the transition from non-alive to alive (and from non-life to life in the origins of all living systems) may be about changes in information-processing capabilities.

data need not be constantly engaged with.

Just because we don’t fully understand something, that doesn’t mean it exists outside our known parameters.

Here, meaningful information is information that influences the processes of natural selection.

self-information (the surprise of the value of a variable within a system).

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

meaningful information for survival becomes correlated between two places: the world and an organism.

Imagine for a moment that the rise of the dataome, and the transition to non-biological computation on Earth, is more like the very first burst of molecular oxygen that really persisted some two billion years ago.

The answer to whether or not robots have DNA appears to be that they have something that accomplishes most, if not all, of the same function in the world. But it’s differently implemented. Their core, heritable information does not need to be held in individuals, or even within a given species. That information is dispersible, although often