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What is Life?

  chemistry open to selection...?
      ...program for symbolic self-replication?
          animate matter defying thermodynamic equilibrium?

• "Life is a self-sustaining chemical system capable of Darwinian evolution" NASA working definition, referenced by and often attributed to Gerald Joyce 1994

• "A a self-organized non-equilibrium system such that B its processes are governed by a program which is stored symbolically and C it can reproduce itself, including the program." Lee Smolin. 'Life of the Cosmos'. 1997. p. 156

• "[...] it goes on 'doing something', moving, exchanging material with its environment, and so forth, and that for a much longer period than we would expect of an inanimate piece of matter to 'keep going' under similar circumstances." Schrödinger, 1944.