Blew my mind as I started to wrap my brain around information theory.
It's a pretty basic question that IMHO demands a clear and adequate explanation. If you read the 'abracadabra' example here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Assembly_theory
... you could be reading the abstract to an early paper explaining LZW codes.
I'm pretty sure that one was originally recommended here on HN, so I guess I'm feeding it back into the echo chamber. But well worth a read!
I'm not sure there will ever be a synthesis of all these things that creates a paradigm of some sort. There's simply too much.
Consider complexity economics, computational social sciences, network sciences and cascading networks, evolutionary theories, parts of systems biology, connectomics and computational neuroscience etc.
The Santa Fe institute has been at the forefront and has an amazing collections of publications in their own press. David krakaeur's book "Worlds Hidden in Plain Sight: The Evolving Idea of Complexity at the Santa Fe Institute" is like a 20 year survey paper and an amazing read.
BTW these books were up on amazon India for like $10-$15 each (books with slight printing defects were being dumped in the 3rd world) so I lapped up the entire collection :P
https://fab.cba.mit.edu/classes/863.18/notes/computation/Szi...
Szilard seems to have been involved in everything.
Depends on whose expectations you are trying to meet.
To some it would be a major transition, to others it's just another everyday minor non-event in the very macro scheme of things.
If you're going to look at it mathematically it probably makes a difference when the number of non-extreme planetary environments begins to become significant compared to the number of possible chemical reactions among the limited number of elements in nature.
Only one of these numbers can reach truly astronomical proportions.
"life is the way to make anything happen to you"
without a body (via life), a consciousness cant do anything
thanks for the downvotes, philosophy noobs
The obvious answer the so-called-science occult refuse to entertain is that consciousness is the universe inflecting itself and life is a subjective scope of potential capacitating this consciousness.
Life is the vessel and consciousness the universe peering back upon itself.
That is good philosophy.
Maybe not "science", yet neither is refusing to believe until someone else explains it to you.
Truth is not confined to the horizon of our ignorance, and science is merely our ignorance rigorously explained away.
in order for a tree to reproduce, it must sprout first, and have a life in which it produces a flower, which gets pollinated, generally speaking. The important point is that from that flower which is pollinated, eventually, a fruit is formed. When the fruit is formed and detaches, that detached fruit is the state of death. even if the tree dies, it can revive through what it stored within its fruit.
Socrates, Jesus, Lao-tzu, Bodhidharma, Buddha - all were outright killed or expelled and lived very lonely lives.
at death the consciousness separates from the body.
consciousness is composed of energy so it doesn't just disappear at death.
My personal stab at an objective defintion: There is a sudden emergence of many more pathways for decay of the universe through entropy. The mechanisms that accelerate the creation of these new pathways is the set that includes "life".
Now with that base definition, we can talk about various forms of life - ones that involve DNA for example. But also others that do not.
Perhaps he said that loosely as a figure of speech, because it should be obvious (religious beliefs aside) that the universe does not "want" anything. The remaining question is whether the emergence of life as an efficient entropy generator is coincidental to the laws of thermodynamics, or incentivized (in an evolutionary pressure sense) by them.
Of relevance, the tendency of matter to organize optimally into energy-absorbing and heat-dissipating structures is a whole theory of its own - see MIT Jeremy England's theory https://www.quantamagazine.org/a-new-thermodynamics-theory-o...
https://www.newscientist.com/article/2398369-why-free-will-d...
This misses the fact that the laws that guide the evolution of the universe are such that its evolution is "aimed towards" increasing entropy. This aim then entails what states are more likely over time, i.e. such states that increase the capacity for increasing entropy. It's not just an incidental fact that entropy increases, but that this trajectory is baked into the laws of nature. But the conceptual dual of an aim is a goal or a "want". So while not literally true, I think using intention terminology is more correct and insightful than leaving out any talk of goal-oriented behavior.
Dark matter?
"Biologists cannot even agree on a unique definition of life itself; but that hasn’t stopped them from unraveling aspects of the cell, the double helix, photosynthesis, enzymes and a host of other living phenomena"