The Life/Non-life Dichotomy

Author(s): David Lynn Abel

What exactly distinguishes life from non-life? Is the dichotomy a black/white absolute, or a slow “gray scale” transition? We don’t normally consider life vs. death to be “relative.” Genomics and epigenomics continue to amass irrefutable evidence of causes and their effects that cannot be reduced to Monod's Chance and Necessity [1-6]. All known life is formally programmed using physical symbol vehicles in Material Symbol Systems (MSSs). The uniqueness of life is specifically defined by syntaxes of semantic Efficacious Executable Choice Command Controls (EECCCs). Cybernetic processing is accomplished only through agreed-upon conformance by programming, machinery and recipient to arbitrary formal rule conventions. Computation cannot be achieved by physicodynamic laws, forces, constraints, quantum mechanics or irreversible nonequilibrium thermodynamics. The prescription of biofunction successfully traverses Shannon channels across The Cybernetic Cut on the one-way narrow Configurable Switch (CS) Bridge from formalism into physicality[7-9]. The result is formal computational halting within the material world. Hundreds of conceptual integrated circuit components cooperate to achieve homeostatic metabolism far from equilibrium. What clearly defines life’s uniqueness is EECCC. The Physicodynamic Incompleteness Theorem [10] firmly predicts that no physicalistic model of abiogenesis will ever elucidate the causation of life’s EECCC on the near physicodynamic side of The Cybernetic Cut.