Emergent biological principles and the computational properties of the universe
Astrophysics
2007-05-23 v1
Abstract
The claim that life is an emergent phenomenon exhibiting novel properties and principles is often criticized for being in conflict with causal closure at the microscopic level. I argue that advances in cosmological theory suggesting an upper bound on the information processing capacity of the universe may resolve this conflict for systems exceeding a certain threshold of complexity. A numerical estimate of the threshold places it at the level of a small protein. The calculation supports the contention that life is an emergent phenomenon.
Keywords
Cite
@article{arxiv.astro-ph/0408014,
title = {Emergent biological principles and the computational properties of the universe},
author = {P. C. W. Davies},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:astro-ph/0408014},
year = {2007}
}
Comments
9 pages. no figures, research paper