Chapter 34 6.7 The fourth break: the circle of becoming

About a century ago, the popular belief that life was a mystical fluid infused into living things was refined into what modern philosophy calls vitalism.Vitalism is not far removed from the usual "she lost her life" meaning.We all imagine that some invisible matter flows away with death.Vitalists take this exclusive meaning seriously.They believe that the essential soul active in the living body is not itself a living body, nor is it an inanimate substance or machine.It is something else: a primordial pulse that exists outside the organism it activates. My description of the aggressive nature of life is not meant to turn it into a postmodern vitalism.Indeed, the definition of life as: "The properties that emerge from the organization of the inanimate parts, but which are not reducible to the constituent parts," (the best definition that scientific research can presently give), comes very close to metaphysics tuned, but its purpose is testable.

I see life as some kind of non-spiritual, near-mathematical quality that can emerge from the network-like organization of matter.It's a bit like the law of probability; if enough parts are put together, the system will behave in a law of averages.Anything that needs to be organized according to some laws that are not yet known can lead to life.The laws that life obeys are as strict as those that light obeys. As it happens, this process governed by natural laws gives life a semblance of spirituality.The first reason is that, according to the laws of nature, such an organization must produce something unpredictable and novel.Second, the results of the organization must look for various opportunities to replicate themselves, which gives it a sense of urgency and desire. Third, the results can be easily linked to protect their own existence, and thus obtain a naturally occurring process.Taken together, these principles may be called the "emergent" principle of life.This principle is radical because it requires a revised idea of ​​what the laws of nature mean: irregularities, circular logic, synonymous repetition, strange things.

Vitalism, like every misconception throughout history, also contains useful fragments of truth.The leading vitalist of the twentieth century, Hans Driesch, defined vitalism in 1914 as "the theory of the autonomy of the life process."In some respects he is right.In our burgeoning new view, life can be detached from living and mechanical subjects as a real, autonomous process.Life can be replicated from a living body as an elaborate informational structure (spirituality or genetics?) and infused into new inanimate bodies, whether they be organic parts or machine parts. Looking back at the history of human thought, we have progressively removed discontinuities from our understanding of our role as human beings.Historian of science David Chanell summarizes this progress in his book Dying Machines: Technology and the Study of Organic Life.

First, Copernicus ruled out the gap between the Earth and the rest of the physical universe.Then Darwin ruled out the discontinuity between man and the rest of the organic world, and finally Freud ruled out the discontinuity between the rational world of the ego and the irrational world of the unconscious.But as the historian and psychologist Bruce Mazlis has pointed out, we still face a fourth gap, the gap between humans and machines. We are crossing this fourth hiatus.We don't have to choose between biological or mechanical, because the distinction no longer makes sense.Indeed, the most meaningful discovery in this coming century must be the praise, exploration and exploitation of technology and life that will soon be integrated.

The bridge between the world of living things and the world of man-made objects is the permanent force of radical disequilibrium—a law called life.In the future, the essence that organisms and machines will have in common—the essence that will distinguish them from all other matter in the universe—is that they all have an intrinsic drive to self-organize change. Now, we can assume that life is something in flux, obeying laws that humans can reveal and know, even if we don't fully understand these laws.In this book, I ask these questions to explore what machines and living things have in common: What does life want?I think about evolution in the same way, what does evolution want?Or more precisely, how do they see the world in terms of the respective interests of life and evolution?If we regard life and evolution as self-governing processes, to what goal do their selfish behaviors point?Where are they headed?What will they become?

In his poetic book Montana Space, Gerrit Eric writes: "The wildness has no condition, no sure course, no apex or goal, all sources surpass themselves for a moment, then let themselves go, always In becoming. Its complexity cannot be explored by CT scans or telescopes, but instead, wild truths have multiple sides, a frank and always unexpected nature, like the string of runner beans in the field under my feet. Wild strawberries. Wildness is at once source and effect, as if every river had its head and tail around it, and the mouth devoured the tail—swallow, swallow, swallow to the source..."

The purpose of wildness is itself.It is "cause and effect" at the same time, cause and effect mixed in circular logic.Eric’s so-called wildness, which I call the network of dynamic life, is a kind of outflow that is similar to mechanical force, and its only pursuit is to expand itself. It pushes its own imbalance to all substances, erupting and turbulent in living things and machines. Eric said wildness/life is always becoming.Generate what?Life is life, life is life, life is endless.On the road of life, life is more complex, deeper, more miraculous, and more in the process of generation and change.Life is a cycle of becoming, a self-catalyzed puzzle, self-igniting, self-supporting more life, more wildness, more "becomingness".Life is unconditional, producing something more than itself in an instant, all the time.

Wild life, as Eric alludes, is much like ouroboros, devouring its own tail, consuming itself.In fact, the wild life is even more strange. It is a ouroboros that is shedding its own body, spitting out a tail that becomes thicker and thicker, and the mouth of the snake continues to expand, and a bigger tail is regenerated, which overflows this strange scene. full of universe.