let’s instead define life very broadly, simply as a process that can retain its complexity and replicate. What’s replicated isn’t matter (made of atoms) but information (made of bits) specifying how the atoms are arranged. When a bacterium makes a copy of its DNA, no new atoms are created, but a new set of atoms are arranged in the same pattern as

whether and to what extent the emergent properties can be explained in terms of the elements of the lower level.

One of the biggest challenges with the idea of information flow and control as a defining property of life (and a window into what could be new physics) is that it still tends to encompass entities or systems that we traditionally think of as inanimate. An example would be anything that a biological entity fabricates, because in that fabrication

generates complexity and information?