The fundamental problem about trying to define life... If you go to a physics department... you'll be given a… — Paul Davies

[P]article detectors in De Sitter space respond as if they are immersed in a bath of thermal radiation. However, the stress energy momentum tensor in De Sitter space is not that of thermal radiation. It's just a renormalization of the cosmological constant. So there's something a bit funny about the thermal nature of De Sitter space, and I've been interested in whether you can mine that thermal stuff...

[T]here is... not just [some] new physical law, but a new kind of physical law. ...[W]hat kind of physical law? ...[O]ne idea that Sarah Walker and I have flirted with is state-dependent laws of information. ...[T]ake chess as an analogy ...If you had a modified game of chess in which the rules ...could be updated according to the state of play ...this opens the way to new forms of complexity and new forms of configuration.

We want to know the transition zone between this demonic cut... from just [Shannon] bits of information... to this more complex form of global, or contextual, or functional information. ...[H]azarding some guesses ...it might be a transition that would be measured by the integrated information, or... pathway complexity that Lee Cronin toyed with, or the breakdown of unitarity, if you think that this is associated in some way with the quantum classical transition.