Encoding Codability and the Possibility of Life

Information-first approaches to life focus on the complexity of living systems and the necessary co-evolution of information and organic molecules. By equating these developments (or rather: by demonstrating how the one seems to necessitate the other and, thus, how the two in fact constitute a single development), such approaches inaugurate a radical reconfiguration of each. They also have a strange but satisfying symmetry with certain deconstructive reworkings of the category of “life.” In this paper, I explore Sara Imari Walker and Paul Davies’s development of an “algorithmic” theory of the origin of life, asking both what such a theory has to offer to current approaches to abiogenesis and how it may remain hamstrung by some of its working assumptions