Is the emergence of life an expected phase transition in the evolving universe?

You could approach the language problem like that as well. Before imperial efforts in recent centuries to normalize languages in certain territories, there was no Standard French or German or Italian. Vocabulary and accents changed slowly across the landscape, following geography - places isolated diverged and places integrated converged. Migration, trade and conquest added layers of complexity to this variation.

But your idea that people are failing to use Standard English and creating language subcultures around peculiar meanings of artificial/processed/chemical vs natural/homemade/organic is itself based on a very artificial distribution of language.

> We don't know how consciousness comes into being

Consciousness and life are completely different things. The article doesn't even mention consciousness.

> Therefore it follows that ... wait for it ... life is not a special state of matter or energy

It is special in the sense that it's remarkably complex e.g. compared to a mineral. It is not special in the sense that it obeys the same laws as a mineral.

> Therefore the emergence of life doesn't represent a phase transition that confronts physical laws or requires an explanation

No one claims it confronts physical laws. In my understanding, the article states: life may emerge naturally as molecules bump into each other, combine and eventually become complex enough that self-sustaining/self-replicating systems can come into being by chance. This process might be deterministic enough that it happens everywhere roughly at the same time (on a cosmological time scale).

I'd reframe this question. What constitutes a phase transition at all in the sense being talked about here isn't super clear.

There's a clear definition in chemistry and it has analogies in cosmology as the entire universe overall went through some early phase transitions in the vacuum state when it was of much greater average density. These are all related to qualititative changes in the properties of matter as temperature and density change.

I would grant that life is a qualitatively different state of matter but it isn't as obvious as the more familiar phase transitions. We don't have a clear demarcation for what is and isn't life. This paper attempts to give a definition, but the fact that that is being done at all shows there isn't one already that is universally agreed-upon, unlike the definition of what is solid versus what is liquid. I guess all life we're aware of consists minimally of a semi-permeable barrier, ingests and stores energy inside of this barrier, and locally reduces entropy inside the barrier while dissipating heat and/or other byproducts into its environment.

Life is, of course, not the only thing that does this. My house fits the same description. The only real line in the sand we have between things we consider alive and things we consider tools is that things we consider alive are all born and descended from other living creatures, not assembled from found or fabricated parts.

Ultimately, though, this is a difference in origin, not a difference in quality or capability. Any tool, including electronic computing devices, can potentially have all of the same qualities as life if we could figure out how to make them self-assembling, self-healing, and self-reproducing. I guess we can do this with software, but it isn't obvious to me how to even demarcate a unit of "software" as an individual entity. How to demarcate intelligent from unintelligent software is even less clear, but nothing about the underlying state of matter the computations run on is any different, so I don't see how it involves anything we can call a phase transition without severely straining the term.

I had glossed it, and the part where they make a surprise move to Kant, is ... not very convincing. The way they describe it doesn't make sense. It's not as if there's any proof that a "Whole" is life or vice versa. It's just one of their assumptions.

If we take their writing as some form of evidence for it, they claim children inherit your Parts, but that's not true. They also imply that Parts cannot exist outside the Whole, which is patently false when taken literally. But in the loose sense in which they seem to use it, I could totally see a piano as a Whole: keys, snares, hammers, sound board, it doesn't make sense outside a piano. Also, notable features of life aren't included nor implied by the concept Whole.

They also call Collectively Autocatalytic Sets an "established mathematical theory", but it's a mathematical property that can be true of some domain. It doesn't prove anything. There aren't any proofs involving that property in the paper either. Later they call it a "chemical reaction system," which seems to be more to the point, but there are so many of those.

It's just another idea, and not an original one either. Wikipedia: "Autocatalytic sets constitute just one of several current theories of life." That Autocatalytic sets by itself isn't enough to explain life may be a point, but there's no reason to assume they've found the magical ingredient in Kant.

For something to be expected, someone must be expecting it. And to be able to expect things, you must be alive.

This proves something, but I'm not sure what...