What's interesting here is that life on earth has commonly defined has been around gathering negative entropy for several billion years (photosynthesis and the

What's interesting here is that life on earth has commonly defined has been around gathering negative entropy for several billion years (photosynthesis and the rise of oxygen for over 3 billion) and growing exponentially on earth. That is a sizeable fraction of the age of the universe. Human like ancestors have been using fire for over a million years (based on the oxygen generated above), agriculture for thousands, and industry for hundreds. All of these are exponential increases in energy density, entropy generation, and negative entropy consumption. To not describe them as phase changes is odd. It's telling that economic growth over the last 4000 years (first farming and now industry in the last ~400) also appear to be exponential over several orders of magnitude. Whether there's a quick end to this or not is an open question, but they still look like phase changes. That weather is starting to be affected is equally telling. A conflation of consciousness with life seems weird, though. If ordered psuedo-crystals are life (or clay-RNA / DNA crystals) or even viruses are life, I don't know anyone claiming they're conscious. It would be like assuming life caused capitalism or industry, when certainly they fit very different exponential curves. Making arguments that industrialization (use of power other than human/animal work) isn't a "phase change" in economy would also be similarly strange. Now, whether it "confronts physical laws" or requires an explanation, I have no idea. They do seem to be transitions at least as interesting as weather on Jupiter. https://communities.springernature.com/posts/were-humans-the-earliest-users-of-fire https://communities.springernature.com/posts/were-humans-the... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Earliest_known_life_forms https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Earliest_known_life_forms https://mason.gmu.edu/~rhanson/longgrow.pdf https://mason.gmu.edu/~rhanson/longgrow.pdf