What is life for you?

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My rule of thumb for philosophy and spirituality is to always defer to scientific explanations whenever possible. So life is something we say of a physical system when it has biological processes. What is a biological process? Wikipedia gives the following: homeostasis, cells, metabolism, environment adaptation, stimulus response, and reproduction.

The interesting thing about nature is that for every line you draw, nature can put things so close to the line that it’s impossible to tell which side they’re on. As lines go, though, life is more clearly delineated than most. Just try to define intelligence!

Another area of inquiry here might be to look at what non-physical processes would we say display life. An interesting example that comes to mind is Conway’s Game of Life.

This stuff, called cellular automata, looks alive but isn’t, it’s just pretty animation that happens according to an algorithm. What’s interesting about it is that it displays a fascinating property that we call emergence. From simple rules, complex behavior emerges. It’s kind of the opposite of entropy. It’s not, these systems disperse into high-entropy states like any other, but emergence seems to allow the system to hold onto it for awhile until it does.

This is an ecosystem, specifically a forest. It looks on the surface like a collection of individual lifeforms, and to be truthful, it is. But you can also look at it as having a kind of life of its own, composed of emergent properties. Each individual life form acts in its own self-interest, and the combined effects of all of these life forms comes together and creates a stabilizing effect on the surrounding areas. Is the forest itself alive? If you look at the above list of properties, you can see that it doesn’t reproduce itself. So no. But five out of six isn’t bad.

Once you broaden your views of what life is in this way, you start to see it everywhere.

This is a representation of a market, specifically a stock market. (it could also be a commodities market, or for other types of financial instruments) A market looks surprisingly like an ecosystem when you take the right approach to looking at it. It has a stabilizing effect on its environment, adapts to things like laws and political acts. You can use words that normally describe biological effects to describe events in the market and do so convincingly. “China’s proclamation of a new approach to anti-corruption campaign did grievous damage to the markets today, it might take years for it to heal.”