Life is a concept with which we are all intuitively familiar but is difficult to pin down with a concrete definition. Let’s start with a definition up front and go from there.
An Entropist definition of life is simple:
A locally anti-entropic process that maintains or increases local order at the cost of an increase in the global rate of entropy.
Life is surprisingly ill-defined in common scientific and philosophical discussion because the essence of “being alive” gets tangled up in emotive language, a strong bias toward carbon-based biological life, wishy-washy silliness around “vitalism” and other antisensical rhetorical tripwires largely because that is how we conceive of life implicitly, being carbon-based life forms ourselves.
The Entropist definition of life pulls back from the details of specific cultural artifacts such as language and emotional values, and even further, backs off from dictating any specific chemical or process foundation. Instead, the Entropist way of defining life is focused on the entropy angle and leaves the details open for interpretation.
Life is an emergent property of the physical laws that define our universe. As religions are based on transcendent philosophical systems of thought this doesn’t necessarily conflict with any particular religious definition of life. Cults, however, are based on prescriptive systems of absolute conclusions and this definition of life conflicts with a fair number of those.
This specific but ambiguous definition allows us to chase some interesting ideas.
For example, is a fire “alive”? Maybe. That’s not entirely clear, and it depends on how much credit we give the fire for maintaining an ordered structure (the burning process itself), and how much it may simply be incidental that some external process happened to provide it continuous fuel for burning, or whether mere circumstance allowed a given fire to migrate across an area where fuel exists. A fire can propagate (ignite new things, and even be transferred) but it cannot propagate purposefully and has no adapted mechanisms for propagation. A fire even dies eventually, but again, while we may use the phrase “the fire has died” we don’t typically credit the fire with having been “alive” to begin with.
It is hard to conceive of fire as an organism, but it is an interesting thought experiment enabled by this more tightly scoped definition for life.
A more strongly “living” concept of life may include adaptive mechanisms, or a whole host of other ideas, but the reason Entropism keeps the definition simple is to focus on two core ideas:
- Life is a process, not a thing.
- Life is an emergent property of the laws that define our Universe.
As with many things in Entropism, we will not find The One True Answer here, but we will instead find a framework for thinking about the phenomena of life, and that is much more interesting.
It is worth noting, for the sake of pedants who love to ruin everything, that the definition uses the term “locally anti-entropic”. This is slightly imprecise, as “entropy” refers to a universal phenomenon, but here we are detaching a specific region from the rest (whatever region is dominated by the phenomena of life). The purpose is to point out the emergent phenomena that dominates the living region and to be explicit about the clear and measurable global cost in terms of an increased rate of overall universal entropy.
This raises the question of whether a universally anti-entropic phenomenon would actually not be defined as “living”. In our definition we have included the idea that there is always a global cost to the local phenomenon. If we remove this global cost, are we now violating the definition? Perhaps. It may be more reasonable to amend our definition of life if we ever discover any phenomena that can be truly anti-entropic, but for the sake of argument we may define any truly anti-entropic phenomenon that exhibits the local properties of life but makes no global tradeoff as “undead”.
The title image of this post is of Rayleigh-Bénard convection cells emerging in a bowl of soup that I found in this video. I recommend looking up “Rayleigh-Bénard convection cells” and considering whether they are “alive” or how far into being alive they might lean.