Ah, I see, it's difficult to parse before coffee... But it's not just > mere chance, bits on a string selected by nature but an incredibly complex and chaoti

Ah, I see, it's difficult to parse before coffee... But it's not just > mere chance, bits on a string selected by nature but an incredibly complex and chaotic system ("the universe") with billions of feedback loops, with agents both affecting the universe and being affected by it and their own actions. It's not surprising that with all the processes occurring (many of them [chaotic](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chaos_theory https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chaos_theory), if not truly random) we get emergent behaviours, and then even more emergent behaviours on top of those! You can define "Life" to be the set of self-sustaining phenomena, and there are remarkably few of those. But then that's what makes it exciting! Large phenotypes (individual organisms) consist of billions of cells each doing their own thing and interacting with others in very specific ways, and every one of these is in turn a complex system of proteins and molecules doing the same, which are all complex arrangements of atoms, etc. The complexity of life on earth is owed to exceedingly hospitable conditions and the good luck of not one, but multiple levels of self-sustaining mechanisms bootstrapping themselves. But it still took literally billions of random events for those to occur. Each level works according to the interactions of those below, but they each exist due to exceedingly good luck.