
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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