Is Life Fundamental? by Sara Imari Walker

Dear Sara:

I enjoyed reading your well-written and deeply intuitive essay addressing the most fundamental question - "Is Life Fundamental?" Whether this question is ill-posed and the ensuing questions related to the reductionist or top-down approach can be answered by a comprehensive, consistent, and non-paradoxical understanding of the Cosmos as described in my paper - -" From Absurd to Elegant Universe" as discussed below:

"Is (biological) Life Fundamental?" appears to be a well-posed question only within the mainstream reductionist thinking of an absolute cosmic time that began with a Big Bang. However, such mainstream thinking is invalidated by the fact that 96% of the universe remains unexplained by the mainstream approach (QM and GR, biology, chemistry etc.) that is also marred with singularities, inconsistencies, and irresolvable paradoxes. These paralyzing deficiencies make the mainstream definition of Life as "Biological, Chemical, or Material Life" entirely ill-posed from fundamentality point of view. However, as described in my paper, the Cosmic Life or Cosmic Consciousness or Free Will evidenced by the Zero-point kinetic energy state of the universe that exists as fully dilated space (omnipresent), fully dilated time (eternal), and fully dilated mass is shown to the ultimate fundamental state of the universe. Matter and biological life are born out of and decay into this fundamental eternal state according to the universal laws of conservation modeled by the GNM in my paper.

Your paper rightly suggests the "Top-down Causation" approach to answer this question but the operational framework of such an approach, especially Emergence, remains absent and unachievable at this time. The main reason for this problem is that the "Top" has not been defined or described scientifically as yet. My paper describes both the "Top" as well as "Bottom" states to be synonymous with the fundamental "Source" - the Zero-point state of the universe from which everything emanates and into which everything merges. The mainstream linearization - Top-down or Bottom-up Causation is invalid because the wholesome Cosmos does not have an absolute time/space needed for causation. My paper shows that the observed universe, quantum as well as classical behavior of matter can all be predicted without any explicit time parameter. Hence, the question of the Origin of Life implying an absolute moment of its beginning becomes senseless in cosmic terms and has no universal validity, in spite of its stubborn illusion in worldly (Newtonian or Classical) terms.

You may be interested to read my paper and I would greatly appreciate your comments/ratings with regard to whether it answers many of the important and crucial questions you have raised.

Best Regards

Avtar Singh

I read the Strulson experiment with cell-like structure, but I have a problem.

It is necessary the presence of two structure interacting in the same time: dextran and polyethylene glycol; but in a fluid dynamic environment these component must be self-replicant, and if it is complex to obtain a life form, then is more complex to obtain two self-replicating life.

I think that it is more simple that the self-replicating rna acquire some characteristic in the terminal part, like an helical capsid that is connected with the rna (a single structure that compartmentalize the rna, a junk gene that give tertiary structure).

Saluti

Domenico

Is virus life?

I think that is possible to try to make a continuing mixing culture broth equal to the cytoplasm, containing all the types of twenty common amino acid, if there is replication then the virus is life (it is not a infectious agent with the right environment to obtain nutrients).

The inner part of the cells have circulating flow (Goldstein-Woodhouse observation is equal to hydrothermal flow), and the Vaidya-Manapat-Chen-Xulvi-Hayden-Lehman experiment can be the test that the rna is able to self-replicating in a right culture broth.

If this is true, since the last ancestor must be the simplest living organism, and since one of the smallest virus have 359 nucleotides (potato spindle tuber virus), and if it is capable of self-replicating (I think that the more simple virus can be an algae virus; so that ebola virus can be a plant virus like anthrax bacterium for algae), then first virus can have a similar form.

If this is true, then exist a simple method to treat each viral infection: a simple culture broth (temperature, pression and nutrient concentrations constant) where the viruses after a while loses the characteristics to infecting cells (complex rna is not more necessary in a simple environment): these neutralized viruses can be injected in an organism to obtain an immune defense, this can be true for each viral infection (it is similar to Pasteur method, if this work).

Saluti

Domenico

Dear Sara,

I completely enjoyed your essay. It is a refreshing point of view onto an old question. I feel that you are into something by the way the question is frame at a higher level but more fundamental elements need to be added.

IN the whole skim of cosmic evolution it is not a coincidence that the life transition occurs at the mid scale of the universe. There is also the question that is not mentioned of the collective/cooperative character of life. So information is also collectively collected and exchanged. At all level of realities, relations among entities are importants. Life gradually defines the environment for life. Life implicitly embodies some of these relations (culture) in evolving new mechanisms to detect and act on them.

Great essay.

- Louis

Pentcho and whoever else that is trying to find cats where there are none,

I think you are missing the basic math. If someone is not yet ranked, for example because they just submitted their paper, and they get a single good mark from someone, it will jump to the top. Say a single member liked it and marked with 10, it will reach the very top. Then things don't get sorted out by any administrator, simply the paper starts converging to its final average over time.

You are right about that, anonymous. At that time I thought that votes were summed up, not averaged.

Pentcho Valev

What speculations-provoking essay! Perhaps it indicates the direction for the next essay contest. Of course, Sara Walker's essay does not answer the question which of our basic assumptions is wrong. In that it resembles the essay by George Ellis.

Certainly, there is a considerable gap between the largely stochastic approach to the half-life of postulated particles and the transfer of self-reproductive genes in biology. Fortunately I feel not forced by vanity to pretend having a bridging solution.

The only related intention of mine is to clarify that not just in biology but also in the praxis of computing causality in its original and sound meaning is still tacitly assumed.

Eckard

Interesting thesis. I can see why the Discovery Institute is jumping on this with glee. Here's yet another yawning gap into which the Abrahamaic God of the Gaps can be stuffed. There is undeniably something very weird about Quantum mechanics, and so far we've not gotten very much closer to a testable hypothesis along the lines of Einstein's underlying laws of reality beneath QM. I'm still holding out hope for an underlying layer of reality involving objective, identical for all observers laws analogous to how conservation of momentum explains the otherwise mysterious spooky connection of the momentum between two masses being blown apart by an explosion. The trajectory of the advance of human knowledge for the past 400 years or more has been to continually increase the distance between us and our concerns from the (now demonstrably non-existent) centre of the Universe. This article seems to be arguing for a move back toward the centre for consciousness -- to the delight of the reactionary ignorami of the ID movement.

Greetings. Though it is difficult to address much of your essay here, I will hit a few items in cursory manner here:

1. Living systems have a cybernetic organizational structure. Non living systems don't. That is a key.

2. If life evolves by chemical organizational emergence, then it must follow that the lowly Helium atom (from which everything in this universe evolved) has IN ITSELF all of the organizational potential (including the seeds of emergence) already present in it. True reductionism must account for this, not just the fig leaf of Darwinism.

3. The central dogma is wrong. Genes are just the "dumb building block" level at root of the cybernetic organism. Epigenetics uses genes as it will, much as a mechanic uses tools. But, epigenetics is driven/controlled by cellular response to environment. But that environment is controlled by the larger (organ) signals, etc. All cybernetics.

4. To attempt any real understanding of biology, one must find the highest cybernetic level and determine its properties. This will be found at the electo-dynamic level of the so-called morpho-genetic field (top down organizing principle).

5. At a metaphysical level, Swedenborg introduces the idea of correspondences as the next higher level above the M-GF. By that principle, "living" is a nearly arbitrary designation. Certainly, without the organizing field or correspondence, no meaningful division between "living" and "non-living" is possible or meaningful, because all of the "effects" flowing from physical structures will certainly appear to be mechanistic with an appearance at the deepest level of feedback (or regressive loop) "control layer" emergence - which is true, but loop control is from a higher level, not from "dumb level" reactance to stimuli.

6. I recommend investigation of Cybernetic control, Morpho-genetic fields and Swedenborgs elucidation of Correspondences. In them, you will likely find what you are looking for.