Question 9: theoretical and artificial construction of the living: redefining the approach from an autopoietic point of view.

TL;DR: An ‘organizational approach’ is promoted to the assessment of life-likeness of synthetic cells and the transition from behavioral assays, like the Turing test, to systemic strategies, based on concepts such as organization, complexity, networks, and emergence is proposed.

TL;DR: This integrative framework will allow us to deal with two issues in biological and emergentist studies: distinguishing the autonomy proper of living systems from some physical processes like those of structural stability and pattern generation and reconsidering the notion of downward causation not as a direct or indirect influence of the whole on its parts, but as an epistemological problem of interaction between descriptive domains.

TL;DR: It is submitted that engineering a self-replicating machine opens up new areas of astrobiology to be explored in the limits of life.

TL;DR: Notwithstanding their diversity, all living systems must share a common organization which the authors implicitly recognize calling them “living,” but there is no formulation of this organization, mainly because the great developments of molecular, genetic and evolutionary notions in contemporary biology have led to the overemphasis of isolated components.

TL;DR: The conceptual framework of the research on the origin of life on Earth includes approaches to the definitions of life, self-organization, autopoiesis, and the logic of cellular life.