Core Life

Full Title or Meme

To deeply understand any complex subject, like life, it is helpful to list out the minimal features of some object that would allow us to classify that object as life.

Context

As we begin to explore the developing field of Artificial Intelligence it becomes interesting to understand the difference between Natural Intelligence and Artificial Intelligence. For an intelligence to be considered natural, we assume here that means that it is based in a life form. This page explores what a minimal life form would be.

• Life = persistent, identifiable processes that can retain their Complexity and replicate.
• Assembly Theory = count of the steps required for the universe to assemble units from their smaller parts. Life appears to require 15 steps at a minimum.
• Unit of Life = the lineage of information propagating across space an time.
• Physicist's view of life = the laws of physics have sufficient explanatory power to cover what happens for the low-level things reality is made of, maybe that really is enough to explain it all. The rest is just a constrained outcome within those laws.
• Change and Evolution in a self-sustaining chemical system is the definition of life that was used by NASA after conditions on the moon Europa were discovered.
• Emergent Behavior seems to be a defining feature of live, but now physicists are thinking that the laws of physics were never “created”. They just emerged as the universe formed from the Big Bang.