“What is Life and Living?”, ISSS-99, June 27 – July 10, Asilomar, California LIFE AS ITS OWN TOOL FOR SURVIVAL Ron Cottam, Willy Ranson and Roger Vounckx The Evolutionary Processing Group Laboratory for Opto and Micro Electronics VUB-IMEC Electronics Division (ETRO) The University of Brussels (VUB) Brussels, Belgium, Europe http://etro.vub.ac.be/evol evol@etro.vub.ac.be Does life emerge “spontaneously” from a predetermined inanimate background, or is it a basic characteristic of all of our environment? Living entities must respond to external threatening stimuli in order to survive in a hostile climate. If we set aside the pre-supposition that inanimate and animate structures and agents are fundamentally different, then this criterion applies to all recognizable entities. An entity depends for its continuance not only on awareness of its surroundings, but also on self-referencing as a means of stabilisation. It must exhibit not only external consciousness but also a degree of self- consciousness. Uniquely external consciousness can engender incongruous or self-destructive internal development; self-consciousness on its own will leave the entity wide open to incomprehensible attack by external agents. The duel between these two facets constitutes the process we refer to as life. We can describe the natural living world as, and by, a nonlinearly-scaled hierarchy of concepts, each of which maintains its autonomy by relying on its precursor as a tool. Life uses biology; biology uses chemistry; chemistry uses quantum mechanics. We propose that at the head of this hierarchy the universal background of causally chaotic communication makes use of consciousness, which uses life as a tool in its auto-propagation. Darwin-Szamosi evolution modulates the emergence of hierarchically-related most- fragile-dimensional approximate objectivizations which facilitate agent survival in an otherwise insufficiently-computable complex natural environment. We identify the entire field of near-equilibrium physics as the minimal description of the universe when it is considered as an "inanimate" system, or more explicitly as its “ground” state. This then recognizes that the ground state of any agent is equivalent to its description as an "inanimate" object, higher unoccupied states presuppose higher degrees of a latent or implicate capability for coherent consciousness, and higher occupied states correspond to higher degrees of explicate consciousness itself. Keywords rationality, computation, life, evolution, consciousness 1. Setting the Stage In coming to terms with the world round about us we form networks of individual representations of the many different entities and processes we encounter or experience. This development is modulated by communication with others, in a manner which stabilizes a common overall view of our surroundings more or less coinciding with our individual conclusions. Without requiring the formal establishment of objectivity, and by making use of individual and collective memory, this provides us with a summed- subjective approximation to objectivity by correlating models of extensive environmental action/reaction experimentation from the individual to the social levels. The formal establishment of this common view corresponds to establishing an intercommunicating network of these models, firstly by formulating them in terms of a single rationality, secondly by organizing their communication in terms of that same rationality. Critical analysis enables the generation of generic types through comparison, leading to the establishment of a reduced number of paradigms from which the models applicable in and specific to particular contexts may be derived. Science concentrates on trying to correlate the "virtual" entities of our modeling world