The architect and accidental inspiration for the idea of Object Oriented Programming, Christopher Alexander has some fascinating ideas on this subjet even if they lack scientific rigor.

The essence of his ideas, which I agree with (while recognizing there isn’t any scientific rigor to disprove or prove his ideas yet) is that life is not a property of a body that the body either possesses or does not. Life is a pattern of arrangement of material in space, and Christopher to his credit is as precise about this as he can be from the lens of architecture. He defines several aspects to “living” architecture (which he means quite literally he… in a fascinating way that is actually kind of hard to argue against) such as deep interlock between borders, good negative space, imperfect repetition, detail at different scale levels, centers that make other centers more vibrant in a work of art rather than draw all the focus etc…

All this to say, I think life must be an analog value, the universe doesn’t have binary aspects to bodies where they are either ARE or ARE NOT something unless you are talking really fundamental physics and even then… and I agree then that life is a set of patterns that were and are woven together from a prexisting diversity and dynamism that opened the door to the genesis of what we would confidently call life.

Consider some recent research on categorizing all of the minerals on earth and how surprising or perhaps unsurprising it is that life has massively increased the diversity of geologic minerals on earth, and this is a two way street, the geologic diversity from active plate tectonics on earth provided the necessary conditions for life to form.

quantamagazine.org/life-helps-make-almost-half-of…