbounded chemical information stores (say polymers) the contents of which undergo natural selection or the evolutionary algorithm in the environment according to physics.
So prion would not be life forms since their number of chemical states are trivial or bounded, while viruses would still be lifeforms under my definition since their RNA or DNA sequences are non-trivial and in some sense unbounded (their genome could grow or shrink in size over generations).
Also consider that just like living organisms can die because of say UV-C radiation, so can viruses be inactivated by UV-C radiation...