"<a href=""https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZecQ64l-gKM&amp;t=5m20s"">5:20</a> To pushback a little", when Lee said "Life is the universe developing a memory", my computer science brain thought "hmmmm....". The issue is, what is his definition of memory? If you define it as a store of information, which is the common CS definition, there are many things besides life that have a memory. A deformation in a piece of solid matter is a memory of the event that deformed it. We use depositions of carbon to encode information on pieces of paper. More recently, we've used magnetic switches and charged capacitors as memory.<br><br>What is actually meant by memory? An interesting observation of ourselves is that in pursuing an understanding of physics, chemistry, biology, etc., we are constructing patterns of information in our brains that are similar to the informational patterns of what we are observing. So in Humans (or life in general), there is a sympathetic reaction to patterns in the environment. I think this is what Lee is getting at. While a rock may be imprinted with information from millennia of wind weathering it, it can only record information about a subset of phenomena in it's vicinity. We have an informational sympathy which is more general than non-living entities. While we are not perfect sympathetic observers, we can replicate (or at least approximate) a larger range of informational patterns present in our environment than most phenomena.<br><br>But it seems what is remarkable about this is computation not memory. One way to look at what we are is as an entity which is highly sensitive to having arbitrary information imprinted onto it, which then goes through a computational process that links the information into patterns and stores them in memory. We use our sight to decode the local EM field, we decode pressure waves in the atmosphere to gain sonic information. We then take that information and process it into abstractions of objects, directions such as up and down, trajectories, etc. Furthermore, through speech and the written word we've used these abilities to relay information to each other, creating a large network of observers through which informational patterns can flow and be transformed, that no single mind could have constructed.<br><br>What's even more remarkable is that the nature of the computation is also highly sensitive to the patterns that have previously been imprinted. Patterns with very little informational content (in terms of bits), can trigger computations that induce radical changes in our behavior. E.g. finding out that your favorite sports team won or lost, which is literally 1 bit of information, can cause dramatic shifts in your behavior. But that shift in behavior only occurs because you've been previously imprinted with information about sports, winning and losing, the cities represented by the teams, etc.