Life! What a concept!

... to see a bunch of famous people off on a wild goose chase.

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Let's end the political smears

Freeman Dyson said "We're all equally ignorant, as far as I can see. That's why somebody like me can pretend to be an expert." That's an example of what makes it sound like a wild goose chase.And then your OP include this quote: "We are witnessing a point in which the empirical has intersected with the epistemological". Since epistemology is way off track (IMO), I don't find that encouraging.As for your quote in Message 3, I'm not an expert in biology. But it sounds more like wishful thinking than anything else. I'm reminded of Turing's 1950 prediction that successful AI was just around the corner.

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Let's end the political smears

It's not a question of Moore's law.Turing believed that thought was logic, and thus could be digitally implemented. I believe that to be a faulty assumption.In this discussion there appears to be an assumption that life is digital. I likewise believe that to be a faulty assumption.

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Let's end the political smears

I don't define life as the genome. I don't define thought/intelligence as logic. I suspect that we are seeing two different versions of the same mistake.Life generates intelligence/thought. If life is digital, it would follow that intelligence is digital. Since I am quite certain that intelligence is not digital, it would seem to follow that life also is not digital. I'll grant that I have not yet finished it. As long as they are the right conclusions, then no harm done

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Let's end the political smears

That omission is telling us something

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Let's end the political smears

Only life has generations, in the sense in which you are using it.I distinguish between "uses digital" and "is digital". It is the latter that I question.

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Fertilization is seen in sexual reproduction, but not in asexual reproduction. I don't see fertilization as characterizing life.

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Let's end the political smears

In Message 70, molbiogirl writes:So here are my thoughts, after reading "Life: What a Concept!"The online book appears to be a partial transcript of the collective ruminations of a bunch of starry eyed white males, as they discuss their theories of everything. One wonders what they were smoking.This book most reminds me of the aura of optimism that followed Turing's 1950 paper in Mind, "Computing Machinery and Intelligence". In that paper, Turing predicted that machine intelligence was just around the corner. He estimated how much memory and processor speed would be required. By now, we have far surpassed Turing's estimate, but we still do not have machine intelligence. There are still starry eyed AI folk who make the same arguments, but claim that we don't yet have enough memory and compute power. However, there is far less optimism that could once be found.This "Life" book is similarly optimistic, and it adds biotechnology to the mix. Biotech is, indeed, a major theme, but there is still talk of computation, even to the point of mentioning Goedel's theorem and the halting problem.The idea that the universe is a giant computer, long a staple of AI talk, shows up in Seth Lloyd's comments (pages 143 and following). On page 147, Lloyd writes "If you program a computer at random, it will start producing other computers, other ways of computing, other more complicated, composite ways of computing." Perhaps he has never heard of GIGO (Garbage In, Garbage Out).Robert Shapiro perhaps has some of the same skepticism I am expressing. He is clearly not buying into the "life starts with RNA/DNA/replication" ideas. His idea is that it started with simpler reactions, and that RNA arose out of something simpler. That make some sense to me.There is a discussion of possible definitions of life, beginning at around page 103. And it seems that the tentative definitions are knocked down as quickly as they are proposed. Dyson wonders about life in a vacuum (p.112), but Lloyd points out that you need an energy source and flows of materials.The logo near the top of the conference web page is "Life/ Consists of propositions about life." That reads like a solipsists manifesto. And in this readers opinion, that's the whole problem with the "everything is information and computation" viewpoint - it is solipsistic.[In case anybody wonders, I was having a little fun writing this.]

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Let's end the political smears