I really like some of Christopher Alexander (the architect) big ideas on the topic. He doesn’t really capture them in a way that is rigorous or quite how a scientist would frame things but I think his idea of life being being a property of the arrangement of things in space that can be either more or less depending on the pattern of that arrangement is actually a pretty deep idea. He lists a series of architectural patterns found in architecture that feels alive such as imperfect repetition, detail at different scales, deep interlock between adjacent regions (not a simple binary border etc…), and they are described as an artist would in vague ways but I while that can be infuriating from the standpoint of a scientist I also think it is interesting to ponder precisely because he isn’t really pretending to know the answer, he knows he is an architect attempting to crudely gesture at science and I kind of find it fascinating. What is the architecture of life? Not the engineering, not how each part of the nuts and bolts of life work… but rather given the same identical set of starting elements, what arrangement of them creates the most fertile environment for new systems to arise? What is the shape and form of living systems? You can see one example of it in the shapes mold makes to spread across petri dishes and how it mirrors the patterns of how cities grow, but I think a rigorous and precise language to describe diversity and the “aliveness” of something or at least the fertileness for something alive to spontaneously form is possible…

sorry for the rant lol