Editing Openai/686aedb2-60b0-8003-98a8-e1766cf496a6 (section)

===== - Your reading of Monod is sound. He saw information as discontinuous from chemistry, requiring chance filtered by selection. =====
* Reflexive chemistry is an attempt to close the gap from raw chemistry to information without invoking full chance-plus-selection initially.
* But it remains speculative and has not yet demonstrated how a three-part symbolic system (encoder/code/decoder) could emerge from purely two-part interactions.
* Your instinct—that a communication system must have a discrete encoding–decoding relationship to count as biological information—is aligned with the most rigorous definitions of life-like systems.

Would you like a specific paper on reflexive chemistry (like Wills & Carter’s “Bootstrapping” paper) broken down to see exactly what they claim about symbolic emergence?