Interdefinitions of Life
How to define the curious adventure of existence
Of all things that life is and can be, it’s near impossible to define.
It’s a problem that countless curious minds have struggled to resolve, leaving the issue to simmer louder and louder atop the backburners of our existence.
One of the biggest obstacles to solving the riddle is that it’s hard to satisfy all the players at the table — to not only synchronize but harmonize every formulaic requirement from every applicable discipline.
But where such difficulty exists, therein also lies a major reward to, once and for all, defining life — if ever achieved, it may become integrated as something of a golden explanation of our existence; one impenetrable and indisputable.
If we can define life with any relative accuracy, we can come to understand a whole lot more about not only who and what we are, but who and what we can be.
This potential, alone, makes the whole venture overwhelmingly worthwhile.
Chess Not Checkers
Sagan approached the question from numerous angles — physiological and biochemical, genetic and thermodynamic — ultimately finding himself at an impasse:
“The existence of diverse definitions of life surely means that life is something complicated… The fundamental ground pattern, both in form and in matter, of all life on Earth is essentially identical… the biologist is fundamentally handicapped as compared, say, to the chemist or physicist or geologist or meteorologist, who now can study aspects of his discipline beyond the Earth.”
He rightfully lay the blame at the limits of our own perceptive ability:
“If there is truly only one sort of life on Earth, then perspective is lacking in the most fundamental way”
Source
But through his approach, and through the many approaches of others, we’ve come to at least understand a few rules to the game.
We know, for instance, that we have to build upwards from the biological processes that we’re a part and parcel of, those upon which we’ve already learned so much about how life works on this planet.
But this is only a start, as we see the parameters for life expand beyond anything strictly biological.
Thermodynamics certainly play a role in the equation — as do physics — and we have to inarguably incorporate these more tangible variables into the definition.
Carol Cleland, philosopher of science whom I have rescheduled interviews with half a dozen times, presents several critical approaches, from thermodynamic to metabolic; she argues that our conceptualizations of self-organization and self-referentiality are outdated approaches towards clamping down on the defining parameters.
Much like Sagan, she concludes that there’s no set criteria that can ever gain a synchronized level of consensus from all disciplines:
“That the most popular contemporary definitions of life are defective does not of course establish that no definition of life could be successful. Efforts to formulate more satisfactory definitions of life are ongoing… Nevertheless it is striking that even with the remarkable advances in biology and biochemistry of the past couple of centuries we still lack a consensus on a definition of life. This suggests that there may be something wrong with the project of defining life.”
She and Sagan may be right.
Because, to further complicate things, there are the non-scientific angles to consider as well, the kind that inevitably drip out of the more subjective dimensions of existence.
The less tangible but equally vital world of the human psyche.
Dostoevsky, for instance, might define life as something that’s marked by the interaction between consciousness and existential challenge; that an adaptive navigation through suffering and adversity, and a capacity to withstand and recover from external pressures, is integral to the definition.
How would Shakespeare define life? How would Roberto Durán or Peter the Great?
Suddenly, the whole landscape of answers within this ever-complicating game becomes much more abstract.
Aging Agency
It could help to sidestep the process and work backwards instead, starting from the end result; it’s from here that we can extract some clearer common denominators.
For one, life obviously consumes, converts and capitalizes on energy; it seeks to evolve and pursue complexity; it seems to also innately want to reproduce or procreate — to perpetuate.
But one thing that stands out, somehow more than anything else on the whole drawing board of intimations, is the squishy-but-unavoidable fact that all life seems to exhibit the pursuit of some kind of meaning.
All definable lifeforms are incessantly entangled with a process of creating and generating some form of substantive meaning across both subjective and objective lines; to procreate, to learn, self-actualize, to feed — even to fertilize.
So such a definition has to, foremost, encapsulate the variable of meaning (to a large degree), one that permeates beyond any one individual organism — into the collective realms of existence.
In itself, this admittedly evasive answer opens up a box of other variables.
For one, it necessitates the requirement of a sentient and negotiable kind of agency, one that dances with opportunity and pursues possibilities.
And so we begin to see that any assembly of organized matter is equipped with goal-setting potential; it’s from here that we can combine and inject other purposes — genetic, thermodynamic or metabolic considerations included.
It’s also from here that we can begin to carve out some kind of interim answer to this slippery question.
Monkey Rocks
Cosmologist Brian Swimme once told me that, as the universe innately grows to become more cognizant of itself, we become aware of the transformative potential behind all life — inanimate matter included.
Swimme presents an interesting analogy:
“Just taking in that the rocks I was looking at, that they actually became the intelligent eyes of the ape, to that example….To wake up to the power that’s in a rock. How ever one thinks of consciousness, the rock had power of becoming these intelligent apes.”
This isn’t too different from an idea espoused by astrophysicist Michael Wong, whose team recently published an ambitious paper written atop the hypothesis that all life (even abiotic life) inevitably increases in complexity, offering a comparative example of apples and moons:
…For Newton, it didn’t matter if it was an apple falling from a tree or a planet going around the sun. It’s just one law and it’s because both of those objects have mass…
…I think for us, we’re trying to identify conceptual equivalencies in complex evolving systems and that has to do with the fact that they’re composed of lots of diverse interacting components, a mechanism that can sample new configurations of those components and then finally this idea of selection for function that there are certain functions, fundamental sources of selection, that sort of favor certain functions over others, or favor the ability to do a function, like homeostasis and dynamic persistence…”
Ordering Chaos
Wong’s team, by the way, embraced an inter-disciplinary approach to formulating their hypothesis, one which included the above-referenced (and ever-elusive) philosopher, Carol Cleland, alongside an A-Team of specialists from numerous fields of study.
And so if we accept the premise that all life seems to contain this encoded pursuit of increasing complexity, it presupposes the existence of a meaningful outcome to this pursuit in the first place.
As ephemeral as it may be, a creative/creating/creationary intent behind every iota of matter (biotic or abiotic) seems to fit within this schematic.
But because our view is fragmented by the walls we’ve put up in our dissections of knowledge, we have trouble achieving any kind of cohesive understanding; the hard-scientists disregard the soft-sciences and the soft-scientists fail to account for the hard-science.
It’s as though we’re looking at something through a microscope with one eye and through a telescope with the other.
We don’t employ knowledge as holistically as we perhaps should, so we’re often overwhelmed by certain overlaps (i.e. physics and spirituality; the cosmos and consciousness) that self-resonate with an obvious yet inexplicable sense of truth.
And it’s within these scintillating overlaps that we seem to uncover the best of the clues.
So while the biologists are diving down rabbit holes and the astrophysicists are getting lost in wormholes, the question becomes whether a coalescence of sorts, somewhere atop a muddled middle ground, is inevitable.
Herein lies another part of the definition.
Because alongside increasing complexity, life also evidences an increasing kind of synchronization. To the observer, information naturally consolidates over time as order emerges from disorder and sense is made from nonsense — at least through our subjective venturing through reality.
Anything and everything that navigates reality, in essence, needs to be able to order the chaos.
Life, somehow, both contradicts and obeys the concepts of entropy (and general thermodynamics); it likewise breaks and adheres to all natural laws as we know them.
So within this operative range, there’s a coalescence that we’ve yet to fully understand, and as our compartmentalized fields of study begin to harmonize, we may fall into some pretty wild revelations.
As Brian Swimme told me:
“We’re leaving the mechanistic phase of science and we’re branching into — we’ve already entered into — the holistic phase of science. Science is becoming another wisdom tradition as this happens… It’ll be very different from 19th century science.”
Slowly, it seems, we’re coming to learn that everything really does boil down to monkey rocks.
Observation Unseen
Beyond the inter-related pursuit of meaning, life seems to be grounded by another ephemeral anchor: the subjective experience.
Life is the experience of a potent form of agency; it’s the experience of being in a super-positioned state, elevated above the intersections of information, and moving through space and time towards more ideal (or evolved) states.
From the magnetic pulls of our moon to the Fibonacci sequences of vegetation on a forest floor, we’re able to navigate the 0’s and 1’s of existence with a meaningful curiosity that is both influenced by, and influential to, the matter around it.
Whatever kind of organism undertakes to engage in this whole game of life, it does so with a a limited set of identifiable purposes that we’ve only been able to understand from our own subjective lens of [frightfully limited] perception.
Of all the things life can be, including being difficult to define, the one fitting description seems to be that life is a kind of curious adventure that we may never come to fully understand.