10. Life

10.1  The title of this blog is Time and Consciousness. So, a definition of Life is a special bonus.

10.2  Definition of Life: if it replicates and evolves, it's alive. You need a population of things that not only create copies of themselves but whose self-copying "programs" or "instructions" evolve in the population as a whole based on what individuals are encountering in their environment. And, for really advanced evolution of living forms (like on planet Earth), you need many populations (millions of species) of interacting, sometimes competing, sometimes cooperating replicators.

10.3  When you put together the principles of replication and interacting populations of replicators, a suitable environment, natural selection, and a time scale of billions of years, you get evolution, you get Life, you get us.

10.4  But still: when, precisely, did Intentionality enter the universe?