And throw in all the sequels to Dungeon Crawler Carl. Haha. I listened to those at a rate of one per week. They're a lot of fun.

In the past eight months. "Read" counts if it was audible, eh?

James S A Corey's Mercy of the Gods
Stephen Baxter's The Thousand Earths
Dennis E Taylor's We are Legion, we are Bob
Matt Diniman's Dungeon Crawler Carl
Scott Hawkin's The Library at Mount Char

At certain values of "r" this splitting becomes chaotic and unpredictable, yet, when examined not quite random, and, at least to me, beautiful. Small differences in where you start can lead to vastly different outcomes: the fundamental law of chaos.

Understanding agency is at the core of the divide between matter's two most fascinating phases: the biotic and the abiotic.

Is this view of agency is too simplistic? Macroscopic states with the ability to supervene on microscopic ones, flipping causal relations from bottom-up mechanisms to top-down agency, are those we typically associate with being "alive."

A physical microscopic narrative paints a mechanistic picture - molecular machinery simply responding to its environment. Agency appears as an emergent descriptor of macroscopic behavior, the result of coarse graining over manifold microscopic degrees of freedom.

The asymmetric rebuilding of the membrane appears as translational motion for the cell.The simple machinery within the cell gives rise to seemingly complex behaviors: bursts of forward motion, circling around, occasional hesitation. Is the cell unsure of where to go next? Is it making decisions?

Three types of "molecules" form a chemical reaction network (CRN), alongside an ever-decaying "membrane." In the environment are pointlike "food" sources, diffusing several more "molecule" types. The CRN interacts with these, transforming them into the building blocks of the membrane.