Life as Information Flow Processing and Management

I believe an ontology of information will help us to understand the universe better. Paul Davies and Sarah Walker have certainly demonstrated that understanding information flows will help us understand the difference between nonliving and living.

"When we describe biological processes we typically use informational narratives -- cells send out signals, developmental programs are run, coded instructions are read, genomic data are transmitted between generations and so forth," Walker said. "So identifying life's origin in the way information is processed and managed can open up new avenues for research."

I talk about precisely these things in my book Diaphysics.One should also understand this as being the relation of the brain to the mind, and what it is social processes are doing. Each of these can be understood as Davies and Walker now (and I, for several years now) understand life:

"We believe the transition in the informational architecture of chemical networks is akin to a phase transition in physics, and we place special emphasis on the top-down information flow in which the system as a whole gains causal purchase over its components," Davies added.

Again, this describes the relationship between cell and biomolecules, mind and neurology, and social orders and humans -- which is to day, spontaneous orders and their constituent parts.