"... if life can be reduced to 'the behaviors of a complex system' ..."

[Jim__]

We really don't know what life is, or consciousness. Perhaps life is just a state of existence for an organic system that has reached a certain level of complexity. Perhaps consciousness is the act of such a system identifying itself as such as system.

...

It means that if life can be reduced to "the behaviors of a complex system" then we might want to ask whether the most complex system we know of - the Universe - is alive, and is aware of itself. If life and consciousness happened on a small scale, it would not be terribly surprising to find that it happened on a large scale as well.

If the Universe is alive, and conscious, does it also possess intelligence? If not intelligence, does the Universe possess instinct?

I agree with the first sentence in the excerpt: We really don't know what life is, or consciousness. But, given that, I really don't see anything in your post that justifies our accepting that life can be reduced to "the behaviors of a complex system" . I realize that this assertion is made as a conditional statement in your post. But, given that we really don't know what life is and we really don't know that life can be reduced to "the behaviors of a complex system", it seems a bit premature even to be asking the question of whether or not the universe is alive. Before we get to that question, I think we want to really know what life is.