Life and Its Close Relatives (original) (raw)

Life as a Manifestation of the Second Law of Thermodynamics

We examine the thermodynamic evolution of various evolving systems, from primitive physical systems to complex living systems, and conclude that they involve similar processes which are phenomenological manifestations of the second law of thermodynamics. We take the reformulated second law of thermodynamics of Hatsopoulos and Keenan and Kestin and extend it to nonequilibrium regions, where nonequilibrium is described in terms of gradients maintaining systems at some distance away from equilibrium.

Life as Thermodynamic Evidence of Algorithmic Structure in Natural Environments

2012

Abstract: In evolutionary biology, attention to the relationship between stochastic organisms and their stochastic environments has leaned towards the adaptability and learning capabilities of the organisms rather than toward the properties of the environment. This article is devoted to the algorithmic aspects of the environment and its interaction with living organisms. We ask whether one may use the fact of the existence of life to establish how far nature is removed from algorithmic randomness.

Five Arguments toward Understanding Life in Light of a Physics of the Immaterial

Proceedings MDPI, 2022

: This paper argues that life is best understood in light of a physics of the immaterial. Life is not properly seen or touched, for instance, but conceived, imagined, intuited. In order to rightly grasp life in general, we need not reduce it in any sense, hence its counterintuitive character. The claim is based on five arguments: life is much more a process than a series of components; the first law of thermodynamics is important in thinking about processes; life entails a twofold perspective that opens up the window, so to speak, to the possible rather than only the actual; living beings are not machines in any sense of the word (biological hypercomputation); and life is an autopoietic or self-organized phenomenon. Some conclusions are drawn at the end.

LIFE AS ITS OWN TOOL FOR SURVIVAL

Does life emerge " spontaneously " from a predetermined inanimate background, or is it a basic characteristic of all of our environment? Living entities must respond to external threatening stimuli in order to survive in a hostile climate. If we set aside the pre-supposition that inanimate and animate structures and agents are fundamentally different, then this criterion applies to all recognizable entities. An entity depends for its continuance not only on awareness of its surroundings, but also on self-referencing as a means of stabilisation. It must exhibit not only external consciousness but also a degree of self-consciousness. Uniquely external consciousness can engender incongruous or self-destructive internal development; self-consciousness on its own will leave the entity wide open to incomprehensible attack by external agents. The duel between these two facets constitutes the process we refer to as life. We can describe the natural living world as, and by, a nonlinearly-scaled hierarchy of concepts, each of which maintains its autonomy by relying on its precursor as a tool. Life uses biology; biology uses chemistry; chemistry uses quantum mechanics. We propose that at the head of this hierarchy the universal background of causally chaotic communication makes use of consciousness, which uses life as a tool in its auto-propagation. Darwin-Szamosi evolution modulates the emergence of hierarchically-related most-fragile-dimensional approximate objectivizations which facilitate agent survival in an otherwise insufficiently-computable complex natural environment. We identify the entire field of near-equilibrium physics as the minimal description of the universe when it is considered as an "inanimate" system, or more explicitly as its " ground " state. This then recognizes that the ground state of any agent is equivalent to its description as an "inanimate" object, higher unoccupied states presuppose higher degrees of a latent or implicate capability for coherent consciousness, and higher occupied states correspond to higher degrees of explicate consciousness itself. 1. Setting the Stage In coming to terms with the world round about us we form networks of individual representations of the many different entities and processes we encounter or experience. This development is modulated by communication with others, in a manner which stabilizes a common overall view of our surroundings more or less coinciding with our individual conclusions. Without requiring the formal establishment of objectivity, and by making use of individual and collective memory, this provides us with a summed-subjective approximation to objectivity by correlating models of extensive environmental action/reaction experimentation from the individual to the social levels. The formal establishment of this common view corresponds to establishing an intercommunicating network of these models, firstly by formulating them in terms of a single rationality, secondly by organizing their communication in terms of that same rationality. Critical analysis enables the generation of generic types through comparison, leading to the establishment of a reduced number of paradigms from which the models applicable in and specific to particular contexts may be derived. Science concentrates on trying to correlate the "virtual" entities of our modeling world

How can a chemical system act purposefully? Bridging between life and non-life

Journal of Physical Organic Chemistry, 2008

One of life's most striking characteristics is its purposeful (teleonomic) character, a character already evident at the simplest level of life-a bacterial cell. But how can a bacterial cell, effectively an aqueous solution of an assembly of biomolecules and molecular aggregates within a membrane (that is itself a macromolecular aggregate), act purposefully? In this review, we discuss this fundamental question by showing that the somewhat vague concept of purpose can be given precise physicochemical characterization, and can be shown to derive directly from the powerful kinetic character of the replication reaction. At the heart of our kinetic model is the idea that the stability that governs replicating systems is a dynamic kinetic stability, one that is distinctly different to the thermodynamic stability that dominates the inanimate world. Accordingly, living systems constitute a kinetic state of matter as opposed to the thermodynamic states that dominate the inanimate world. Thus, the model is able to unite animate and inanimate within a single conceptual framework, yet is able to account for life's unique characteristics, amongst them its purposeful character. As part of that unification, it is demonstrated that key Darwinian concepts are special examples of more general chemical concepts. Implications of the model with regard to the possible synthesis of living systems are discussed.

Bridging the Gap between Life and Physics

2017

ion The foundation of all Natural computation is abstraction. Merriam-Webster defines abstraction as the act of obtaining or removing something from a source: the act of abstracting something. More precisely, in our context, abstraction refers to the generation of a reduced model of a situation or a systemic description. As such it supports the temporal computation of consequences by reducing computational quantity and/or complexity. There can be many levels of degree of abstraction of a system—these may constitute the hierarchy of levels we have already seen in previous chapters. The ultimate abstraction of a system is its identity as existent or not, and lesser levels of abstraction constitute the systemic models which are the target of our considerations. But first, before considering abstraction itself, we must be clear what kind of logic we are applying to the situation or system. Nature uses natural logic, which has unavoidable consequences. Science and thought in general use ...

The Physical Origin of Subtle Energies: The Principle Of Self-Organization Driving Living Systems

It has long been known that "subtle Energy" pervades the cosmos and every interstice of all forms of living systems. Until now there has never been a pragmatic scientific model of these energies that lends itself to rigorous empirical investigation. A self-organized cosmological model, called the Holographic Conscious Megaverse (HCM), has been developed wherein a teleological action naturally arises. This new complex selforganized action principle is synonymous with the unified field sought by physicists like Einstein; that in a conscious megaverse 'pervades all space, gives life, is the light of the mind and the force that frames the heavens'. This action principle has broad application to fields of medicine and psychology.

Biosemiotics and biophysics — the fundamental approaches to the study of life

The importance, scope, and goals of semiotics can be compared to the ones of physics. These represent two principal ways of approaching the world scientifically. Physics is a study of quantities, whereas semiotics is a study of diversity. Physics is about natural laws, while semiotics is about code processes. Semiotic models can describe features that are beyond the reach of physical models due to the more restricted methodological requirements of the latter. The “measuring devices” of semiotics are alive — which is a sine qua non for the presence of meanings. Thus, the two principal ways to scientifically approach living systems are biophysics and biosemiotics. Accordingly, semiotic (including biosemiotic) systems can be studied both physically (e.g., using statistical methods) and semiotically (e.g., focusing on the uniqueness of the system). The principle of code plurality as a generalization of the code duality principle is formulated.

Agency in Natural and Artificial Systems

Artificial Life, 2005

In this paper we analyze the conditions for agency in natural and artificial systems. In the case of basic (natural) autonomous systems, self-construction and activity in the environment are two aspects of the same organization, a distinction of which is entirely conceptual: their sensorimotor activities are metabolic, realized according to the same principles, and through the same material transformations, as those typical of internal processes (such as energy transduction). The two aspects begin to be distinguishable in a particular evolutionary trend, related to the size increase of some groups of organisms whose adaptive abilities depend on motility. Here a specialized system develops which, in the sensorimotor aspect, is decoupled from the metabolic basis, although it remains dependent of it in the self-constructive one. This decoupling reveals a complexification of the organization. In the last section of the article this approach to natural agency is used to analyze artificial systems, by posing two problems: whether it is possible to artificially build an organization similar to the natural, and whether this notion of agency can be grounded on different organizing principles.

Simulations, Realizations, and Theories of Life

The phrase 'artificial life', as interpreted by participants in the first Santa Fe workshop on A-Life, includes not only 'computer simulation', but also 'computer realization'. In the area of artificial intelligence, Searle (1980) has called the simulation school 'weak AI' and the realization school 'strong AI'. The hope of 'strong' artificial life was stated by Langton : 'We would like to build models that are so lifelike that they would cease to be models of life and become examples of life themselves.' Very little has been said at the workshop about how we would distinguish computer simulations from realizations of life, and virtually nothing has been said about how these relate to theories of life, that is, how the living can be distinguished from the non-living. The aim of this chapter is to begin such a discussion.