No doubt about it: Life is truly amazing. I mean, the things it gets up to far exceed our imaginations! (Just watch a few dozen Ze Frank “True Facts” videos to scratch the surface.) It hardly seems necessary to invest in a post to elucidate what constitutes Life, when a small child will correctly identify instances almost every time. Living beings demonstrate awareness about their surroundings, taking actions broadly in service of goals to thrive and reproduce. An amoeba marks itself as alive because we witness its purposeful mobility to secure food and evade danger.

Yet, living beings are undeniably made of atoms—atoms that do not appear in any close investigation to operate outside the usual rules of physics. Our sensation of awareness, experience of color perception, etc. seems so far removed from physics that the intractable connection is obvious to neither child nor adult. How could this awareness (what we label “consciousness”) possibly arise out of inanimate particles obeying physics without some “special sauce” unavailable to mere “machines” like computers or robots? It seems prima facie absurd, so it requires an unusual suspension of disbelief to submit to the baffling prospect.

How is it even possible, though, that inanimate matter can constitute Life? In a word: feedback. Life is feedback. The sun is of huge importance to Life, but we would not say that it is alive itself even though it actively engages with the universe and is a critical contributor to living beings on Earth. It’s continuance as a star is not contingent on these interactions. No feedback loop makes fusion in the core care what happens in Las Vegas. As an aside, I resist dividing lines and include the Sun (and everything else) in a living whole: just try doing without it!

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I spend probably too much of my time (and now yours) trying to work out the apparent differences between animate and inanimate arrangements of atoms. In practice it’s not at all hard to tell one from the other, even if a mass spectrometer would confirm that all the same atoms comprise the collections. Children easily differentiate one from the other. Isn’t that definitive?

In a similar vein, it’s not hard to tell a star from a brown dwarf, even though they have essentially identical compositions. The one having more than 8% the mass of our sun will ignite fusion and light up, while the one not “tall enough to go on the ride” will continue sulking as a dim, warm lump.

It’s not hard to tell the difference in behavior between a piece of paper fluttering to the floor and the exact same piece wadded tightly and dropping straight down. A clear sheet of glass or ice becomes an opaque white powder simply by crushing it thoroughly. A log looks and acts much differently before and after burning, even though no atoms were created or destroyed—most are dispersed as invisible gas. Arrangement matters.

But I want to poke a little deeper and identify an arrangement that we would never call animate, yet displays many of the hallmarks of Life. This is my clumsy attempt at doing so. The purpose is not to find an exact match in this example, because that’s impossible: identifying flaws is easy sport. Rather, this exercise provides a window that might allow our crippled imaginations to dimly grasp how Life might develop behaviors that appear purposeful in the context of evolutionary feedback. So, instead of focusing on imperfections, the challenge is: are you able to make out the shape beyond the distracting foreground fog? What new insights does this perspective offer? How might you build upon it and make it even better?

This is the first in a two-part series on what constitutes Life, as far as I can gather.

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