I don't think of this as "changing the subject," rather of "clarifying the subject," thus to ask better questions....
Why is that a better question? Life is part of reality. How will limiting your investigation get you more comprehensive results?
From my point of view, I'm not "limiting" my investigation. You say "Life is part of Reality." I say Life is prior to Reality, more basic than Reality; and totally comprehends it.
No one who is not alive can observe Reality. Thus one presumes life and consciousness are more basic and more general.
In his fascinating work, Life Itself: A Comprehensive Inquiry into the Nature, Origin, and Fabrication of Life (1991), Robert Rosen puts some of modern-day science's most cherished presuppositions under intense scrutiny.
[Rosen [RIP] is a mathematician, systems theorist, and theoretical biologist.]
Once such cherished presupposition is that physics is the preeminent science, for it addresses the "general case" with respect to reality in all its parts, including the biological parts, which are just so many "special cases," and comparatively rare.
...[T]he phenomena of biology have played essentially no role in the development of physical thought.... Why? Mainly, I think, because theoretical physics has long beguiled itself with a quest for what is universal and general. As far as theoretical physics is concerned, biological organisms are very special, indeed, inordinately special systems. The physicist perceives that most things in the universe are not organisms, not alive in any conventional sense. Therefore, the physicist reasons, organisms are negligible; they are to be ignored in the quest for universality. For surely, biology can add nothing fundamental, nothing new to physics; rather, organisms are to be understood entirely as specializations of the physical universals, once these have been adequately developed, and once the innumerable constraints and boundary conditions that make organisms special have been elucidated. These last, the physicist says, are not my task. So it happens that the wonderful edifice of physical science, so articulate elsewhere, stands today utterly mute on the fundamental question: What is Life?After mulling over the implications of this situation for a bit, Rosen asks a striking question: "Why could it not be that the 'universals' of physics are only so on a small and special (if inordinately prominent) class of material systems, a class to which organisms are too general to belong? What if physics is the particular, and biology the general, instead of the other way around?"
Thus in effect, dear tacticalogic, I invoke Robert Rosen in hoping to explain why I regard the question "What Is Life?" as more "general" than the question "What Is Reality?" — which I imagine is closely related to physicalist (not to mention atheist) views so popular among so many scientists and students of science these days. This question represents the "particular case," not the general one.
It has been said that the great "art" of science is asking the right questions....
Rosen also has a field-day with the absolute wrongness of the "machine metaphor" or model of Newtonian, or classical, physics, viewed mainly under the aspect of mechanics, as applied to living systems in nature. A quip comes to mind: That answer is so bad, it isn't even wrong. But space does not permit elaboration here.
Thank you so very much for writing, dear tacticalogic!