Physics

Your body is made of matter, just like everything else. But the atoms you’re built from today won’t be the atoms you’re built from in a year.

My grandfather's axe is a wonderful axe. It's been in my family 3 generations now. It's had the head replaced once and the handle three times, and it's just as good today as it was in his day. Checkmate, reductionists.

Give me a simple cell from the early days of Earth’s history, and I could never predict that some 4 billion years later it would evolve into a giant rabbit that can punch you in the face. Kangaroos—like humans—are an unpredictable, emergent consequence of life’s evolution.

Appealing to the author's own lack of imagination is a bold stroke...

The fundamental laws that govern matter and energy cannot predict another fundamental property of life: It is the only system in the universe that uses information for its own purposes. Plants grow toward light, microbes swim toward rich food sources, animals hide from predators, humans send giant metal contraptions into outer space. Although one can, say, program a robot to search for a wall plug when its battery gets low, a living thing (a human programmer, for example) must hard-code that need into the machine. Life, by contrast, is both agential and autonomous. From microbes to crabs to people, all living things have their own itches to scratch.

And since no reductionist description of these things exists yet (that the author knows of), therefore physics must be rewritten.

Very woo.