WHAT IS LIFE? :

EMERGENCE AND SAPIENCE

Ron Cottam, Willy Ranson & Roger Vounckx

Abstract

            

Erwin Schrödinger’s 1977 book “What is Life?: the Physical Aspect of the Living Cell: Mind and Matter” presented a powerful analysis of the relationships between (understood) science and (mysterious) life. We are now moving into the 21^st century, and towards a world where a multiplicity of interactions between biology and technology are already apparent. The establishment of a clear view of the place of life in our environment becomes ever more important, most particularly if we are to avoid the blind acceptance through ignorance of any and all emerging biotechnologies.

We present the argument that life is not understandable from a classical unified scientific viewpoint, and that its very nature is one of rational inhomogeneity. The multiple levels at which life operates are neither autonomous nor entirely interdependent: their basic nature is one of compromise through negotiation. Although the operation of biology at a particular organizational level may be approximated by formal rational representation, communication between different organizational levels is necessarily less-than-completely describable in similar terms.

The key to formulating overall multi-level representations of biological systems is the creation of an integrated multi-scaled form of entity-ecosystem co-evolution. The resultant framework includes multi-scalar forms of Newtonian and quantal physics, and leads to the recognitions that living and non-living systems are more closely related than appears from a classical viewpoint, that life as we know it can be identified with a specific form of level-emergence, and that the various aspects of sapience and consciousness can be related to the emergence of system-wide hyperscalar correlations of the various system levels. The criterion for development of these attributes in living systems is closely related to the nature of the model itself, through the integration of very large and increasing numbers of initially independent information-processing entities into a unified community which then naturally splits into related sub-systems and sub-sub systems to maintain the viability of its union in a hostile environment.

Conventional science describes our environment prior to the development of large informationally-coupled (living) communities. There is no reason to suppose that these will just exhibit “more of the same” physics which has been used to successfully describe non-living entities, at the very least because life requires the integration of both classical and quantum-like physics in a single non-static unified multi-scalar structural process.

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