Is Life a Complex Computational Process? | Aeon Essays
Walker thinks that our understanding of life, as a phenomenon, is right now where we were with gravity before Newton. We can describe what we see, but we have no sense of the underlying principles—we just see an apple falling to the ground. She thinks that without a theory, a deeper understanding of what life is, the search for it beyond Earth is p
... See moreJaime Green • The Possibility of Life: Science, Imagination, and Our Quest for Kinship in the Cosmos
The overarching thesis is that we live in a computational universe that is continuously evolving into an increasingly complex, functional, and sentient state. This means that humans are neither a cosmic accident nor the end goal of evolution. Instead, we are an intermediary step on the cosmic evolutionary ladder of becoming.
Bobby Azarian • The Romance of Reality: How the Universe Organizes Itself to Create Life, Consciousness, and Cosmic Complexity
we now have growing reasons to suspect that agency is a genuine natural phenomenon. Biology could stop being so coy about it if only we had a proper theory of how it arises. Unfortunately, no such thing currently exists, but there’s increasing optimism that a theory of agency can be found – and, moreover, that it’s not necessarily unique to living ... See more
Philip Ball • The biological research putting purpose back into life | Aeon Essays
