What is Life?

❤️ I just received Blaise Aguera y Arcas's wonderful little treasure, 'What is Life?", a play on Erwin Schrödinger's opus of the same title, published as the first tome of the Antikythera series as part of Nicolas Berggruen's constellation of philosophical ventures. Here we get a subtitle that narrow things down (a bit): "Evolution as Computation". According to Blaise "Erwin", a general understanding of life came from computer science and in particular Alan Turing and John von Neumann.

⚡ Turing's reaction-diffusion (from his 1952 article "The Chemical Basis of Morphogenesis") is a foundational concept in Artificial Life, a discipline dedicated to studying life as it could be, not just life as we know it. I fell in love with Artificial Life through a random 1991 encounter at the Harvard Coop bookstore and have been an editor of the journal since 1994. Reaction-diffusion and its cast of characters (e.g., morphogens) would be discovered in chemical and biological systems many years later. My friend Hans Meinhardt re-invented it from East Germany without knowledge of Turing's article. And von Neumann's link between life and computation had a deep influence on our interpretation of biological phenomena as computation. For example, the central dogma of biology 🧬 is really an embodiment of von Neumann's insight.

Blaise uses a variant of the minimalistic model Brainfuck 😵‍💫 , which he calls bff, to illustrate the interplay of dynamics, thermodynamics, self-organization, emergence and evolution. At 157 short pages, it is obviously not a final theory of life and evolution but an artistically augmented, delightful journey through some fascinating history. Count me as a fan!