Definition of term: lability. Term, lability (n.) Definition, Characteristic ofsomething that tends to change.
Labilty is actually independence of structure from the physical substrate, facilitating more replication and other functions of body. Structures originally imbedded in the substrate developed more independence. Things like pressure, waves, and electric current, can already move across the substrate - so techniques of moving bits without moving atoms are actually billions of years old. Crystal structures can replicate more complex patterns within the same material; living organisms pass features and behavioral patterns to physically unconnected bodies; information technology allows structures to travel between different substrates and change representations (which is basically the same thing but one level of abstraction higher - it is passing semantics between different syntactic substrates).
