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Thank you so much for your excellent post and all the great excerpts from Dr. Grandpierre!

When you consider that the human organism is made up of roughly 6*10¹³ cells, and in each cell more than 10⁵ chemical reactions occur per second, which generally involve localized, "neighbor relations"; and yet the living system is able to organize and integrate all of its astronomically large number of parts distributed throughout its physical extent into one single, dynamic, self-organizing, sensitively-responsive global whole -- well, you've got to figure an enormous amount of information is required. And "information" does not appear to be a physical quantity."

Indeed, information is not corporeal - and it appears that particular feature is a huge stumbling block to many.

Truly, I am amazed - especially here and now, in the information age - that so many still don't accept that "all that there is" extends beyond the physical. Many believe with all sincerity that there is nothing beyond that which is corporeal.

To illustrate, I’d like to borrow a phrase from RightWhale‘s post 1967 where he says:

Life is made from the matter of the universe

It has been said that the surest statements we can make are mathematical – in this case, it would be that any “thing” must have space/time coordinates and thus consists of fields (which are defined as existing in all points of space/time) and geometry. That is what makes it corporeal. But that is not what makes it “alive”.

On the Plato thread we labored diligently to come up with a definition of life v. non-life v death as the first step in trying to investigate the theory of abiogenesis.

My personal favorite was Shannon information: a thing (in nature) which is successfully communicating is alive, when it ceases to communicate, it is dead. If it never communicated, it is non-life. That particular definition is not prejudiced against dormant life cycles, viruses, prions and such. Jeepers, it is not even prejudiced against non-carbon based life (should any be discovered), etc.

We also discussed the Irvin Bauer and Javor definitions – both of which contain important observations of biological life.

Perhaps someday we shall have an elegant, ideologically neutral, widely accepted, definition of life v non-life v death. And if we do, the definition itself will prescribe whether life is to be known by biochemical criteria or information theory or both (or perhaps something else).