>>12680600emergent property of simple reactions
the reason Conway's Game of Life (he died from covid btw) was so latched-onto by the field is the fact that it demonstrated emergent properties so clearly: extremely simple and small rules lead to complex behavior.
If you haven't, I recommend really learning the basics of the game of life, letting it sink in, and then connecting the simple rules to every emergent phenomenon from those rules, with literally no other guide.
At the end of the day, life, thought, consciousness, is all emergent properties from simple reactions that build more complex emergent phenomenon that build more complex phenomenon.
When you study enough cell biology, everything is distilled down to chemical reactions of the same types and orders, just built into circuits of sorts. All processes, although we describe them as "sentient driven" (aka, DNA replication and cell division, neurons firing, blood cells circulating, heart pumping), when you really dig down, its just small reactions happening naturally and automatically.
The funny thing is, life isn't a distinct boundary vs. abiotic chemical reactions. It's a gradient, which is why its so obvious that it comes from abiogenesis. Viruses are indistinguishable from, say, the general machinery inside your cells, and I replicate that daily with things like PCR, and you wouldn't call that life, since it literally is just me mixing a bunch of random shit in a tube. And a cell is just one step up, including a replication phase. There is no hard boundary of life to abiotic reactions.
