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Comment by hamburga | Hacker News Reader

I sat in on one of Stephen Wolfram’s YouTube lectures on his new physics project, and asked him about his conception of life in the big picture of physics.

His perspective was that (if I may take the liberty of paraphrasing him) there’s nothing particularly special about life from the perspective of physics. What we call life simply correlates to parts of the physical world that have the highest degree of complexity and internal structure.

Life is not binary.

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That sounds like saying that that Michaelangelo's Sistine Chapel paintings are nothing special in terms of information science; they just unusually have an unusually high entropy content.

Technically true in both cases, but if physics is irrelevant to life, why not just answer the that way, instead of taking all the life out of Life.

It actually has profound implications (at least, for me). And it goes the other way, too. You can just as easily say that if there is no binary category, of living/non-living, then it's fair to say that if I am alive, then everything is alive. I like that.

Ok. What's an example of something low but non-zero on the spectrum of life?

I'm having trouble thinking of one that isn't more properly "life-like".

Viruses?

New understandings of mega-viruses have let us to believe that the line is really quite fuzzy. Some of these larger viruses have double stranded DNA, some have ribosome like functions, some have ERs, etc. Kinda like a cell, but missing random parts that make them truly alive.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pandoravirus

Potentially crystals as well. While we don't typically consider them part of "biology" there are some good arguments for including them as a form of life.

You can also consider a virus a loosely coupled form, which really increases the size of the virus, since it requires its platform to propagate.

All the ingredients of the primordial soup that bacteria grew from - water, methane, carbohydrates.

Are you sure he didn't think you were only referring to the cellular automata rule?

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