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

inciting reactions—and tracking the evolution of complexity. Because that, Cronin believes, is the entirety of life.

assembly theory, a way of differentiating life from nonlife, not by its chemistry but by its complexity.

By promoting self-organization, energy flux gradually converts a clump of mindless molecules into information-processing machinery with agency—meaning the self-drive and purposeful action that we associate with life.