Related papers: The quest for the definition of life
There has been on-going philosophical debate on whether artificial life models, also known as digital organisms, are truly alive. The main difficulty appears to be finding an encompassing and definite definition of life. By examining…
The origins of life stands among the great open scientific questions of our time. While a number of proposals exist for possible starting points in the pathway from non-living to living matter, these have so far not achieved states of…
The question of "what is life?" has challenged scientists and philosophers for centuries, producing an array of definitions that reflect both the mystery of its emergence and the diversity of disciplinary perspectives brought to bear on the…
The multifarious internal workings of organisms are difficult to reconcile with a single feature defining a state of being alive. Indeed, definitions of life rely on emergent properties (growth, capacity to evolve, agency) only symptomatic…
We propose a novel definition of life in terms of which its emergence in the universe is expected, and its ever-creative open-ended evolution is entailed by no law. Living organisms are Kantian Wholes that achieve Catalytic Closure,…
Even when concepts similar to emergence have been used since antiquity, we lack an agreed definition. However, emergence has been identified as one of the main features of complex systems. Most would agree on the statement ``life is…
The path toward the emergence of life in our biosphere involved several key events allowing for the persistence, reproduction and evolution of molecular systems. All these processes took place in a given environmental context and required…
Our binary intuitive understanding of life and lifelikeness is good enough for daily life, but not for research in the natural sciences. Here we propose an operational definition of lifeness of a particular entity as a scalar, product of…
Living systems exhibit a range of fundamental characteristics: they are active, self-referential, self-modifying systems. This paper explores how these characteristics create challenges for conventional scientific approaches and why they…
When a large number of similar entities interact among each other and with their environment at a low scale, unexpected outcomes at higher spatio-temporal scales might spontaneously arise. This nontrivial phenomenon, known as emergence,…
It is well known that life on Earth alters its environment over evolutionary and geological timescales. An important open question is whether this is a result of evolutionary optimization or a universal feature of life. In the latter case,…
In their recent comment, Cockell et al. argue that the habitability of an environment is fundamentally a binary property; that is to say, an environment can either support the metabolic processes of a given organism or not. The habitability…
At present, there is a great deal of confusion regarding complexity and its measures (reviews on complexity measures are found in, e.g. Lloyd, 2001 and Shalizi, 2006 and more references therein). Moreover, there is also confusion regarding…
Biological evolution is a complex blend of ever changing structural stability, variability and emergence of new phenotypes, niches, ecosystems. We wish to argue that the evolution of life marks the end of a physics world view of law…
One thing that discriminates living things from inanimate matter is their ability to generate similarly complex or non-random architectures in a large abundance. From DNA sequences to folded protein structures, living cells, microbial…
The claim that life is an emergent phenomenon exhibiting novel properties and principles is often criticized for being in conflict with causal closure at the microscopic level. I argue that advances in cosmological theory suggesting an…
Living organisms have some common structures, chemical reactions and molecular structures. The organisms consist of cells with cell division, they have homochirality of protein and carbohydrate units, and metabolism, and genetics, and they…
A modeling formalism is proposed for the description and study of living and life-like systems. It provides an abstract conceptual model framework for real life and evolution of biological organisms. It is proposed, that this model…
While fields like Artificial Life have made huge strides in quantifying the mechanisms that distinguish living systems from non-living ones, particular mechanisms remain difficult to reproduce in silico. Known as open-endedness, we've been…
It is high time to openly and without finalism define the dangerous but needed term 'purposeful information', whose quantity is an Eigen information value. Using the term 'biological information' in its stead forces one into an…