Michael Levin asked 68 scientists including myself: What is life? We came back with 68 different answers.
My definition was the least “lab-coat” of the bunch. On purpose.
Mike’s paper is called What Lives? A Meta-Analysis of Diverse Opinions on the Definition of Life. It maps everyone’s answer on a graph.
Defining life is notoriously slippery. No two biologists give the same answer. No definition captures all life does.
This is not merely a linguistic problem. No string of human syllables captures what conscious living beings are and do.
I’m all for trying to discover life, break it down, model it, analyze it, research, build, improve and extend it — but it’s so much greater than our words and concepts. Life is ineffable.
My definition:
“Life is the fire that lights itself. Self-awareness and self-agency — not just an act of creating, but the continual gift of creativity, the potenza for singularity in every single moment, ineffable.”
Some scientists don’t know what to do with a statement like “Life is the fire that lights itself.” But in choosing to define it this way, I’m calling out the elephant in the room.
50 years ago Maturana and Varela coined the term autopoiesis. It means self-creation. Like a watch that assembles itself out of a pile of springs and gears, then winds itself up.
How does anything create itself?
Nobody knows. Yet when you watch an embryo assemble itself, that’s exactly what you see.
The profession sweeps this question under the rug with clever rhetoric: “Evolution through natural selection.”
‘Evolution through natural selection’ is backwards. Real life is “Natural selection through evolution.” Why? Because you have nothing to select until after the evolutionary event has occurred.
Natural selection is an outcome, not an explanation.
Natural selection is not the cause. It is the effect.
“Evolution through natural selection” is a shell game. “Life is the fire that lights itself” is not. It’s a fitting metaphor. An artistic statement that hints at the nature of this yet-unsolved mystery.
I define “Self-awareness and self-agency, not just an act of creating but the continual gift of creativity” in other papers. In Biology Transcends the Limits of Computation, I show that life does inductive reasoning — it makes decisions that cannot be mathematically determined.
Life makes choices, and those choices create information.
Axioms are chosen rules for building a world. An axiom could be “I’m going to map locations using X and Y coordinates.” (Euclidean geometry.) A different axiom could be “I’m going to map locations using latitude and longitude coordinates.” (Spherical geometry.) Axioms don’t make themselves; they are chosen by agents. All living cells are agents.
“Fire that lights itself” translated into formal language is “self-generating axioms.” That would be my lab-coat definition. But I didn’t put it that way because it doesn’t convey the full idea. Axioms are flat and boring. Fire crackles with energy. So does life.
Stuart Kauffman, Sy Garte and I, in The Reasonable Ineffectiveness of Mathematics in the Biological Sciences, we prove biology does not merely obey mathematics, it creates mathematics. In biology there is almost no such thing as a math formula that is 100% true.
In the 1940s, legendary physicist Erwin Schrödinger called this creative force negentropy, or negative entropy.
Entropy causes fire to burn out.
Negative entropy is fire that lights itself.
Nothing can reverse conventional heat entropy. But by manipulating information, life can increase physical order. Despite the fact that total entropy still increases according to the 2nd law of thermodynamics.
When you clean your room, you reduce information entropy. Heat entropy has no reverse gear. Information entropy does. This reversal, from disorder to order, happens every time any person, plant or animal makes a decision.
I love the Italian word “Potenza.” More flavorful than English potential. When I say “singularity in every single moment” I am saying that most of the time, a cell runs its program. Yet at any point in time a surprise can come along, and the organism can make a choice not calculable from a prior state. A singularity.
Evolution is not random events; it’s response to random events. The creative power of life.
Humans are not wind-up toys; nor are the cells we are made of. This is why biology cannot be reduced to fixed physical laws. That’s why science as traditionally defined — reducing the cosmos to equations — will never capture biology.
Two options: Upgrade the definition of science to fit what biology does. Or keep pretending the problem will go away.
Science lags because its tools aren’t mature yet. We are only at the foothills of understanding life. Artists, poets and musicians capture the essence of life better than scientists.
Oxford scientist Andrew Briggs wrote The Penultimate Curiosity. Subtitle: “Science swims in the slipstream of ultimate questions.” He explores the Big Questions that have captivated humans for 100,000 years.
Briggs shows how theology, philosophy, poetry, and the arts pose questions centuries ahead of what science can analyze and digest.
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So… what is this paper about?
It maps our spectrum of definitions.
X-Axis: On the left, those who feel the line between life and non-life is an artificial human construct. On the right, those who say it’s an objectively measurable distinction.
Y-Axis: On the bottom, those who see life as a process; on the top, those who classify life in terms of its ingredients.
Perspective: 57% of definitions take an objective stance (life is observer-independent); 43% take subjective points of view.
Nature: 46% treat life as alive / not alive; 54% as a continuum.
Approach: 88% actionable / conventional; 12% inspirational, poetic, or self-recursive.
What Lives? A Meta-Analysis of Diverse Opinions on the Definition of Life preprint of the paper on Arxiv.
Props to Mike Levin for inviting me. I’m proud to be the outlier at the edge of the chart.
Perry Marshall
P.S.: Over the last few decades people somehow got the idea that scientific papers are supposed to be flat, boring and impersonal. Written in dreadful, droning, false-authority passive voice. When you read papers from 50-100 years ago, they often include anecdotes, quotes from literature, poetry and personal opinions. It’s time to bring personality, passion and fire back into science.
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