The Question of Life

But what is life? Looking around we see life at the broadest levels to be a temporary activity manifesting transformatively in the world of physical matter and continuing its presence only through propagation of itself into other instances of living matter.

When we attempt to dissect life to determine its workings we invariably kill it to some degree. Why is this? Is life the sum of its material components working in ways that are greater than its parts? Or is it because life is to some degree independent of its material parts while at the same time requiring them in order to manifest physically?

This leads us to ask what is the nature of matter in general? Our contemporary sciences typically define matter in terms of other matter only – for example a table is composed of certain substances which are themselves divisible into tinier parts called atoms. These in turn can be broken down into even smaller less distinct parts called subatomic particles.

Instead of seeking to define matter in this structural building block sort of way, intuitive scientific thinking notes that life itself cannot be described by these methods which only apply to the non-living. Yet while life itself is fundamentally self-defining it is constrained by the limits of the non-living matter it works with. Seeing this to be the case we are led to ask what are the structural limits of life with respect to the non-living?