[betty boop]

All the physical laws that account for matter, it's bonding and other energy exchanges are sufficient to know and understand the assemblies and configurations that are identified as life.

Au contraire, mon ami. They cannot be identified as "life," only as the necessary preconditions of life. Yet life is "more" than its physical preconditions. See Chaitin, Yockey, Grandpierre et al. Not to mention Williams.

[spunkets]

Re: "All the physical laws that account for matter, it's bonding and other energy exchanges are sufficient to know and understand the assemblies and configurations that are identified as life."

"Au contraire, mon ami. They cannot be identified as "life," only as the necessary preconditions of life."

Life is a configuration of energy. Those configurations exist according to the physics and give rise to all and every instance of life in this world.

"See Chaitin, Yockey, Grandpierre et al. Not to mention Williams."

"On this basis, Chaitin has pointed out that the complexity we observe in living systems cannot be accounted for on the basis of the chemical and physical laws alone, owing to the paucity of their information content."

Obviously the complexity of his simple scratch pad program did not model life. Evolutionary algorithms can be used to do so, and generate info as they progress.

"The single most telling point that Williams’ model makes is that information is vital to the living state; that it flows “downward” from the “top” of his model — Level (v), meta-information — and not from the “bottom” of the model flowing “upwards” by the incremental means characterizing Levels (i) and (ii) — not to mention orthodox Darwinist expectation.

As I pointed out, Williams model doesn't represent reality. There's no real distinction between levels 1&2, and the levels above are built upon the simple physics contained in 1&2. All that's needed is to analyze the interactions of the components of the appropriate complex configurations. That's done in medicine for instance, to know and understand human life and to provide for intelligent and deliberate curative, or corrective affects.

Also, Williams idea that info proceeds down is never seen in reality. Biological development,and evolutionary progression are observed to progress from the simple to the complex, never the other way around. That's because, the info contained in the fundamental physics is all that's needed to result in the physical configurations recognized, known and understood as life. There's no life form, or part of, that can be shown to be irreducibly complex. The contrary is true, indicating the info arrow goes up, not down as with IC(omplexity).