I find the idea of life as an organizing force that locally reduces entropy and 'offloads' disorder on the environment deeply compelling, and what I wondered was, does this not put a pretty big nail into reductionist scientific worldviews that argue purely in terms of bottom-up physical explanations?
Is there some account of life at the level of particles that could ever give a reasonable description of the behavior we observe, or is the existence of living organisms evidence of some sort of genuine top-down causality?
The reason why I was looking into this was the TV show Devs that toys with the idea of determinism and the idea that even though someone could look at a prediction of their future, they could not change it, and to me this made sense if the world could be purely explained in terms of bottom-up physics, but I started to scratch my head if decision making could actually go top-down.
Anyway slightly rambly post but if someone has a book, or essay or some other reading recommendation on this I'd appreciate it.