What Is Life

Chapter 1. What Is Life

A definition through structure, not through properties

1. 1. The Problem of Definition

The question “what is life” has been asked for a long time, yet no satisfactory answer has emerged. Not because the question is too difficult, but because all known definitions look at life from the outside.

The classical biological approach enumerates properties: metabolism, reproduction, response to stimuli, growth, homeostasis. Each property is intuitively correct, but together they do not constitute a definition. A virus reproduces but does not metabolize. Fire grows and consumes resources. A crystal reproduces its own structure. For every edge case the list must be refined — and there is no end to this refinement, because a list of properties describes the manifestations of life, not its nature.

The thermodynamic approach (Schrödinger) is more precise: a living system maintains a local decrease of entropy by consuming negentropy from its environment. This describes a necessary condition for the existence of life, but not life itself. A refrigerator, too, maintains local order.

Autopoiesis (Maturana, Varela) comes closest to the essence: a living system continuously reproduces itself and its own organizational closure. Here, for the first time, the idea of closure appears — the system produces itself out of itself. But the mechanism of this closure remains unclarified: what exactly is reproduced, through which operations, in which space.

The Darwinian approach is the most popular today: life is that which is capable of heredity, variation, and selection. Its strength is operationality: the criterion is testable. Its weakness is that it describes a population over time, not an organism in the moment. This is a definition of life through its evolutionary consequences. An individual organism that will never leave offspring does not fall under this definition.

All these approaches describe life from the outside — through properties, conditions, or consequences. None answers the question of internal structure: what exactly happens inside a living system, which operations it performs, and why precisely those operations make it alive. The present chapter proposes a definition through structure.

1. 2. Conceptual Apparatus

Defining life through structure requires introducing four concepts.

Space — a set of dimensions that determines the type of entities and the character of the relations between them. Physical space, the space of symbols, the space of descriptions — each is characterized by its own ontology of objects: one and the same reality may be described in different spaces by fundamentally different entities.

State — the descriptive vector of an entity in a given space.

Transformation — the passage of an entity from one space into another, that is, a change of the state vector. Depending on the relation between the source space and the new space, three kinds of transformation are distinguished: convolution, splice, and chain. Each kind is described in a separate section below.

Gativus Transformation (GTR) — the complete cycle, comprising the sequential application of the three kinds of transformation with the possibility of a reverse pass.

1. 3. The Definition of Life

Life is a closed cycle of transformations: a passage from one space into another with a return to the original space in a new state.

This definition does not appeal to properties, conditions, or consequences. It names a structure.

A virus is not alive, because it has no closed cycle of its own — its transformations parasitize on another’s. Fire is not alive, because it has no return: the cycle is not closed. A crystal reproduces structure, but without a change of space — passage and return are absent.

The three kinds of transformation that constitute the cycle of life, and their concrete realization at each level, are the subject of the following chapters.