If we define life as the ability to organize and propopagate information then the highest form of life is a salt crystal or any self propagating organization of atoms with long range order. A diamond has far lower entropy than any living system. Like wise if we define it as system that processes energy to propogate itself then we have Fire as the ultimate for of life.
clearly gasses (disorded are dead) and crystals are dead. SO is life a liquid (in the middle of the two)? Again obviously not.
The best definition of a living system in terms of information tehory concepts I have come across is the one by David Wolpert who coined in the term self-dissimilarity in reaction to the vogue study of self-similarity in self-organizing systems. For example, a pile of sand is self-organizing system that is ever changing but also ever-self simmilar. it's not alive either
so solids, liquids, gasses and self-simmilar self organizing systems are all bankrupt as a informational definition of life. What's self-dissimilarity then?
It's the concept that the organizational principles of a system can suddenly change as one crosses scales.
imagine one zooms out from a microsope from the atomic scale. at first you see the atom and it has some interesting symmetires in the way the electron oribits have some simmilarities. at a higher scale we see the molecule. then the collection of molecules. soon we see the patterning of molecules.
we observe that this is infact cell. then many cells. then it's an organ. then its many organs. then an animal. then a school of fish. then zooming our we see schools of fish separated across the ocean.
the key insight is this. at each scale everything you infer about the information content and predictibitly of adjaceny in the pattern works to predict the patterns propoagation at a slightly larger zoom. Up until it suddenly fails. you reach the edge of the liver or the edge of the cell or the edge of the animal. then the lower scale is useless in predicting how the next scale up is organized.
these abrupt steps in dissimilarity is a halmark of living systems. the degree of information gain at the step is phenomenal. this is different than saying for example that a composite rock is alive. the difference is that the system is processing information and energy across these organizational boundaries. that's pretty much the best definition of life interms of a single defintion that can be plotted on a graph. the x-axis is the zoom, and the y-axis is the predictability of the next larger scale from the lower one. you see steps. that plus the processing of information across steps is a living system. If you accept this you might feel like their are non-traditional defintiions of life as well. for example, if a bacteria is living thing, is it possible that a community of bacteria is also a lvifing thing. Perhaps the earth is too.
What's intriguing here is that systems with this property may imprint themselves on other systems. you might for example be able to spot radio emissions or atmospheric molecular composition that displays the imprint of dissimilar steps in it's self organization.
SO unless this theory considers this, I'm skeptical about it. Salt is self organizing but it's not alive. It is however highly probable. Indeed eutectic separation is highly propable but it's just physics not life.
