Life Defined in Terms of Information Flow
JoeMerchant writes:
Scientists Are Proposing a Radical New Framework to Redefine Life:
Biologist Chris Kempes and complex systems researcher David Krakauer from Sante Fe Institute in New Mexico have posed the idea that our focus on evolution as a driving force of life may have "blinded us to additional general principles of life".
To explore this, the researchers broaden the definition of "life" to the union of two energetic and informatic processes that can encode and pass on adaptive information forward through time.
Using this definition vastly increases what can be seen as life, to include concepts such as culture, forests, and the economy. A more traditional definition might consider these as products of life, rather than life itself.
[...] Kempes and Krakauer call for researchers to consider, first, the full space of materials in which life could be possible; second, the constraints that limit the universe of possible life; and, third, the optimization processes that drive adaptation. In general, the framework considers life as adaptive information and adopts the analogy of computation to capture the processes central to life.
Several significant possibilities emerge when we consider life within the new framework. First, life originates multiple times - some apparent adaptations are actually a new form of life, not just an adaptation," explains Krakauer - and it takes a far broader range of forms than conventional definitions allow.
Culture, computation, and forests are all forms of life in this frame. As Kempes explains, human culture lives on the material of minds, much like multicellular organisms live on the material of single-celled organisms."
So, next can we get a definition of sentient life which deserves the rights afforded to (most) h. sapiens today?
Journal Reference:
Kempes, Christopher P., Krakauer, David C.. The Multiple Paths to Multiple Life [open], Journal of Molecular Evolution (DOI: 10.1007/s00239-021-10016-2)
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