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.

This article was written to refute that exact, and incorrect, belief.

For most of human history, it was obvious that life was of a higher order than matter, since the latter cannot be coalesced into the former.

An ignorant kind of scientism, narrow in focus, spent the last hundred years trying to rub out that basic truth and replace it with a system run by scientists, none of whom can make life but many of whom are very good at taking it away.

Thought this thread wouldn't mind knowing about this given the topic of the article. Many points raised by Frank are referenced in a documentary I just made, even if only implicitly.

A scientist from Denmark purported to have found evidence for tunneling in the brain as part of a prestigious Systems Neuroscience program at Newcastle upon Tyne in the UK, paid for by the Wellcome Trust. Link in the comment below.

The scientist now purports to have an experimental design to test for the physics he thinks is happening in the brain, albeit outside the brain, in various quantum tunneling setups. So I put this scientist and his idea in front of the world's top experimental physicists and hit record. What follows is a deadpan documentary about either a breakthrough experiment or a sociological view of academic absurdity.

Here is the link: https://youtu.be/yTQa3O7Qlm4.

It may be helpful to watch this 3 min primer first for context: https://youtu.be/vF_g5Uh5MEg.

This story may be relevant given how the mind comes from 20w is unknown. If I understand the AI boom is in part based on the idea that the brain does not solve hard problems and is not using quantum effects (it can be simulated on a Turing machine). If the scientist in the doc is right, these assumptions are false.

Happy to share what little I learned in the process of making this. Although as I say in the 3 min video this story is orders of magnitude above my pay grade. I just thought it would be a funny story to try to tell.

The scientist argues that explanatory power of the human brain is a required feature of any physics theory that can try to unify the open questions.