[kubanczyk]

How is this model useful? It certainly moves away from our domain knowledge and paints a new picture that is considerably more fuzzy than the old one. What do you gain by considering life in such way?

Side note: computation seems like a wrong term, because it's not about counting/calculating/determining any abstract value, is it? A Turing-complete mechanism maybe?

[api]

I find the idea of it as a phase of matter very conceptually elegant in that it neatly classifies life as a unique but still physical phenomenon. Nevertheless I agree with you that the details of the definition are hard to pin down.

Of course I have yet to see an attempted definition of life that isn’t a little squirrely or that isn’t just a list of criteria taken from the one example we have.