People don't like it, but the "weirdness" of life, as it relates to physics, just completely evaporates if the universe is superdeterministic.
And that's actually overkill. Plain vanilla determinism would do it. As would a universal-wavefunction/no-collapse conception of quantum mechanics. (i.e. the universe has its own wave function.)
Point is, what the author decries does not require New Physics. It should suffice to re-evaluate different interpretations of existing physics. These matters are, after all, by no means settled.
the minimum description length principle encourages us to describe living entities at higher levels of abstraction (as motivated rational agents rather than collections of atoms jiggling)
The universe is absolutely hierarchical and neglecting it just because we don’t strictly need hierarchy to define things seems silly
The implication that biology defies physics is just incorrect on many levels. There is no "truth" to ignore. The claim that life requires information that is otherwise not defined by physical laws is a misinterpretation of what defines information. A tree "bending toward the sun" is an emergent property of underlying physical laws--not a creation or demand for information.
https://archive.is/wkzUa#selection-613.0-613.38
People don't like it, but the "weirdness" of life, as it relates to physics, just completely evaporates if the universe is superdeterministic.
And that's actually overkill. Plain vanilla determinism would do it. As would a universal-wavefunction/no-collapse conception of quantum mechanics. (i.e. the universe has its own wave function.)
Point is, what the author decries does not require New Physics. It should suffice to re-evaluate different interpretations of existing physics. These matters are, after all, by no means settled.
the minimum description length principle encourages us to describe living entities at higher levels of abstraction (as motivated rational agents rather than collections of atoms jiggling)
The universe is absolutely hierarchical and neglecting it just because we don’t strictly need hierarchy to define things seems silly
I may be misunderstanding things, but strictly speaking I don't think we need particle hierarchy for:
"motivated rational agents rather than collections of atoms jiggling"
We need complex networked interactions, zones of dense interconnectivity.
The implication that biology defies physics is just incorrect on many levels. There is no "truth" to ignore. The claim that life requires information that is otherwise not defined by physical laws is a misinterpretation of what defines information. A tree "bending toward the sun" is an emergent property of underlying physical laws--not a creation or demand for information.