Dear Prof. Ellis,
First off, what I understood was that the main call of the contest is for a mathematical formulation of human aims and intention, and that in its defect (if one is unable to hit this hard target) one may entertain other approximations such as the one you invoked "How did physical systems that pursue the goal of reproduction arise from an a-biological world "and others. I understand that the contest organizers gives us latitudes to the target because they want to have a live contest with as many participants as possible. Otherwise, why even formulate the first subject, because they are all clearly different topics. In that sense your essay hits the second target in my appreciation.
Now, what most proponents of life as an emergent property of nature do not realize is how grandiosely anthropomorphic this notion is. It simply proposes that everything in nature beyond biota is purposeless and devoid of meaning in and of themselves and that their only purpose is to offer to humans context and means for them to be purposeful and meaningful themselves. It is this kind of idea, eminently self-serving, so prevalent in the Middle Age that viewed the live burning of the poor Galileo. Don't be quick to blame it on religious intolerance. Blame it on anthropomorphic mental attitudes and self-centrism that have not died at all thru the centuries, but made it very strongly into our scientific theories, old and modern, as ever.
You say: "I have no idea how you are defining life, nor how you impute teleology to a star or galaxy." I am sure you don't, because your proposition is a reductionist anthropomorphic idea, very much the like of the decried Anthropic Principle. As Lee Smolin had put it, "If we don't understand the values the fundamental constants take in our universe, just presume our universe is a member of an infinite and unobservable ensemble of universes, each with randomly chosen parameters. Our universe has the values it does because those make it hospitable to life." I extend these comments by saying that if you and modern science understood the fundamental components of life, from a Functional descriptor as well as the covariant entities at play, you would know that there exists a fundamental physical life constant, in the same gauge company as the other fundamental physical constants, which sets every ontology in nature ultimately as a lifeform and that the difference between one and the other is not a value in quality but in Quantity. In that unified view, nothing in nature is more VALUABLE than other, WE ARE ALL AN ESSENTIAL PART OF NATURE AND EACH WITH THE SAME WEIGHT at a fundamental level.
To justify the concept of emergent life, you write this seemingly absolute truth: "There was no life 13 billion years ago. It emerged after then." So YOU say, but you were not there then as a live witness and could not be, because I can offer the vision that the Universe has not started from a point in the distant past, but from the infinites because it has ALWAYS been there. Your vision is no more assertive than mine because mine, far from suffering from a Hierarchy Problem, and a Cosmological Constant Problem, and an Anthropic Principle Problem, and now a Supersymmetry Problem, and so many more, can compute a large swath of the fundamental physical constants of nature from upheld principles.
I think that it is time for us all, the science people, to show reservations in our views, to stop contending absolute truths of ours, and being intellectually tolerant, because we and our science will all do better in the Global Culture with a bit more prudence and wisdom. That all said, I am not saying at all that your essay is worthless, just that it has to be re-contextualized.
Joseph