The biological research putting purpose back into life | Aeon Essays
By promoting self-organization, energy flux gradually converts a clump of mindless molecules into information-processing machinery with agency—meaning the self-drive and purposeful action that we associate with life.
Bobby Azarian • The Romance of Reality: How the Universe Organizes Itself to Create Life, Consciousness, and Cosmic Complexity
basic ingredients for systems that could devise and improvise solutions to living that are emergent, versatile, adaptive, and robust. The new picture dispels the long-standing idea that living systems must be regarded as machines.
Philip Ball • How Life Works: A User’s Guide to the New Biology
Another key fact is that agency isn't intrinsic to a system, but rather something we ascribe to it. It's a way of describing a system at the level of abstraction that includes goals, obstacles, motivations, etc. If you look too closely (at a sufficiently low level of abstraction), the agency might seem to disappear. A plant, for example, is 'merely
... See moremeltingasphalt.com • Neurons Gone Wild
These hypotheses suggest that deep principles govern the emergence of problem-solving matter, principles that push our understanding of modern physics and chemistry towards their limits. They mark a radical departure from life as we once knew it.
Chris Kempes • Is Life a Complex Computational Process? | Aeon Essays
