This is because it cancels out of the equation. Biology boils down to chemistry boils down to physics and if you reduce variables on both sides of the equation, "life" is not necessary for the universe to exist. "Posits" is not the correct framing. "The Second Law of Thermodynamics requires that entropy increases over time throughout all systems in the multiverse" is accurate. There is nothing controversial, experimental or theoretical about it. If the 2nd law is wrong, everything is wrong and we fly apart into clouds of tachyons. My favorite definitions of thermo come from my 400-level thermo class, which used gambling as an analogy: : “You must play the game (zeroth law), you can't win, (first law), you can't break even (second law) and you can't quit (third law).” There's a lot of lawyerism to the laws of thermodynamics because anyone puzzling about with them is out there on beyond zebra but for normies, "time's arrow moves forward" "energy is neither created nor destroyed" "energy transfer is never 100% efficient" and "everything stops at absolute zero". Thermo don't give no fux about quantum observers. Particle or wave the gods of thermo get their cut. your part in the play changes but to the universe it's all the same. As soon as you start digging into it, all the "spooky action at a distance" schroedinger'scatism of quantum mechanics collapses into boundary conditions and framing; "energy is matter with a constant" is the theoretical physicist's way of saying "it's all just vibes, maaaan" but much like Erwin's zombie cat, pop culture turns it into something it's not. "Life" has to be defined as a thin bright line somewhere and the preponderance of the privilege for doing so belongs to the biologists. "consumes/transforms energy" has been in place since 1749 while "If I observe it I must be alive" comes from Schroedinger himself in 1944. Schroedinger, however, did not feel that the universe needed to be observed to exist but that instead, our existence is defined by our observation. While life is not typically categorized as a fundamental force, our understanding and definition of life might benefit from its thermodynamic and quantum mechanic properties.
The Second Law of thermodynamics posits that in an isolated system, entropy – a measure of disorder – invariably increases over time.
How do we know? What forced the indeterminate? I disagree about Shrodinger. In his What is Life he posited that consciousness was not even something that was seated in the individual, but spread across the lot of us, with an illusion of individuality. I don’t think he was so sure himself. Yeah ‘posits’ is the wrong word for the second law. Biology boils down to chemistry boils down to physics and if you reduce variables on both sides of the equation, "life" is not necessary for the universe to exist.
That's fair. We don't. Flip side of the question, though - what reason do we have for disregarding the current status quo other than egocentrism? There's a lot of effort by the TESCREALists to redefine "life" to include their new favorite plaything, generalized artificial intelligence, so that they can discuss what rights Rosie from The Jetsons might be entitled to. I find this to be deeply disingenuous, considering their utter and total lack of interest in extending rights to, say, black people. "What is life" has taken on a new urgency now that the overwhelming majority of the world rejects the idea that ChatGPT is entitled to discount car insurance. Schroedinger cribbed the Buddhists, Tegmark cribbed Schroedinger. That's fine, hard scientists can be philosophers, too. But my tail gets bushy when hard scientists pass philosophy off as science simply because that's what their degree is in. What function does this definition serve? Why are we defining it? What's wrong with the definitions we already have? What has changed that we now need to re-examine this question? Because biologically and ecologically speaking, nothing has changed. We have not found any new goo armpit deep in a black smoker. Rama is ripping out of the solar system without so much as a chromatograph to remember it by. Nobody's discovered a cave of Sudoku-solving slime molds. What has changed is a whole bunch of too-online chinstrokers have started batting answerbots around and way way way too many of them want to turn their gullibility into profundity by arguing "I noticed it, therefore it matters." Crichton's Andromeda Strain is literally about aperiodic crystals and whether they are entitled to rights as "life." Chrichton consequently digresses for a number of chapters on the definition of life and its reduction. He effectively concludes the question to be unanswerable but moot; regardless of the definition, "human life" takes precedence over any other. That's the step that I see skipped in these discussions. And I see it skipped a disturbing percentage of the time.How do we know?