Fiontan O’Ceallachain
Staff Writer
As a living species, we have so far failed to define life. Why? Because life is not a tangible substance, it is continual process.
“But that is easy!” you may say, “Life is anything that exhibits homeostasis, organisation, metabolism, growth, adaption, response to stimuli and reproduction – exactly as we were taught in school.” But consider the humble virus that simply does not not metabolize… “Yes, viruses, replicators rather than life-forms they call them.” OK a virus may not be metabolic life-form, but to me and many others it is very much alive.
The great Greek philosophers believed that substances defined life. Epedocles proposed that earth, fire, water and air form the universe, but combined appropriately these elements would create a living being. Democritus claimed that fire composed the soul and that the soul was the substance of life. Aristotle argued that matter and form together gives birth to the universe, and that matter married with a special form, the soul, defines life.
Including biological definitions of life, there exists bio-physical definitions and living system theories. For instance, in bio-physics physicists such as Shrodinger suggested life is a member of the class of phenomenon characterised by open or continuous systems with the ability to decrease their internal entropy at the expense of substances of free energy taken in from the environment and subsequently rejected in a degraded form.
There exists many biological definitions of life that choosing the ‘right’ one becomes a matter of philosophical taste. Overall I have come to the conclusion that there is no one ‘true’ definition of life, but that all things are alive – some things just happen to be more alive than others.
Now in the 21st century, we as a scientific species understand that life cannot be so easily defined. Our definition must be open to extraterrestrial life, however fundamentally different, perhaps even open to virtual life?
The Second Universe
Through the invention of the computer we have unleashed the ability to create whole realms of existence – universes – with the push of a button. Computers provide an independent form of space, independent from that of our universe, and time borrowed from our time. This space-time is very different to what we recognise as space and time; the space uninhabitable by us – its physics of a functional nature rather than a tangible one – and although the
time may be a reflection of ours, it masters the pace of its world in ways impossible by the tick-tock of our clocks.
However, these universes are not wholly independent from our control; by the necessity of their invention we have architected the capacity to influence their processes. We feed information into them, manipulating their abilities to our favour – but in return we must grant them the intelligence to respond, to influence this world.
By our mastery these windows of influence have become an elemental substance of our lives. We dance through the power of this new knowledge, over the slow shuffle of nature, instantly creating new forms of life in digital atmospheres, life that can evolve and thrive according to the strange rules of a newborn universe. This idea is so powerful that we are afraid to even recognise these alien digi-systems as life, afraid to recognise that life can be so easily created and destroyed.
More than a practical tool or a clever entertainment medium, the invention of the computer may be the most humbling discovery since the birth of mankind…
