What is Life? How does it work?

Is it possible for us to truly understand what life really is -- and how it works, in general, not only for a few special examples?

            Back at the time of Charles Darwin, before his revolutionary new ideas became popular, biologists often seemed to be doomed to a life of meaningless leaf-collecting. They seemed to be collecting a gigantic archive of raw, descriptive data – without being able to generalize or to predict or to understand the underlying patterns. This has changed a lot since then -- but even today we face a big challenge in trying to generalize and understand all the data which has been accumulated.

            Is it even possible to develop a kind of unified, mathematical understanding of life in general? Is it even possible to develop the same kind of universal, coherent mathematical understanding here as it is in the case of physics or in the case of intelligent systems? Is it just plain inherently intractable – or are there ways to deepen our understanding that we simply haven’t yet discovered? Can we develop an understanding general enough, for example, to actually predict what kinds of life might exist in other chemistries or other hypothetical universes? Or even what kind of life we might accidentally create on earth? Can we even be sure, theoretically, about what kinds of scenarios from science about alternative life forms would actually be possible, in some environments? (I have wondered at times about Philip Jose Farmer’s scenario in To Your Scattered Bodies Go.)

            Maybe such an understanding is impossible – but before we give up, we should think about how impossible it once seemed to develop a unifying mathematical understanding of basic physics or of intelligence. The first great unifying mathematical understanding in physics came from Newton. It was incomplete, but it was a huge step forward – and it led to  ever more complete and advanced understanding unrolling over centuries. In the study of mind or intelligence, we have really only just begun that process – but there certainly is new, unifying mathematics, and the emerging new technology that comes form greater understanding. In the study of “what is life?”, there are number of interesting strands waiting to be woven together more coherently… and mathematical approaches yet to be explored.

            Life, in the most general context, is really just one part of the larger subject of self-organization or self-organizing systems. Back in 1994, Karl Pribram invited Ilya Prigogine, myself and a couple of dozen others to address the basic questions about self-organization in one of his workshops. He invited me to write a general introduction to self-organization, which was printed next to Prigogine’s paper in the start of the book:

just it

Everybody wants to change the world
Everybody wants to change the world
But no one, no one wants to die
Wanna try, wanna try, wanna try,
Wanna try, wanna try, wanna try?
I’ll be your detonator!

We’re not told what the answer was when the sky opened up. I think that the answer is in the lyrics that  follow. The answer is ‘no one’. This is what this is all about. It’s about stopping sitting there waiting for someone to save you, and getting to saving yourself, and maybe a piece of your world, if you’re lucky.

its about me

“The greatest challenge in my LIFE
is to find someone who knows my faults and
weaknesses but STILL wanting to embrace me
with so much LOVE and without any doubt..

quotes of life

Life without love is like a tree without blossom and fruit.

quotes of life

Our lives are like a candle in the wind.

life is too short quotes

You only live once, but if you work it right, once is enough.

What would be your last wish if you knew you are about to die after 24 hours?

? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ?