Emergent Biological Principles and the Computational Properties of the Universe

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.

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