Information is Life In Formation

What is Life?

I propose that Life is a phenomenon that needs these conditions:

• A medium that supports the encoding of information and allows the interaction of the encoded patterns
  
• Seeding of the medium (initial or continuous)
  
• Time to evolve

That's ALL. Or, as mathematicians would put it, these and only these are the required conditions. And that's the main idea of this post - the fact that any such system has the intrinsic potential to support arbitrary complex (and beautiful) Life-forms.

A system that fulfills these conditions will, sooner or later, exhibit emergence, the emergence of Life. Autopoietic systems, structures which are able to fabricate themselves, possibly with variations, will appear. Then Earth-like life is only a more or less huge number of millions of years away.

Yeah, that's right, YOU are not significantly more alive, or living than some information patterns, say, some moderatly complicated bit-strings, this is the message.

What are the implications of this bull^H^H^H^Htheory you ask? Well, there are two main implications:

• For any living systems, we can find the encoding medium and the ways it allows for their interaction.
  
• For any structure, physical or theoretical, that qualifies as a Life-supporting medium by having the above properties, we can think about the nature of Life it is able to support.