What is Life?

Here's a mind-expanding idea for your consideration: “Life is that which organizes.”

How can you tell if something is alive or not? Generally speaking, you might do things to provoke reaction, and if it doesn't react, call it dead -- or non-living if it never seemed to react in the first place. But, what is it that motivates reaction? It seems to me that the motivation is about creating or retaining organization. If something feels threatened; in other words, if it senses danger to the form it is organizing, it does what it can do to avoid or counteract the threat.

But what about things that react slowly? Does a tree react noticeably when you chop it down? How about a carrot? Those things cannot move, or cannot move quickly. Plants will react -- albeit slowly -- to shifts in light, or to the introduction of poisons and such things, but the best they can generally do is to grow toward or away from the stimulus, and that happens at a rate that takes hours or days to notice. In any case, once again, they do their best to preserve the molecular structures they have organized.

It seems to me that the most reliable way to tell whether something is alive or not is to kill it. What happens then is that it's organized structure dis-organizes.  Plants, for instance, turn brown and/or start rotting. Animals do the same, they just do it faster.

Living things also often organize their environments. This is easiest to see in people, where we build houses or towns, and make gardens and such, but plants and other animals do the same thing. They are just more limited in their ability to manipulate (organize) things quickly. Often, their only real chance to organize their environments is to choose where to grow in the first place. Many plants and animals seem to have developed rather remarkable strategies for transporting their progeny to new and suitable environments. In this, they seem to exhibit a level of unselfishness: the strategy is aimed at future generations, and takes no heed for preserving the parent generation.

It's easy to say these things are the result of random chance. Parent trees seem to have little control over where their seeds get blown by the wind, or carried by birds, for example. There are many examples that lend credence to the “chance” hypothesis. (Note that many plants do develop relationships with bugs and other animals when spreading seeds.  Some may have a sense of timing related to weather and such.)  Still, the thing that matters is that there is an effort -- in all cases -- to organize. Trees organize molecules into trees; people organize molecules into people (and houses and such).

What about rocks? Diamonds are an organization of carbon atoms, aren't they? Is a diamond alive? Is coal, which is another organization of carbon atoms, a 'failed” diamond -- a diamond that didn't find the best environment in which to “grow?” Perhaps that's taking things a little too far. Yet, what about a planet? Could it be that the planet is what organizes both diamonds and coal? Does it organize carbon and other elements into bacteria or algae, too? Maybe or maybe not, but I ask again, what exactly is life, and how do you tell when something is “dead?”

So far as I can see, there is nothing in physics that predicts organization. There are all kinds of arguments that permit it, but there are no codifiable laws that predict it. As far as I can tell, the laws of physics predict only entropy, and entropy predicts dis-organization; random scattering of molecules and energy into a “smooth” soup of sorts. Left to itself, everything in the universe is predicted to eventually dis-integrate.

I propose that wherever we see organization, there is -- or recently was -- life.

Certainly, chance (or luck?) plays an important part in the organization process. All stars do not organize solar systems, and all planets do not organize amoebae or coal, or polar bears, for that matter. Question: is the amoeba a by-product of organizing for coal, or is coal a by-product of organizing for amoebae? I leave it to you to ponder that one. The point I want to make here is that organization is a “by-product” of life.

A by-product of my “Life-is-that-which-organizes” hypothesis is that I find it useful to anthropomorphize -- to personify -- things that most people consider as non-living. I think of Earth as a living entity, the organizing principle or force behind the planetary structure we see. I tend to call Her “Grandmother Earth,” and I ponder Her intents and motives when acting in my everyday life. I think of Her working for 4.5 billion years to create the basic environment in which I live, and which nourishes my body and brings enjoyment to my life, and I am put into a state of wonder and awe. I feel gratitude, too.

I do the same thing with “Grandfather Sun” and ultimately with the whole universe (aka “Great Spirit”). It's not the atoms and molecules I think are alive, but I think there's an organizing principle at work in all of it, and I find it useful to have a place for myself in that thought-framework, and to try to cooperate with it rather than subjugate it or take it “for granted.” I think of this organizing principle -- this life force -- Nature -- as sacred, and worthy of respect. And I think of myself as sacred too. I not only feel reverence for other life forms, I feel it from them as well.

Thinking and speaking as I do, gives me an unusual view of things. Recalling the influence language has according to General Semantics (  see post here ), this gives me a way to create a useful world-view; a pretty “map,” if you prefer.

And I do find it useful. I “go with the flow” more easily than I once did, and I think I get important things done more easily as a result. I certainly have less stress doing them. I also find that when I meet resistance to doing something, it frequently turns out that it was a bad idea or that there was an easier way to get it done. I offer my experience to you for consideration.

Is it necessarily the absolute truth of how things really are? I don't know. I am told, especially by scientists and atheists, that it isn't necessary to have an organizing principle; that it could all be done with random chance. I respond by saying that what isn't necessary is that we beat each other's brains out in competition to grab all the resources we can in complete disregard for the sanctity of life.  What isn't necessary is war; war with other people or war with Nature. What isn't necessary is to advocate the pointlessness of life and the irresponsibility of attributing it to chance. What I do know is that my hypothesis, and the way I use it, makes for a more beautiful and more wondrous world-map.

YMMV.