Jack,

So sorry to be so late. I've been working hard these past couple of months on a "history of information."  It's a trick to be rigorous enough to get the thermodynamics and information theory right, but not so profound as to overreach my own limitations or the interests of those outside those fields. Please let us know what you learn in those books. I will get to them when I can, especially if you think that they are truly on to something. As I've stated before, more or less, at least there isn't any current consensus in the scientific community that we understand the basic property of physics, chemistry, or some other force that predicts the emergence of life, although we know a lot about what seem to be prerequisites as it exists on this planet.

http://lesswrong.com/lw/99c/transcript_richard_feynman_on_why_questions/

So Feynman is wryly saying that before you can answer a question, you need to know how much context and how much resolution are you expecting in the response. Well, it would be good to know as much context and resolution regarding the origins of the simplest life form as we believe we do about star formation.  Of course, that's easier to answer because it is less complex, we can look at many examples across in the galaxy at various stages, sizes, etc. We know much about the context of life (its characteristics, likely use of carbon, some replicative process, etc.), but I don't our resolution to the question as to how it originated is very profound: probably began on Earth about 4 million years ago when conditions were different than today, unless you subscribe to panspermia.  Look forward to your manuscript.

Ken, et al, I m finding that the Smith and Morowitz  book does have a quite detailed exploration of just what sort of chemical reactions, against just what sort of planetary characteristics, were likely to energetically and chemically have bootstrapped life. 

If you can find enough time to wade through the first 50 -70 pages, then skip to p 141, and then go to page 170 and proceed from there a bit, you will see what I mean. 

Jack

This is a reply to an earlier post of Ken in which he characterized information as 'Relationships among (I say quantum))systems in space time' (the parenthetical is my own)

De Gruyter has published my "order theory" book, entitled "Fundamentals For the Anthropocene" Here is a link to the open source availability

https://www.degruyter.com/viewbooktoc/product/496571?rskey=PH6hIm

Ken has referred me to an informative  website of a friend of his, http://www.informationphilosopher.com/

After reading that website, I would probably retitle the third chapter of the book from "Correlation=Differentiation=Order" to read "Correlation=Differentiation=Order=Information"

That is, along the lines of Ken's suggestion, each quantum system interacts with each other in such a way as to register a relationship, which also can be seen as 'information". 

I read Rovelli's seminal work on Relational Quantum Mechanics https://arxiv.org/abs/quant-ph/9609002 to say that relational quantum mechanics is also a theory of information, and quantum interactions are information transactions, so to speak.