What is life?

Biology asks, how does life work? Meta-biology or Philosophy of Biology asks, what is life, fundamentally? The meta of every science asks the bigger questions, it judges the fundamental assumptions upon which a science is built, it judges the historical evolution of that science. It questions its practices, theories and concepts; it asks, how much of it is facts and how much hypothesis?

But instead of questioning the fundamentals, tendencies towards materialism in the scientific community has reduced the Philosophy of Biology into a faculty focused on the idea of how to reduce biology into lower-level sciences such as chemistry and physics. With such a pre-determined goal in mind, wherein vitalism is simply not an option, the door is closed for any possible explanation for higher phenomena like the 'uniqueness of human intelligence', 'purposefulness in humanity, nature and the universe', and the 'uniqueness of life' itself.

So, simple biology talks of 'life' as an organised, self-maintaining, energy-using 'process' that preserves its own structure, interacts with its environment, carries heritable information, and belongs to a lineage capable of evolution. All these aspects seem to be physical, but as the physicist Erwin Schrodinger suggested, life is an ordered physical process that avoids decay by drawing order from the environment, while preserving and transmitting hereditary order through a molecular code – i.e. 'life' defies entropy, as the individual constantly and actively strives to maintain order within it as long as it is alive.

Life, then, is the force that inhabits a biological system that is in itself highly advanced in terms of the complexity of the living cells and the living organs that have multiple functions, and that work in near-perfect coordination, synced together at every level. Seemingly, life is coexisting with the animate form in complete harmony, but it is also true that the animate existence's constant strife against disorder and decay is for the very purpose of accommodating 'life', the vital force, the soul that thinks, feels, contemplates, discovers, designs, chooses, and has the most profound agency that can bring all kinds of changes around it.

Life needs to be explained in terms of concepts such as, functions, purpose, organism, fitness, adaptation, information, normality, individuality, and meaning which have no 'physical' basis. The idea – that all the physical complexities layered within living organisms as well as the abstract concepts that define life in so many ways can be simply reduced to an explanation based on physics and chemistry, meaning atoms and their interactions – is naïve. Rather, the truth is that even physics and chemistry are not reducible into each other, nor are each of these sciences free of controversies and unexplainable gaps. It is true that so many aspects of these sciences are riddled with anomalies, which scientists often fill with the 'gods of hypotheses and theories' that allow them to make huge strides in the directions they desire. And to support their deep inclinations, theories are constructed in those directions, even when factual data or empirical evidence to support them is absent.

For instance, in quantum physics, elementary particles display a property called 'entanglement' which means they communicate regardless of the distance separating them. The two pre-entangled particles do not have a specific spin, rather they have a probability of either. But if particle A is forced to be measured as 'up', particle B will instantly exhibit as 'down'. This 'spooky action at a distance' is not explainable in classical materialism, so physicist bend materialism into a physicalism or a broader materialism, which says that 'physical systems can have shared states whose properties are not reducible to the independent properties of their parts'.

Why, then, can biological organisms not have 'properties that are not reducible to the independent properties of their parts'? If a subatomic particle can connect with its separated pair millions of miles apart, why can the human mind, which is filled with all kinds of ideas, emotions and spirituality, not connect with reality at a distance? Do the deepest human emotions deserve to be shunned off as nonsense or a wasteful, residual side-effect of evolutionary biology, as some biologists would say. Will the same human mind – which is the seat of all scientific endeavors, of all philosophical striding, of asking the questions and persevering to answer them – utterly degrade itself by simply dismissing its own uniqueness and its extraordinary higher intelligence compared to inanimate things and even other living things. Just because materialism despises the idea of non-material connection and, at the behest of those who 'believe' in it, will humanity be ready to depose itself from being the most spiritually potent object of the universe to something that is only matter, atoms and atomic interactions?

What is life then, in the fundamental sense? Is it mere matter interacting with itself? Is it matter that organises and reorganises itself? Is it matter that has an illusion of 'thought'? Is it matter that has a sense of seeing and hearing; that eats and wears clothes; that discovers the abstract structures and laws underlying the motions and interactions of matter; that has the creative power of producing novel art, tools and machines? Is it matter that is conscious of itself and its surroundings; that recognises love, purpose and destiny; that is the seat of profound agency?

Or is life not a complete, fulfilling experience, embodied in an animate form that has organs, functions, growth, a sense of being alive, a sense of self-preservation – an animate form that stops all functions and loses its sense of being alive once life exits it?

Life that grows, nourishes and flourishes with the animate form, loves its embodiment, but also urges for a purpose, a connection that is beyond mere animate matter. There is something about its longing, its passion, its adventurism, its sense of inquiry and discovery, and its 'belief' that there is more to be known!

This urge, this passion, is what gives the human thought the wings that take it to the depths of the subatomic realms, and to the edge of the universe. It removes the person from mere surviving and reproducing and satisfying its physical wants to an appetite for understanding, uncovering, travelling and finding – still remaining unfilled and after every finding, urging for more!