I feel confident we have shared definitions of living vs. non-living things, but if you insist:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Life
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Organism
We don't need to get into what we mean by consciousness, or experiencing qualia. We only have direct evidence of our own consciousness. But I disputed a different statement, specifically:
> A lot of people hold the prejudice that both 'thinking' and 'consciousness' are substrate dependent, without a lick of evidence.
Define "a lot of people." In my anecdotal experience "a lot of people" believe in AI/AGI without any evidence for it. Those people implicitly believe that thinking and consciousness can happen in non-biological "subtstrates" whether they have thought that through carefully or not.
I just pointed out that if we agree on what we mean by "thinking" and "consciousness" for purposes of discussion, we (human beings) have lots of evidence for it, and all of that evidence occurs only in biological entities we call "living" and "organisms." We have no evidence for thinking or consciousness in rocks, stars, or computers. You can call that a prejudice if you like.
Not too long ago claiming that cephalapods or birds or insects could "think" or had something we might call "consciousness" amounted to extraordinary claims, rejected by people, mainly out of prejudice. Now we have persuasive evidence that non-human animals can think and appear to experience something that looks like consciousness, though we can't know for sure what happens in the mind of an octopus, crow, or ant. We have evidence but not definitive proof, in other words.
Today we have people making claims about AGI and machine superintelligence, with no evidence (but large financial incentives). Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. Watching a crow use a stick to get at some food, or an octopus cleverly escaping from an aquarium, most people infer intelligence. Similarly many people infer intelligence when they "chat" with an LLM (and that happened back in the '70s with ELIZA). One possible explanation: we have created thinking, conscious software. Another explanation: our brains trick us (and people who stand to gain from deceiving us will trick us). Since we have lots of evidence for our brains tricking us, and other people defrauding us, and no evidence that computers can think or experience anything, I choose to wait for more compelling evidence of machine intelligence.