Despite apparent progress in the life-sciences, one can perhaps state that much progress hasn’t been made on the question “What is Life?” as per Schrödinger (Schrödinger, 2012). I don’t intend to go on a historical outlook for the approaches on this question, as this is merely a bit of thought on such question. Particularly, it is done in similar fashion to the organicist school (Nicholson, D. J., & Gawne, R. (2015)) which was somewhat prominent in the 20th century, and which is making a comeback. As such, this is heavily inspired by Rosen, Waddington, Varela, and a miriad of other folks in both process biology (Nicholson, D. J., & Dupré, J. (2018)) and organicism (past and contemporary).
The title “Organisms Aren’t, They Happen” points towards a different perspective. One that sees organisms as processes. This comes out of necessity, as mechanistic thought and associated substance-based metaphysics only captures (if it captures) a very compartmentalized view of organisms, which inherently “dillutes” their most interesting properties. A good chunk of attempts at formalizing organisms (to the maximum extent, assuming they are reducible to the point of being formalizable) can be captured under concepts such as autopoiesis, closure to efficient causation, organizational closure, etc. All of these emphasize one thing about organisms: their relational nature. In this regard, what’s important about organisms are the relations between constituents, and not necessarily the constituents themselves. One could state then, that life and organisms are constituent-agnostic.
Under this, an organism can be seen as a master-process, “composed” by a set of sub-processes which co-create each other under a dialectical relation. Such system and respective organization show impredicativity, which is stronger than recursion. In this, each process can’t exist independently and nonetheless emerges through co-creation with other processes. This very much “dissolves” away “chicken-and-egg” conundrums, but what is necessary then is an explanation of how such organization (that shows impredicativity) can even emerge. On this, a few abstract models of basic units of life have been developed over time, which I shall discuss later.
To develop a bit further with the concept of autopoiesis in mind, the sub-processes of an organism (master-process) and the relations between them would evolve in a manner so as to conserve this specific organization that gave rise to the impredicative loop. This doesn’t imply conservation of shape, function, mass, etc; much to the contrary. Under this lens, any new adaptation or behaviour taken by an organism can be seen as a compensation to a pertubation in order to maintain such organization.
And eventhough organisms still follow physical-law, any type of description or modelling scheme that approaches simulating organisms as simulating physical scenarios is going to be at disadvantage. They miss so called “emergent”-behaviour, in this case referring to strong emergence. The type of emergence, where pre-stating the phase-space of a system is possibly the worst case scenario. With this type of approach, for organisms there would invariably be a need for an evolving phase-space (as is often the case in biochemical systems, “constants” or parameters derived from practical assays evolve over time), or outright need for a huge phase-space, which leads one to question if a major point isn’t being missed in correct conceptualization of the system under study.
This presumably stems from organisms being isolated systems, organizationally that is. They are self-determined, and one could almost state they “aim” to become organizationally isolated. And all of this, whilst being thermodynamically open systems. Such systems show self-referential and relational meta-dynamics which are mostly imposed from within. This is because they have solved both problems of determining a boundary, between them and the environment, and of relevance, of what is important to them.
To understand what organisms are, one presumably needs to assume naively (and perhaps incorrectly) that there’s a fundamental difference between organisms and other dynamical systems: their organization. Better yet, the difference might reside in the system under scrutiny being able to conserve the specific organization or not. As such, the trouble is in defining such organization through observables, that can be practically measured, in both organisms and in other dynamical systems. After that, if there’s indeed a difference one can explore if organisms are a special case, in terms of operating at critical behaviour or not.
A good chunk of these have already been stated in Montévil, M., & Mossio, M. (2015), and are associated with the difficulty of “individuating” processes. Regarding the comparison between individuating substances and processes, the latter is much harder, as there’s first the consideration of: should we? And then, processes although being concrete, are “fuzzy”, as they can’t be easily considered to have a spatio-temporal location. With that said, a combination of both process and substance-based metaphysics will presumably prove the most fruitful.
These are only two examples out of a bunch attempting to describe basic units of life, or patterns, that could lead to the emergence of what we call life. Let me deliberate a bit on them.
On chemotons
It generally asserts that a basic unit of life would need to have (1) a metabolism, (2) self-replication, and (3) a bi-lipid membrane. If we take seriously the concept developed prior based on autopoies both (1) and (2) would be compensations to pertubations in order to maintain organization of the system. And (3), whilst it was asserted that organisms solve the problem of boundary, it shouldn’t need to be specific. As such, anything that strengthens the causal interactions between internal processes of the system, and that weakens causal interactions between internal processes and those of the environment, would be considered a boundary, no matter how strange it might appear at first sight. Even a temperature gradient might do as a “boundary”.
Such is generally described by a set of entities, each of which can be catalytically realized by another entity in the set, leading the set to realize its own production. This is a much better concept, however one could presumably find examples of sets which nonetheless don’t self-replicate and still realize organizational closure. As long as there’s a set of dialectical processes and relations between them that conserve organization, the need for self-catalysis shouldn’t be relevant.
As far as we know, life (the process) emerged once and it never stopped. I think the most intuitive property about organisms is that something is being conserved. And it’s not matter, nor shape, nor function. It’s organization. A specific type of organization which allows the emergence of dialectical processes, and which is maintained by the evolution of both these processes and of the relations between them. This is the impredicative loop which describes organismal organization.
[1] - Schrodinger, E. (2012). What is life?: With mind and matter and autobiographical sketches. Cambridge university press.
[2] - Nicholson, D. J., & Gawne, R. (2015). Neither logical empiricism nor vitalism, but organicism: what the philosophy of biology was. History and philosophy of the life sciences, 37, 345-381.
[3] - Nicholson, D. J., & Dupré, J. (2018). Everything flows: towards a processual philosophy of biology (p. 416). Oxford University Press.
[4] - Montévil, M., & Mossio, M. (2015). Biological organisation as closure of constraints. Journal of theoretical biology, 372, 179-191.