The Fiction of Biology
Martine Rothblatt
2012-01-31 00:00:00
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Life is such an important concept – perhaps the most important concept – that it should be defined based on why life is important, not based on the lowest common denominator between humans and bacteria. 

Because biology defines itself as the study of life, it obligates itself to define life. Yet, biologists frankly concede that they cannot consistently define life, and that, as they define it, life blurs into non-life. For example, biologists generally define life as something that is well-organized, seeks nutrients from its environment, adapts to change and replicates.

However, these same characteristics apply even to stars – they are organized into distinct shells, they gravitationally attract hydrogen and helium atoms from interstellar space, they alter their structure under gravitational influence and they reproduce via nova and supernova explosions, which seed interstellar space with thermo-nuked atoms. Since biologists do not want to study stars (and similar non-squishy examples abound), they attempt to more strictly define life as something organized upon cellular organic chemistry. Both their general (any self-replicating, well-organized, and interactive thing) and their specific (any self-replicating, well-organized, interactive cellular organic chemistry) definitions miss the mark because both fail to recognize the salient feature of life – its purpose, as evidenced by what it uniquely does.

Life is important because it is the only way to make reality more pleasurable, and less painful, than it otherwise would be. Life accomplishes this by imposing order upon reality. It imposes order upon reality by processing, sharing and extending information, since information is a necessary, and sufficient, basis for development. Information is, in and of itself, a reduction of uncertainty, disorder and chaos. Therefore information is, in and of itself, a tool for imposing order upon reality. Information enables greater pleasure, fairness and justice than offered by a lifeless universe.

Evolution has created beings with an ever greater ability to impose order on the world. One could say that the purpose of life was to evolve, but that would be like saying the purpose of arithmetic was to add. We evolve so that we can achieve ever greater ratios of pleasure-to-pain in the world; ordering reality is the best way to do this (beats random chaos!). The evolution of sensory, manipulative, mobility and cognitive systems are the successful outcomes of an age-old process of trial-and-error to find the best tools for ordering reality. Just as the purpose of arithmetic is to appreciate an abstract reality, and the ordering of numbers via addition is a super tool in that regard, the purpose of life is to enjoy total reality, and the ordering of phenomena via evolution is a super tool in that regard.



The Purpose and Definition of Life



The 17th century philosopher from Holland, Baruch Spinoza – considered by many to be Jesus-like in his humility – discerned that what makes life important is also its very purpose. Spinoza observed that “God can ask nothing of man which is contrary to nature,” and then further observed that every creature in nature is primarily motivated to seek pleasure (e.g., eat) and avoid pain (e.g., not be eaten) [7]. Consequently, discovered Spinoza, the purpose of life is to seek pleasure and to avoid pain. 


Nowadays we often associate the word “pleasure” with hedonistic pursuits, but Spinoza explained how true pleasure requires new achievement. In other words, doing the same old thing is not increasing pleasure, and will eventually become the pain of boredom. Achievement of pleasure means developing one’s capabilities (including, but not limited to, sensual and epicurean pursuits) and taking pride in one’s contribution toward making the world a better place. In the parlance of physics, pleasure would be called “positive delta” phenomena, meaning it was the increase in beneficent achievement, not the preexisting level of such achievement that really constitutes pleasure.

In modern English, the term “satisfaction” (or perhaps the psychological term “self-actualization”) is closest to the quest for “blessedness” that Spinoza deduced to be the purose of life. To be satisfied, self-actualized, or posses blessedness, one should make ever more contributions to the order of the universe. Yiddish has a good word for Spinoza’s conceptualization of the purpose of life – produce “nachas.” Roughly translated, producing “nachas” means giving a kind of pleasure that arises from someone improving themselves, others, or the world in general. This is what Spinoza would say is the purpose of life, because this kind of order-building is what the universe is all about.

The restless and curious mind will ask “why is the purpose of life to increase the ratio of pleasure-to-pain?” The inquisitor may fairly comment that “I can see that this does, in fact, occur, but why does it occur? If this is the intent of the universe, why does the second law of thermodynamics that of ever increasing disorder in the universe, point in the opposite direction?”

The answer to the first question is that the universe is designed so that increasing the ratio of pleasure-to-pain is a self-fulfilling prophecy. Things that feel good (meaning generate true satisfaction), get done more, and things that feel bad (including boredom), get done less. Consequently, the purpose of life is to feel good (i.e., pursue satisfaction). There are only two other ways the universe could have logically been designed: (1) painful things could feel good, in which case those phenomena would quickly disappear from reality in self-immolator activities, such as suicide, or (2) whether something feels good or bad at any point in time could be a random occurrence – a reality of pure chaos no matter what.

By choosing the seek-pleasure, avoid-pain approach, the universal design selected for rationality and success. Indeed, from an evolutionary standpoint, the seek-pleasure, avoid-pain approach may have simply edged out alternative design principles that worked less effectively at propagating themselves. In short, the purpose of life is to increase pleasure and to decrease pain because that principle works best at propagating itself.

Why the universe would be designed to favor order on the one hand (evolution), and constantly drift toward disorder on other hand (thermodynamics)? Every good teacher and trainer knows that the best progress requires continual challenge, and hence to grow beautiful order one needs the ferment of disorder. Or, in the words of the great philosopher Heraclitus, living some 2600 years ago in Greece, “the mixture that is not shaken, decomposes.” We can place our bets on what will happen first: intelligent (re)ordering of the universe, atom-by-atom, to escape the fate of thermodynamic entropy via a more subtle comprehension of physics, or the loss of all matter, and energy to randomness, empty space and endless time.

Given that we already understand the game plan, and still have at least nine-tenths of this universe’s life ahead of us, the smarter bet seems to be that intelligence will manipulate physics to save the universe, and thus escape its own extinction. For example, all the forces of disorder on the earth have not stopped the planet from becoming an ever more ordered place via our ever better understanding of physical sciences such as materials engineering. Dams don’t change the laws of hydrology, but they manipulate them to escape the brute force of their uncontrolled application. On a vastly grander scale, intelligence can do the same thing with the laws of physics. Yes, our little earth in our little time is but a small piece of the puzzle. But if our accomplishments here are a portent of things to come, intelligence will ride thermodynamics, not vice versa.



It is said that ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny. This means that a developing embryo (ontogeny) reveals, stage by stage, the evolutionary history of that being (phylogeny). But it is also true that the evolutionary history of a being enables one to predict its future development. Consequently, it is also true that phylogeny recapitulates ontogeny.

Now, think of the future development of the universe as out to-be ontogeny, or “destiny,” and the historical development of order on earth as our phylogeny, or “reality.” We then may say that phylogeny prefigures ontogeny, or more simply, that reality prefigures destiny. In other words, what we see a little of we will eventually see a lot of. The cosmic fruits of tomorrow are in the earth seeds of today.

Life accomplishes its purpose by creating order out of disorder, and forging fairness out of random chaos. Of course life often fails to make the world a better place, and often makes it a worse place. Nevertheless, reality would be much worse if all were left to the mindless fluctuations of the environment. Without life, there would be no pleasure in the universe. Of course, there would also be no pain, but the course of evolution has been to increase the ratio of pleasure to pain in the world. This is the universal purpose that was discovered by Spinoza.

When those very first amino acids felt complete, electrically, from a particular configuration (but not from other configurations), pleasure entered our corner of the universe. A world with hellish environmental conditions, but some electrically satisfied amino acid chains, was a more pleasurable world than one in which just hellish conditions prevailed. And pleasure continued to mount exponentially as the amino acid chains replicated themselves many times over, and satisfied themselves with ever more complex biochemical structures.

 Life is in many ways an “n steps forward, n-1 steps back” process (pessimists assign n a large number, like 100, while optimists assign n a smaller number, like 2), but that is still a process that gradually forges more and more order out of disorder; that creates more fairness and less injustice [8].

Even though most living things have been wiped out repeatedly throughout the earth’s history - at least every hundred million years or so - there are more living things in existence today than ever before. N steps forward, n-1 steps backward. And, amazingly enough, there is now technology at hand, born of information-induced order, that could save the earth from the species-devastating effects of the random earth-crossing asteroids of the past (space-searching radar systems, ultra-fast information processing capability, nuclear missiles).

 Cellular organisms have done a fantastic job of remaking the environment into a more livable world. But it is not the cellular structure of the organisms that make them alive; it is their ability to make the world a better place. Cellular structure proved to be an excellent tool for safeguarding valuable information, coded in DNA, as to how to build increasingly capable organisms – organisms that could make increasingly more order out of a largely, but not entirely, disordered universe. But, a priori, we cannot say that such structures are the only way to create an entity that makes the world a better place.

Consequently, organic cellular chemistry is biology, and biology can become life through the force of evolution and natural selection. But life is not necessarily biology, because biology is not the only way to create (and does not necessarily create) a more ordered, fairer, more just universe. There is, for example, circuitry, as one finds in chip-based computers and machines.

Any non-biased, i.e., non-cellcentric, definition of life will include many entities that biologists do not currently consider to be alive. Logically, this does not mean that such entities are inanimate (they may or may not be). It only means that such entities lack organic cellular characteristics. The reason for this is that biologists require an entity to have an organic cellular structure in order to be considered ‘alive.’

Yet, there is no reason to suppose that having a organic cellular structure is a necessary (although not sufficient) condition for being alive. 

Consider, for example, biology’s dogma that living things (i) are organized, (ii) take materials and energy from the environment, (iii) respond to stimuli, (iv) reproduce, (v) develop, and (vi) adapt to the environment. These conditions are certainly satisfied by bacteria, plants and mammals. But are they necessary conditions for an entity that serves the purpose of life, to make the universe a more ordered, less random, place? Is it necessary, for example, for each member of a species to reproduce; indeed, most members of many species do not.



On the other hand, as noted earlier, the criteria are so general that they can be satisfied even by stars in space, unless one starts getting cell-centric in the definition of “organized.” 

Now, it is possible to have a definition of life that is more elegant, more precise and more useful.

Here it is: life is an entity that autonomously processes, cooperatively shares and transcendentally extends information. These criteria may be formalized as saying that an entity is alive if it demonstrates (i) Autonomy, (ii) Coopetency, and (iii) Transcendence (“ACT”). In shorthand, it can be said that to be alive, something must satisfy the ACT criteria. Rephrased in common language, logically structured, life is something that (i) processes its own information (which means Autonomy), (ii) shares its information consensually (which means Coopetency and requires Autonomy), and (iii) operates beyond its information to achieve the purpose of life (which means Transcendence and requires Coopetency).



The new word “coopetency” is used instead of “cooperativeness” because the new word encompasses cooperation via competition as well as via teamwork [9]. Lifeforms share information through both teamwork and competition since each form of cooperation (or, more properly, coopetition) has its time and place advantages [10]. “Autonomy” is a classic term meaning on one’s own. It is a needed component of a definition of life to separate out what is alive, sub-alive and macro-alive. We want to think of a person as alive, not a muscle cell in the person, or the city in which the person lives. Finally “transcendence,” which means going beyond one’s programming, is an essential definition of life because ultimately it will separate out the inanimate from the animate.



Now, are non-brained entities alive? They are if they process information (as even a bacterium does by executing its genetic code), share information (as bacteria do via plasmid exchange), and extend information (as bacteria do by carrying out activities, such as colonization, that are beyond what is written in their genetic code). 




Now, suppose a cybernetic being with adequate memory, software and power satisfied the ACT definition. Is s/he or “heesh” alive? Yes, because it (or heesh) is like us in an important way, namely in the way of working together to make the world a more satisfying place. 


This cybernetic being, like us, could be an example of transcendental biology, if it was constructed based upon cellular organic chemistry, or an example of non-biological transcendence, if it was constructed using inorganic molecules.

Hence, the beauty of the ACT definition of life is that it includes all that biologists deem to include in life, and it also includes non-organic phenomena that “quacks like life and waddles like life.” On the other hand, the ACT definition of life clearly excludes phenomena, such as a rock or the sun, that either fail to demonstrate autonomy (a rock or a sun does not process information because nothing proceeds pursuant to any kind of an uncertainty-reducing code), or fail to demonstrate coopetency or transcendence (a rock or a sun does not operate consensually or enhance order in the universe).



The fact of the matter is that biologists have been mis-defining life for a long time. Life is not equivalent to a growing, reproducing, reacting entity with a cellular structure. Such entities are simply cellular organisms. They constitute a particular, and fantastically diverse, form of self-replicating matter. But life is something different altogether. Something is alive if it is (1) an autonomous entity that (2) builds information sharing relationships with other living entities for (3) the purpose of creating for themselves a “happier” (as they would define it) world. All biological organisms meet this definition, which is why they seem to us to be alive (those that don’t, like viruses, don’t process their own information).

Biological organisms seem to exhibit Autonomy by processing information, they seem to exhibit Coopetency by sharing information, and they seem to exhibit Transcendence by extending their behavior beyond its stored information.

These three characteristics make them alive, not the arrangement of their molecules.


Footnotes

[7] Spinoza, B. (1957), Ethics, Demonstrated in Geometrical Order, reprinted in Gutman, J., ed., Hafner: New York.

[8] The back-and-forth nature of human progress results in the fact that “out of the crooked timber of humanity, no straight thing was ever made.”  I. Berlin (1969), Four Essays on Liberty, Oxford University Press: Oxford, p. 170.  The most important point, though, is that many things have been made, albeit they are not straight.  Consequently, antipodal philosophers such as Nietzsche and Rousseau both miss the point.  They each see the back-steps of civilization and pine for either forward-motion at goose-step rate under a strongman (Nietzsche) or no back-steps in an idyllic natural world (Rousseau).   Yet the goose-step approach inevitably takes one right off a cliff, while the anti-civilization approach leads one to slow decay.  There appears to be no good substitute for careful trial-and-error progress, with reliance on free discussion and collective decision-making to keep the ratio of n:n-1 as high as possible.



[9] Brandenburger, A. & Nalebuff, B. (1996), Co-opetition, Doubleday: London



[10] Ridley, M. (1997), The Origins of Virtue, Penguin: London.