What is Life?

Why is there something at all?
What is life?
How did the sophisticated thinking-animals come out of simple non-living atoms?
Are we just self-preserving and reproducing biological robots or are there more to us?
Do we really exist?

When you discover the truth, it can shatter your sense of reality. You may feel like you have wasted your life on a false belief and lose your footing. It can be frightening, but also awe-inspiring. It can open your eyes to a new dimension of wonder and spirituality.

I remember the first time I experienced such a scary, identity-shattering, near-spiritual feeling as a kid when I realized the meaning of “up.”

Seriously!

“Up” seemed to be an obvious term with a fixed direction, and I always thought I knew exactly what it meant. When I stand on this huge, stable ground, a ground that constitutes everything I have seen, everywhere I have been, and most likely everywhere I will ever be, my feet point towards “down,” and my head points towards “up.” “Up” was where the celestial bodies and mysteries dwelled. But I did not grasp how deep those mysteries were until I understood the true meaning of “up.”

Only after I saw the near-spherical Earth and realized that there was no fixed “up” direction, that it was just the direction away from gravity, did I understand the true meaning of “up.”

The universe has no “up” direction.

“Down” is the direction to which things fall, and often break, because they are attracted by gravity. If gravity sucks, “up” is the direction of un-sucking. That probably makes no sense. But that’s not the scary part.

The discovery of the truth that we were just stuck on a small, vulnerable planet floating in vast unknown and uninhabitable space, was scary. There is just a thin veneer of atmosphere on the surface of this planet, and that is the only place we can survive. The universe is vast, and we are just a small part of it stuck in the “down” direction of some random rock.

Who would have thought that a simple word like “up” can change your perception of reality?

Suddenly, the comfort and safety I felt about our world, and life in general vanished. But that generated the inquisitiveness to learn more about the universe and our place in it. Why is there something at all? How did the complicated-thinking animals come out of non-living atoms? How is life even possible? And, more importantly, what is life?

THE BEGINNING

Picture created by NASA and modified by Wikimedia users

The most popular theory about the origin of our universe is the Big Bang Theory. According to this theory, our observable universe*1 began around 13.8 billion years ago as a small, hot, and dense point called a singularity. There is a good reason to believe in this theory based on real evidence like

The abundance of light elements in the universe that can only form under such conditions,
The cosmic microwave background (after glow light pattern) that’s a remnant of the Big Bang, and
The fact that all galaxies are moving away from each other (Hubble’s law) at a speed that is proportional to their distance. It means that they were once much closer.

The starting point of the Big Bang is a bit confusing. I mean, like, what was there before it? Was something simply created out of nothing like magic? Too bad we can’t tell, because our known physical laws break down at the singularity. It is possible that there was a Big Crunch of the older universe before the Big Bang of our universe, and this is an endless cyclic process. The only honest answer here is we don’t know.

It is possible that there is always a quantum fluctuation from which universes pop out.

This is not a weird theory because matter and antimatter have been created in the lab inside the quantum vacuum. They seem to pop in and out of existence out of nothing. However, the process does require energy, and a bit of gravity would always be there inside the vacuum. This is known as Schwinger Effect, according to which powerful electromagnetic wave can create matter. In the presence of electric field electron- positron pairs spontaneously form leading to decay of electric field.

The fields in a vacuum cannot be exactly zero because that would be too predictable. The universe don’t like it. Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle would not allow any field to have zero position and zero speed (rate of change) at the same time. So, in a vacuum, all fields are in a state of quantum fluctuations. It might seem weird… but what isn’t? The world is not as simple and predictable as it appears. That was another scary revelation for me. Uncertainty is at the heart of creation.

There is “real” nothing outside of space, and that does not matter because it’s nothing. But, inside space, nothing is not really nothing. The whole universe may be in a quantum probability domain where all matter and anti-matter exist in a way that the result is nothing. So, it is not impossible to think that nothing and everything are the same thing. Nothing makes sense. It does.

The form is emptiness, emptiness is the form

Emptiness is not separate from form, form is not separate from emptiness

Whatever is form is emptiness, whatever is emptiness is form

Heart Sutra- Prajñāpāramitā

Another reason the starting point of the Big Bang is confusing is that time and space were also created during the Big Bang. If there was no time before the Big Bang, we can’t even ask what was there before it. You already know the answer: real nothing. The same is true for space. The universe is not expanding into something after the bang; space itself is expanding. So, we can’t ask what’s beyond the universe.

In the beginning, according to the Big Bang Theory, a highly dense, hot, thermal heat bath of photons and a soup of nuclei (and later atoms), unsuitable for life, filled the entire universe. It was a state of horror and very high order, and we will soon come to know why that is important.

As the universe began to expand and cool, atoms started to form, and the fundamental forces came into existence one by one.

The rough sequence is as follows:

Big Bang > Quarks, gluons, electrons > protons, neutrons > H, He > other elements including C > solar systems.

The cosmic microwave background (CMB) is a strong evidence of the Big Bang.

Planck is a space observatory operated by the European Space Agency (ESA) that observes the Universe at wavelengths between 0.3 mm and 11.1 mm, covering the far-infrared, microwave, and high frequency radio domains.

The mission aims to study the CMB – the relic radiation left over from the Big Bang – across the whole sky with greater sensitivity and resolution than ever before.

The CMB is detected in all directions of the sky and appears to microwave telescopes as an almost uniform background. Planck’s observations have provided significant insights into the composition and evolution of the Universe, shedding light on the fundamental physics that governs the cosmos.

The photons in the early Universe were constantly interacting with free electrons, making it opaque like fog. The photons were unable to escape. It was the dark age of the universe.

After about 380,000 years since the Big Bang, the Universe had cooled to around 3000 Kelvin, and electrons combined with protons to form hydrogen atoms.

In the absence of free electrons, the photons were able to move unhindered through the Universe, making it transparent. Not like there were observers to see it.

Over billions of years, the Universe has expanded and cooled greatly, and the photons have been ‘redshifted’ to roughly 1 millimetre, creating a background glow that can be detected by far-infrared and radio telescopes.

There are roughly 400 photons in every cubic centimetre of space.

The hot and dense initial universe was in thermal and chemical equilibrium. Nothing is freely available in a state of equilibrium. Once the universe cooled down sufficiently and there was disequilibrium, free energy, the energy in a system that is available to do useful work, could be made available. The newly formed stars became the key source of free energy, without which life was impossible.

ENTROPY

As mentioned earlier, the starting point of the universe was one of very high order, and with time the universe moved towards disorder. This phenomenon gives rise to the Second Law of Thermodynamics.

To understand the Second Law of Thermodynamics, imagine a new deck of cards stacked in perfect order. The sequence is arranged so that the cards of each suit are in ascending order, from ace to king. The suits are also arranged in a specific order, with spades being the highest suit and hearts being the lowest suit. This sequence is known as the new deck order, or the casino order.

Entropy is often defined as a measure of the disorder of a system. A system with a high entropy is more disordered than a system with a low entropy.

A better way to define entropy is to find out the number of possible configurations one can be at. There is only one way to stack a card to form a casino order. This is a state of lowest entropy, like in the beginning of the universe.

Every time you shuffle the deck of cards, the sequence gets disordered. After shuffling randomly multiple times, you will likely find that the number of times that a red card is followed by a black card is approximately equal to the number of times that a black card is followed by a red card. This is because the deck is random after it has been shuffled, and it is reaching a point of equilibrium, that is, every card is evenly distributed. Shuffling increases the entropy of the cards. As you keep shuffling the cards, nothing prevents the cards from randomly turning back to casino order, but the probability of that happening is very low. While not impossible, it’s improbable.

By the same logic, un-breaking an egg is statistically possible. An egg is in a state of low entropy. The shape and form are predictable, and hence it has an identity. We not only know from its shape that it is an egg, but experts can tell you which species the egg belongs to. Once the egg is broken, after it falls in the “down” direction, it is in a state of higher entropy because there are multiple arrangements in which one can break the egg. If you put the whole egg inside a mixer and mix it homogeneously, it will have a very high entropy. You cannot identify what kind of egg it was anymore. No physics law prevents the broken egg from randomly becoming an unbroken egg of high order, but the probability of that happening is very low. While not impossible, it’s improbable.

Once we understand this concept, we realize that it is improbable for the whole universe to go back to a previous configuration, because that is just one fixed configuration compared to infinite ways it can move to a new configuration. That is why time does not move backwards. Entropy gives the universe the arrow of time. It is the same reason heat cannot flow spontaneously from a colder to a hotter body.

So, now we have a fixed law: the state of entropy of the entire universe, as an isolated system, will always increase over time.

Next time you see dust gathering on your table, the coffee getting cold, or yourself having to drag your body to the office, blame entropy.

LIFE

https://www.pablocarlosbudassi.com/2021/02/nature-timespiral.html

So far, we have discussed one good and one bad news. The good news is that we have free energy for life to form. The bad news is that entropy will not allow life to exist forever. Now, let’s move on to the beginning of life, around 4 billion years ago, to see how a compromise between the two is made.

The Big Bang Theory can explain how we got our current universe from the Big Bang, it cannot explain the beginning of the universe. Similarly, evolution can help us explain how complex animals like us evolved from simple unicellular organisms, but we have no idea how living things came out of non-living things by the process of abiogenesis. Did it happen by random chance? Or was it an inevitable property of a deterministic universe? If everything is guided by deterministic laws of physics, why should the origin of life be an exception?

The question of why we exist seems profound until we define the universe as everything that exists, or even more boldly, as everything possible that exists, including all multiverses. In such a universe, we would exist to ponder about our existence only in the version fine-tuned for us to exist. We wouldn’t even know about other versions since we don’t even exist there. That makes the profound question redundant.

Human perception is limited, and our thoughts are confined to the world we experience. As a result, we cannot comprehend multiverse or infinite possibilities, much like how our brains cannot comprehend more than three dimensions. We only perceive things that are necessary for our survival, and our brains simplify reality to make it easier to understand. The coastline paradox is one example of this simplification.

Although we might assume that only intelligence can create a great novel, the infinite monkey theorem suggests that randomly hitting typewriter keys for an infinite amount of time without bias can produce the complete works of Shakespeare. In a complex world not limited by human imagination, everything that seems like design can exist without a designer.

So, instead, we ask how life originated, and the answer isn’t pretty.

Think of dark, smelly, alkaline, burning hot and forever wet deep-sea hydrothermal vents, or hot springs. That’s the very definition of hell, and it seems like that’s where life began (though there are multiple other hypotheses).

This hellish environment was probably ideal for abiogenesis and laboratory experiments have shown that some of the early stages of this process can be reproduced. These are early stages of experiments that show promise, but we are still far from unravelling the mysteries of the origin of life. So, we end up with multiple theories, and scientists don’t have enough data to come to one agreement.

Some studies suggest that RNA, made of nucleotides, came first. With time DNA was formed, which mixed with RNA to create life. Single-stranded RNA is much more flexible than DNA, having a double-stranded helix. It is also simpler and easier to form. Not only RNA can copy itself like DNA, but it can also fold up to act as an enzyme. Other studied suggests that amino acids / proteins came first. Proteins, the building blocks of life, carry out essential functions for life to survive, while RNA and DNA help in replication. Both are essential for life.

https://www.sciencealert.com/scientists-have-designed-their-own-evolving-rna-soup-for-the-first-time

Recently the Law of Increasing Functional Information (LIFI) have been proposed, that can explain the formation of complex things like RNA and DNA from simpler building blocks. When there are different things, like atoms, molecules, nucleotides, amino acids etc., they will try to form all possible combinations randomly, given enough time. According to LIFI, the configurations would be selected for one or more functions. Which means, nature would prefer some configurations over others. The ones not selected would go extinct. This is not just applicable to Darwinian evolution, but to everything that exists.

The Emergence of Life (2019) Camprubi et al.

According to this new study, there are three functions that occur in nature which governs which configuration survives.

The first is stability. The stable configurations, like the ones that minimize free energy and maximise entropy, would survive.

Secondly, systems that can maintain a flow of energy are more likely to persist over time. This is because energy is needed to power all of the processes that keep a system alive and functioning.

The third is novelty. Evolving systems tend to explore new configurations that sometimes lead to startling new behaviours or characteristics. This is because new configurations can give systems new advantages in their environment. From life to minerals, things tend to evolve for novelty. These emergent characteristics can make the new configuration more fit to survive.

Nature is constrained by the laws of physics, which limit the possible ways that matter and energy can interact. Within these constraints, however, the disorder can be channelled into patterns with some common underlying theme. This is because the laws of physics often favour certain patterns over others.

Patterns and beautiful designs does not need an intelligent designer, it is innate to nature. Some things form just because they are the most efficient designs, like the beautiful sedimentary structures created by deposition of sediments carried by wind or water.

For example, the law of gravity causes matter to clump together, forming planets, stars, and galaxies. They tend to be spheroidal not because someone designed it, but because it’s efficient. The laws of thermodynamics favour patterns that maximize entropy. However, the laws of thermodynamics also allow for the formation of ordered structures, such as snowflakes and living organisms.

The underlying theme of many patterns in nature is efficiency. For example, the honeycomb structure of a beehive is the most efficient way to pack a hexagonal grid of cells. The pattern is not intelligent design, just innate design because of its efficiency. Inefficient designs went extinct. Same is true for the spiral pattern of a nautilus shell. It is the most efficient way to grow a shell that becomes larger without changing its shape. Efficiency creates novelty without a blueprint.

The universe is in a continuously evolving process that can create complex things like RNA, DNA (nucleic acids) and amino acids. Which in turn can form proteins and living things. Order can evolve from chaos.

Even if the linear strands of amino acids are formed, they still need to fold into a very specific 3-D shape. The time it would take to form randomly would be more than the time life has existed on Earth.

So, maybe it was not a random process but guided by novelty.

It is possible that life or near-living things arose multiple times, but only one origin survived. This is because all known life forms descend from a single last universal common ancestor (LUCA). If there were other ancestors, they would have left no descendants.

There is strong evidence to support the existence of LUCA. For example, all life on Earth uses the same genetic code, nucleotide bases Adenine, Thymine, Guanine and Cytosine (A, T, G and C). This means that the same sequence of nucleotides in DNA corresponds to the same amino acid in proteins.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/RNA_world#/media/File%3ADifference_DNA_RNA-EN.svg

What makes life apparently unlikely is that it is a highly ordered chemical system that self-sustains the order. Unlike inanimate things, living things have this unique “urge”, in the absence of a better word, to create order, and that is what makes life possible. Life is a matter with the intent to fight against entropy. Without the intent it would be devoured by chaos.

When life first formed, it created a boundary between itself and the surrounding environment. This boundary helped isolate the order within its own system.

This boundary is called a membrane and is made of lipids. What makes lipids unique is that they have a hydrophilic (water-loving) head and a hydrophobic water-repelling) tail.

This unique structure of lipids is important for creating local order faster than any random process. The hydrophilic heads of the lipids are attracted to water, while the hydrophobic tails are repelled by water. This property would try to arrange the water molecules into a specific order, much to the dislike of entropy.

We know we cannot defy the second law of thermodynamics, so what the water does instead is it causes the lipids to form a bilayer, with the hydrophilic heads facing the water on both sides and the hydrophobic tails facing each other in the middle. This allows local order in the lipids, but overall, the water can continue to please entropy. Local order was, in fact, necessary for entropy to continue increasing. In other words, lipids hacked entropy to create order.

The lipid bilayer makes a barrier that prevents water and other polar molecules from freely entering and leaving the cell. This is important for maintaining the cell’s homeostasis, or internal balance.

Such hydrophobic and hydrophilic properties of the protein allowed the specific folded configuration of the amino acids to form faster than a random process by eliminating a large number of useless configurations that would have defied the second law of thermodynamics.

Living things, unlike non-living things, are open systems. So, the membrane allows life to exchange free energy and matter with the surrounding environment, which is necessary for life to survive. That’s a neat trick life plays to not defy the second law of thermodynamics.

Once that basic system is there, adding complexity is not an issue. By nature, things get more complex with time because of the Ratchet Effect. It is easy to add complications, but very difficult to reverse back to simplicity.

The increase of complexity does not go against the 2nd law of thermodynamics because complexity and entropy are two different things. The casino deck and the completely shuffled deck are both simple systems. The state in between is the most complex.

It seems counterintuitive, but entropy itself can help create complex structures, as discovered by Glotzer and her group in 2009.

Entropy always increases monotonically in a closed system, but complexity can increases at first and then decreases as equilibrium is approached. So, as long as we are far from equilibrium, we can create more complex organisms by evolution. But ultimately, entropy would be the death of all life and all order, once the universe equilibrates.

While we have been speaking about life, we haven’t defined it yet. One of the reasons is that even scientists cannot agree on how to define it. We seem to intuitively identify what’s living and what’s not. Yet, when we try to come up with a consistent definition, we have no clue what life is. Like, are viruses a living thing?

One way of explaining life is in terms of information. Life is a complex system that is based on the processing and transmission of information. For example, the DNA of a living organism contains information that is used to create the proteins that make up the organism’s cells. DNA can be thought of as a digital information storage device that contains the code that tells the organism how to grow, develop, and reproduce. Metabolism is controlled by information encoded in DNA and RNA, and reproduction involves the transmission of genetic information from parents to offspring. Living things store, copy and process information to stay alive.

The information is also a code that guides inanimate matter to the right places to form the organism, and then makes them behave in a way that the low entropy system is maintained within the boundary that it identifies as self. To stay alive, organisms must maintain this low entropy state by homeostasis.

Three key things about life are thus: boundary/containment, information/genome, and metabolism/ homeostasis.

Homeostasis creates a relatively stable internal environment despite changes in the external environment. For example, the body maintains a constant blood sugar level by releasing hormones that either increase or decrease blood sugar at levels that allow the organism to live. The same is true for blood pressure and pulse rate. So, there is a most “likely state” (a normal range of vital functions necessary for the organism to survive) that the living things know they have to be in, because it is the most efficient outcome, just like the near perfect shape of honeycomb.

The body of living organisms is often called “wetware”, in contrast to “hardware” and “software.” In the context of living organisms, wetware refers to the biological molecules that make up the organism and the interactions between those molecules. Wetware is responsible for all the processes that are essential for life, including metabolism, reproduction, and growth.

One of the key features of wetware is that it is self-organizing. This means that wetware systems can spontaneously form complex orders and maintain their likely state without any external input. This is in contrast to hardware and software systems, which require external input to create and maintain order.

Another key feature of wetware is that it is adaptive. It can change and evolve over time in response to its environment, unlike hardware and software systems, which are relatively fixed in their design. So, the likely state can be updated as per environmental needs.

To maintain homeostasis, organisms must constantly exchange energy and matter with their surroundings. It is for this reason that we need to move, eat, and drag our bodies to the office. All these activities release heat and waste products, which in turn increase the overall disorder of the universe. Entropy is happy, and so is our wetware.

Unfortunately, this is not a fight that we can win forever. Death is entropy having the last laugh. Our body slowly disintegrates, and we equilibrate with the soil and attain a state of high entropy like the egg in the mixie. We lose our temporary identity. But information carries on by using a loophole in entropy. The information makes a copy before dying. As long as living things reproduce, information is copied, and the battle is on.

Even though the body dies, life continues. That’s why Dawkins thinks that a chicken is an egg’s way of making another egg. From an evolutionary perspective, the individual organism is not as important as the species. The individual organism is simply a vessel for transporting genes. According to this way of thinking, the purpose of the individual organism is to reproduce and pass on its genes to the next generation.

CONSCIOUSNESS

Once we get an idea about what life might mean, the question that naturally comes is, are we just self-preserving and reproducing biological robots or are there more to us? How does this whole physical process help us feel the redness of red? Why are we conscious? What does it mean to be myself? Do I even exist?

If we are indeed robots whose behaviour is guided by physical laws, we would be stuck in a meaningless, purposeless, nihilistic universe with no free will to control our fate, or the fate of the world. That would be a very depressing world. But then, depression itself would be just another deterministic physical process. This view is know as Casual Determinism, where we are like a dust in the wind. It moves and seems like it’s alive and dancing, yet it has no control over its fate.

We don’t know who we are, but I am pretty sure that if and once we find out, it will be entirely different from what we think we are.

We have this idea of self that we feel as a definite and distinct entity, and often it is considered separate from the body. It is possible that this feeling of self is a gift of evolution. Individuals who denied self, might have been prone to cognitive dissonance and depression and went extinct. The human population that had a stronger sense of self were better survivors. We probably evolved to be hardwired (or wetwired) to believe in self and soul.

Before life is formed, everything must have been governed by the laws of physics. The universe would have been deterministic. However, the adaptability and intent of life seem to go against classical laws of physics. That begs the question, if everything is governed by deterministic law, do we really have free will? Or is there a different unknown force at work?

The question that often comes to my mind is, if the starting point of some other universe was the same, would there inevitably be another Subhrashis typing these very words?

Laplace believed that if we knew the position and velocity of all particles in the universe, we would be able to precisely predict the future. According to this view, everything is predetermined because for every effect there is a specific cause. If the initial conditions are same, you and I will always exist. And if it is a cyclic universe that always starts from same conditions, we will be living the same life multiple times. I have written this before, and you have read it before. We are stuck in an infinite loop.

Measuring all the position and velocity is of course not possible because of the complexities of nature, Heisenberg’s Uncertainty principle and the butterfly effect. Minute changes in the initial conditions and tiny round-off errors can lead to an entirely different future. Experiments have confirmed that there is no way to know both the position and velocity of any particle and thus Laplace’s classical view of determinism was wrong. That’s why Hawkins wrote, “All the evidence points to [god] being an inveterate gambler, who throws the dice on every possible occasion.”

The more physicists learned about this strange world of reality they realized that the uncertainty is not just a measurement problem, but the particles don’t, probably can’t, have a definite position and speed. That’s why vacuum is not really vacuum because zero is also definite. Particles have to be represented by a wave function instead. Since the wave function is predictable, there is a sort of determinism, but not the way Laplace thought. It is a determinism that lacks precision and prediction power.

Intuitively, deterministic world does not feel real. We do feel, think, and make decisions, good or bad. At every stage of life, we seem to have more than one option to choose from. Whether our choices are always influenced by our genes, culture and past experiences is a different debate of free will. But at least we seem to have a degree of freedom that is more than one, because we often repent the decisions we have taken. We feel we could have done it differently.

If quantum tunnelling can cause random mutations that might be predicted with accuracy statistically in a group, but not at individual level, there would be enough reason to not believe in determinism, even though there may be no freewill for individuals.

We probably have more degrees of freedom than non-living things, and even simpler life forms. In hindsight, we see the options, even though we might not always know what made us choose a specific option. Our ability to make those decisions makes us intelligent.

Fyodor Dostoyevsky writes in Crime and Punishment, that it takes something more than intelligence to act intelligently. What is that ‘more’ that makes us feel we are more than just biological robots? In other words, what makes us more than the material things that make us? In a deterministic universe governed by laws of physics, how would life have free will?

One good explanation of our identity and conscience is the philosophy of Sunyata. Sunyata, or emptiness, is a central concept in Mahayana Buddhism. It is the idea that all phenomena are empty of inherent existence, or svabhava. Unlike nihilism, it does not claim that nothing exists. Sunyata does not deny the existence of phenomena. It simply teaches that phenomena are empty of inherent existence.

All phenomena, including consciousness and the idea of self, are emergent properties from the interaction between different things. While there may be no permanent and unchanging self, there is no denying the phenomenon of self itself. Thanks to advanced MRI imaging of the brain, we can now see the area of the brain that gets activated when we have self-related thoughts.

My brain lights up when I think of myself, therefore I am.

The part of the brain that lights up during internally directed activities, such as daydreaming, self-reflection, and contemplating the future is known as Default Mode Network (DMN). DNM includes the Medial prefrontal cortex, Posterior cingulate cortex, Angular gyrus, Precuneus, Hippocampus, and Temporoparietal junction. It is thought to be involved in constructing and maintaining a sense of self, as well as in processing autobiographical memory and simulating future events.

Taking psychedelics reduces activity in DMN, dissolving the sense of self, and leading to an ecstatic sense of interconnection with the universe. However, the fact that the sense of self can reappear underscores its existence. This suggests that the sense of self is not fixed and unchanging, but rather a fluid and dynamic process that is constantly evolving, just like the concept of Sunyata.

There is a definite existence of self, and it seems like it is emerging from the interaction of material neurons but is still more than just the sum of the neurons.

EMERGENCE

One might wonder how something as complex as consciousness and intelligence can emerge from simple matter. But emergent properties are more common than we think. A good example is water, which has the property of extinguishing fire, even though its components, hydrogen and oxygen, are flammable and supports combustion respectively. Emergent properties arise from the interaction of simpler parts, not from the properties of the parts themselves. The whole is more than the sum of parts. Dostoyevsky was probably right, even though he did not mean it that way.

Such emergent properties are seen at all scales, from the microscopic to the macroscopic.

Many animals, such as ants, display a mechanism of coordination called stigmergy. Stigmergy is an indirect communication method that allows groups of simple beings to achieve complex results. For example, ants use stigmergy to find the shortest path between their nest and a food source.

An individual ant would be clueless about direction. But a group of ants display swarm intelligence, thanks to their pheromone trails. When an ant moves, it leaves behind a trace of pheromones for other ants to follow. Luckily for the ants, the pheromones evaporate after some time without leaving a trace. Now if you leave some random ants to move from point A to point B, the ants traveling the longer distance would have thinner pheromone trails and ones travelling shorter distances would have stronger or thicker pheromone trails. So, there is more probability of new ants finding the stronger, but shorter, path. The more ants travel the shorter path, the stronger the pheromones in that path become. Given enough time, the pheromones of a longer path would fade away and only the shortest path would be left behind, leading all the ants to the food source. Individual ants are not aware of the overall plan, but their collective actions lead to an intelligent outcome. This shows that intelligence can emerge from the interaction of simple beings, without any central coordination or exterior control. In the same way, simple ants have created complex agricultural civilizations long before humans.

Ants are not the only ones to display such intelligent group behaviour. We know that at least the swarm of bees, flocks of birds, termites and many other animals show this fascinating phenomenon of emergence. Research shows that human civilization, the human brain, and life itself are probably such emergent phenomena.

Atoms come together to form proteins, which display emergent behaviour that is different from the atoms. Same way, emergent properties of cells come from the interaction of much simpler proteins. The cells interact to form tissues, and tissues form organs, organs form human beings, and humans form civilization.

At the basic level life is made of cells where hundreds of chemical reaction are going on. Individually, none of the reactions can be called alive, however, all reactions collectively result in an emergent property that we call life.

Like a fractal, emergence can be seen at all scales. There are different levels of hierarchy of emergence that cumulatively create conscience from something as simple as atoms. The theory of emergence still has a long way to go to help us understand the hard problem of consciousness, but it is a good start.

A 2016 study by researchers from France and Canada studies how consciousness is related to entropy. Their results showed that our brain displays higher entropy, based on the number of possible configurations of interaction between brain networks, when we are conscious and alert. They conclude that consciousness could be an emergent property of our brain trying to maximise entropy, which in this case is information exchange. This allows the brain to better model the external environment, helping it survive. In a way, consciousness is life using entropy to fight entropy.

Once consciousness and intelligence emerge in an animal it can become more complex through the ratchet effect and more sophisticated as explained by LIFI. The idea of self is a novelty that can emerge because it helps the organism survive. The idea of self is efficient.

Self-recognition arises as a result of the brain’s attempts to minimize the amount of free energy (or ‘surprise’) in sensory systems to be in states where the environment is highly predictable, the “likely states” described earlier.

Life is information that knows the likely state it needs to be in for the information to survive, in other words, for the organism to stay alive. The external environment determines the organism’s survival. To maintain that it gathers information from surroundings and creates an external model that can predict the future internal states.

Our model of the external world is not perfect, but just useful enough to survive. The redness of red is not real, but if that helps an organism find a ripe fruit, it is a useful model that helps the organism survive. Life responds to the external model in a way to ensures that the likely states of the organism are maintained in the new model of its external environment. If the model predicts food you can eat it, but if it predicts a tiger you better run.