Raising consciousness for a new world
The Mystery of Life and Consciousness
Life is a biological process of maintaining the organized, self-sustaining state(s) exhibited by all living things. Its characteristics include growth, metabolism, maintaining homeostasis, response to external stimuli in its environment, and reproduction. A rock is matter that changes passively (e.g., requires outside forces), while a living system actively maintains itself and can utilize information to either heal, grow or to make more of itself. So, the distinction between living and non-living is really about organized, self-sustaining processes that learn and interact rather than something that is just static and unchanging and just made of fixed number of elements or atoms and molecules arranged in specific and fixed pattern.
To distinguish life from non-life, scientists look for features like self-sustaining organization, metabolism, replication, and the ability to learn and to evolve. Abiogenesis is the study of how a non-living system could gradually acquire those features, meaning it is essentially the study of the transition from “not alive” to “being alive”. As will be shown in this article, a primary distinction between being alive and being dead lies in the presence (versus the absence) of these self-sustaining integrated biological functions plus awareness and intentionality (i.e., agency or a primitive form of consciousness – click here to learn more) even in simple organisms without brains. Agency in living systems is defined as the inherent, goal-directed capacity of organisms to actively participate in their own development, maintenance, and function, which also distinguishes life from non-life.
This is why the question should not just be “What is life?” but also must include “At what point does chemistry and physics along with energy and information become biology?”. In abiogenesis research, scientists often focus on intermediate steps such as self-replication, autocatalysis, membrane formation, complexity and agency, because those are the kinds of processes that imply the shift to living organisms.
Life is not simply about the matter from which it is composed. Every single celled or multi-celled organism is an open thermodynamic system. Matter and energy are constantly being transported between and organism’s internal and external environment. The atoms and molecules your body is made of today are not the same as the ones you will be composed of a year from now. In fact, in just a relatively short period of time every atom in your body will be replaced by your internal metabolic processes. The cells currently comprising your intestines may be replaced in days. Those of your skin might be replaced in a matter of weeks. Your red blood cells could last for several months. Your cerebral neurons, will last much longer.
Energy and matter are constantly flowing through every cell and are continually being replaced. This means that living systems are not fixed collections of atoms and molecules like a non-living object such as a rock. Instead, they are lasting informational patterns and processes that persist through time and space. In fact, they even have a built-in error correcting mechanism to maintain this stability. This homeostasis is maintained by a cell’s metabolism along with other internal processes, patterns of matter and energy, and the information contained within them as well as that which is exchanged with its external environment.
Life is about a specific kind of organization and processes in which information is used to control how matter and energy are utilized within the organism. It is also about how the living organism interact with each other and their local environment. These both imply some form of agency.
The emphasis on “organization” and “processes” is also key. The materialist / reductionist view only emphasizes the states of atoms or molecules and their properties that comprise living things at each moment in time. The ability to predict a future state is limited to predicting future quantum states (i.e., future states of the properties of that matter) and nothing else. There is no set of properties or state of a living object that contains all the information and processes of how to maintain life, no matter how detailed those properties, processes or their states are described.
As we have discussed, all living systems are self-organizing and self-maintaining. A classic example necessary to maintain this stability is the cell membrane. This is necessary for the cell to function and forms the boundary between the internals of the cell which is alive and the outside environment in which it lives.
The cell membrane that enforces this separation between “self” and “other” is also a product of the cell’s metabolism and other internal processes. It separates the internal functioning of the cell from the external environment to maintain its integrity and yet it must be porous enough to let energy, matter and information pass through. This is not simply a sequence of biochemical reactions. It is the ongoing self-referential self-organization that must continue if an organism is to maintain itself (i.e., stay alive).
As we have stated, differences between life and death do not revolve around particular material components. Instead, they lie in the ongoing processes of the internal cellular activity: the self-organization resulting from the cell’s metabolism and agency.
Clearly one of the most important features of a living cell is its metabolism. Even the simplest cells exist as individuals that live within a boundary separating interior (the self) from the outside environment. Many scientists and philosophers now believe that even the simplest organisms also exhibit “a degree of consciousness” or “agency”. They all possess the ability to have experience, to “know” in some sense that they have had these experiences, to have some sort of memory to remember them, and to have the intentionality to act. For example, a single celled organism like a paramecium seeks food, avoids danger and builds little mud structures to live in for safety and protection from the external environment in the pond in which it lives. The same is also true of planaria, a multi-cellular creature that exhibits a tremendous ability to regenerate. As I recall, neither paramecium nor planaria have brains although in the latter case they do have a few neurons.
The cell’s metabolism is a process that it must actively maintain for itself through its own actions. These actions are only possible because a cell actively maintains its self-organization and homeostasis with never-ending feedback loops while it remains alive. In a sense, the self-referential loops of those actions is the experience (i.e., its agency). In the simplest of organisms, it means recognizing and moving towards opportunity (food, pleasure or something else to sustain itself) and recognizing and moving away from threats ( toxicity or life-threatening danger). When these processes stop the cell dies.
What about collections of cells in multi-cellular organisms? Here groups of cells form tissues, tissue forms organs, and organs form organ systems. These all exist in harmony for the common good of the collective organism. Individual cells comprising them will even sacrifice themselves for the benefit of the group of which they are a part. How do they “know” and communicate this behavior to/from the collective? Is there something more at work here than just chemical signaling and proximity?
Ecologically speaking, your body is porous and co-dependent on the life within and around you. An adult male body contains around 40-50 trillion cells, but it also contains another 40-50 trillion microbes, bacteria, viruses, archaea and fungi. (For comparison purposes a typical single human cell contains approximately 100 trillion atoms.) No cell, organ, nor organism is autonomous; all life relies on other life and maintains harmony through symbiosis, reproduction, and so on. When disharmony occurs it means a cancer has formed which disrupts normal internal bodily processes.
During periods of growth, or after an injury or during a regeneration process, these cells somehow “know “when the collective has reached its proper shape, size and functionality. In biology, this is referred to as morphology – the study of the form, size and structure of animals, plants and microorganisms and includes both the external appearance and the internal anatomy of these organisms. Rupert Sheldrake, a British biologist, has researched and written extensively about “morphogenetic” fields (to learn more about fields – click here) that may influence these biological processes.
Stem cells are unspecialized biological cells that serve as the organism’s internal repair system and building blocks.They possess two unique properties: the ability to self-renew by making copies of themselves and they also have the capability to differentiate into specialized cell types, such as muscle, blood, or nerve cells. Stem cells replenish cells lost through normal wear and tear, injury, or disease. How do these cells “know” what type of cells they are to differentiate themselves into? Is their specialization also influenced by morphogenetic fields?
Another related question is how do collections of cells “know how to behave” as a part of a larger group such as tissues and organs and when to stop reproducing or growing? “Knowing” is a characteristic of agency that is a subset of consciousness that exists for the benefit and proper functioning of the collective itself. Clearly this is something that exists beyond the purview of the DNA of the individual cell. Does this form of “knowing” (read “consciousness” or morphogenic fields) exist as a hierarchy both within and between these related cells?
Michael Levin, the director of a biology research lab at Tufts University, has been leading some ground-breaking work regarding intercellular communication and regeneration between cells that seems to show that these cells and their collections do have agency and therefore a form of consciousness. His work also suggests that this agency also forms a hierarchy of agency specifically for problem solving in their environment.
Every organism must actively maintain itself against the continuous threat of its own demise. The boundary that defines metabolism and experience is the agency to act that came into being when life formed. By becoming an individual separate from its environment, all life requires agency that is free and directs it in a way that’s impossible for a rock. Yet, at the same time, all organisms have continuing dependence on the outside world for the material resources for food, for shelter, for protection and for maintaining its internal structure. They also need the external energy available for their own internal uses to sustain themselves as well as for being able to influence or manipulate their external environment.
Life is inherently a precarious and yet a fine-tuned and balanced process. If it strays just a litttle ways in any direction from its equilibrium, the organism dies. From single celled organisms up to multicellular organisms like homo sapiens, life has an unyielding intention and imperative to maintain itself (i.e., stay alive) and stay at equilibrium at least long enough to reproduce.
As organisms become more complex, including those organisms with a brain, new behaviors emerge to help enhance its ability to survive and to thrive. These include instinctual and learned behaviors along with a curiosity to investigate and learn to enhance the organism’s likelihood of survivability. These all provide an advantage in maintaining the organism’s viability and status within the environment it finds itself within or, even to learn new ways to help it adapting to its external environment. Adapting to its circumstances is intrinsic to all living creatures and that implies memory, agency and the creative or the instinctual impulse to act (i.e., intentionality).
There is no well-defined universal checklist that can be used to define what life is, or, for that matter what consciousness is, even for the simplest partial life-forms like viruses (which are considered to be “half” alive). That’s why biologists are looking for broader patterns and processes and not just some single “life molecule” or “life energy” or “metabolic” state because several of these can also be produced individually without life. Perhaps another area that might be more fruitful to look for is whether the life-form being investigated (from single cells, to collections of cells to organ systems) also exhibits some rudimentary or more complex form of agency (i.e., primitive consciousness) that exists both within and beyond its boundary (brains notwithstanding).
For additional information or further reading:
Coming To Life - by Christiane Nusslein-Volhard
Life as We Do not Know It - by Peter Ward
Michael Levin’s World: Bioelectricity, Mind and the Hidden Order of Life - by John Goldwood
Morphic Resonance – The Nature of Formative Causation - by Rupert Sheldrake
The Fifth Miracle - the Search for the Origin and Meaning of Life by Paul Davies
The Way of the Cell - by Franklin M. Harold
Understanding Living Systems - by Raymond Nobel & Denis Noble