It is difficult to speak of the universal specifically.

We cannot do it in this way for two reasons. First, we do not yet know all the basic laws: there is an expanding frontier of ignorance. Second, the correct statement of the laws of physics involves some very unfamiliar ideas which require advanced mathematics for their description.

The fundamental problem about trying to define life... If you go to a physics department... you'll be given a definition in terms of matter... force... energy... entropy... free energy, molecular binding affinities, and so on. If you go to a biology department... you'll be given a very different narrative in terms of... instructions, transcription, , translation, coding, signals...

With the historicization of the heavens the age-old idea of discovering universal laws of behavior applicable everywhere and always seems to have lost plausibility, whether for sub-atomic particles or for human beings. ...all such patterns and regularities, it seems to me, should be understood to be limited, local, evanescent — including, now, even the laws of physics.

Physics is not about how the world is, it is about what we can say about the world

The issue, then, is that we are interpreting a global world with a system built for local landscapes. And because we’ve never seen it before, exponential change makes even less sense.

The issue, then, is that we are interpreting a global world with a system built for local landscapes. And because we've never seen it before, exponential change makes even less sense.

No physical concept is sufficiently defined without the knowledge of its domain of validity.

...Most of the collective problems that confront citizens (poverty, environmental degradation, war and terrorism, etc.) cannot be addressed locally.

"Any concepts or words which have been formed in the past through the interplay between the world and ourselves are not really sharply defined with respect to their meaning: that is to say, we do not know exactly how far they will help us in finding our way in the world. We often know that they can be applied to a wide range of inner or outer experience, but we practically never know precisely the limits of their applicability. This is true even of the simplest and most general concepts like "existence" and "space and time". Therefore, it will never be possible by pure reason to arrive at some absolute truth.
The concepts may, however, be sharply defined with regard to their connections. This is actually the fact when the concepts become part of a system of axioms and definitions which can be expressed consistently by a mathematical scheme. Such a group of connected concepts may be applicable to a wide field of experience and will help us to find our way in this field. But the limits of the applicability will in general not be known, at least not completely."

Physics is, hopefully, simple. Physicists are not.

the challenge for physics is deriving the consensus reality from the external reality, and the challenge for cognitive science is to derive the internal reality from the consensus reality.

If one resolves the measurement problem by postulating additional variables beside the wave function, it is the dynamics of these variables which manifests the non-locality and which resists a fully Relativistic formulation.

We must therefore not be discouraged by the difficulty of interpreting life by the ordinary laws of physics. For that is just what is to be expected from the knowledge we have gained of the structure of living matter. We must also be prepared to find a new type of physical law prevailing in it. Or are we to term it a non-physical, not to say a super-physical, law?