Going cold on a new definition of life

摘要

Hillary Shaw suggests a definition of what constitutes life. It is defined as "abounded system containing a readable information code that can locally decrease entropy". This seemed to me to succinctly encapsulate all forms of life that we know about, and reduced a complicated concept to a simple idea in a really satisfying way-I liked it a lot. Then, two weeks later, I opened my fridge and realised that it, too, decreases entropy locally and contains readable (binary) information that tells its "body" how to do it - how annoying! Can we extend the definition to exclude systems that were created by other readable information-encoded, entropy-decreasing systems?