Life as its own Tool for Survival

Ron Cottam, Willy Ranson & Roger Vounckx

Available on the ISSS-99 SIG site "What is Life and Living?"
as the Abstract and as the Complete Paper

In press

Proceedings of the 43rd Annual Conference of
The International Society for the Systems Sciences , paper 99168.
Edited by Janet K Allen, Martin L W Hall and Jennifer Wilby
ISSS, Asilomar, CA, 1999
ISBN: 09664183-2-8

Abstract

            Does life emerge "spontaneously" from a predetermined inanimate background, or is it a basic characteristic of all of our environment? Living entities must respond to external threatening stimuli in order to survive in a hostile climate. If we set aside the pre-supposition that inanimate and animate structures and agents are fundamentally different, then this criterion applies to all recognisable entities.

            An entity depends for its continuance not only on awareness of its surroundings, but also on self-referencing as a means of stabilisation. It must exhibit not only external consciousness but also a degree of self-consciousness. Uniquely external consciousness can engender incongruous or self-destructive internal development; self-consciousness on its own will leave the entity wide open to incomprehensible attack by external agents. The duel between these two facets constitutes the process we refer to as life.

            We can describe the natural living world as, and by, a nonlinearly-scaled hierarchy of concepts, each of which maintains its autonomy by relying on its precursor as a tool. Life uses biology; biology uses chemistry; chemistry uses quantum mechanics. We propose that at the head of this hierarchy the universal background of causally chaotic communication makes use of consciousness, which uses life as a tool in its auto-propagation. Darwin-Szamosi evolution modulates the emergence of hierarchically-related most-fragile-dimensional approximate objectivisations which facilitate agent survival in an otherwise insufficiently-computable complex natural environment.

            We identify the entire field of near-equilibrium physics as the minimal description of the universe when it is considered as an "inanimate" system, or more explicitly as its “ground state”. This then recognises that the ground state of any agent is equivalent to its description as an "inanimate" object, higher unoccupied states presuppose higher degrees of a latent or implicate capability for coherent consciousness, and higher occupied states correspond to higher degrees of explicate consciousness itself.
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