The correspondence below (using pseudonyms) is part of a longer correspondence that took place within Facebook during the summer of 2024. The original topic was the definition of “life”.

John: There is also an artificial intelligence that knows how to replicate itself or will know soon – robots that produce robots, software that produces software. Life is metabolism in a way that bypasses the laws of chemistry and physics and opposes them, such as a self-will of self-preservation and interaction with the outside, which is beyond chemical and physical actions of the laws of the “still” nature.

Bud: Nothing “bypasses” the laws of nature… there may be things that we know or know less about. And there is no theoretical prevention that sufficiently sophisticated future robots will have self-awareness and a feeling of self-will.

John: Biology circumvents the laws of physics and chemistry in a way that makes life possible, and it proves itself to be so.

Bud: Biology bypasses the laws of physics and chemistry? Biology is based on physics and chemistry! At what stage from the development of the first amino acids through primitive cells to mammals – did biology suddenly begin to bypass the laws of nature?

John: Chemical and physical interactions of a living biological creature with its environment and inside its body are different than the interactions when the same creature is dead with the same molecular structure of itself.

Bud: Death is a gradual process in which both the interaction changes and the molecular structure changes, and unfortunately in an irreversible way in which the processes that happened during “life” can no longer happen. And it’s all pure physics and chemistry. The only thing that deceives us is the “sense of existence” produced by complex neural structures (=brains) due to these processes.

John: Biology is above physics and chemistry, like a second floor above a first floor.

Bud: This is the second time you’ve written this, but these words mean nothing without some data to back them up. In practice, all the data we have (millions of pieces of data) show that biology is fully based on what we call physics and chemistry. You can linguistically name it “second floor above first floor”, but that doesn’t change the fact that brains and cuckoo clocks are subject to the exact same set of physical/chemical laws.

John: So how do you explain on a purely physical and chemical level that a mechanism of metabolism exists only in living things?

Bud: Materials “change” in any creature, whether living or dead, at some rate. In a living being, all different mechanisms function “in harmony” and each in turn produces what is required at some stage in the normal process. Take as an example a cuckoo clock in which an important spring is broken – the materials will continue to be the same materials, and perhaps some of the processes will continue to happen, but the main processes of the clock will stop happening.

John: What is this spring that differentiates between a living thing and something that was alive and just stopped living?

Bud: It’s an analogy (of course). This could be, for example, kidney failure, which leads to failure to remove various substances from the blood, which leads to the disruption of the intracellular chemical processes in the brain, which leads to stopping the passage of neurotransmitters between different neurons, which leads to the failure of electrical signals to reach the heart muscle, etc., etc. The multicellular creatures evolved into quite complex machines.

John: Can science resurrect the really fresh dead that lack the physical/chemical elements to trigger the physical/chemical “spring” that differentiates living organic matter from dead organic matter?

Bud: You’re missing the point. There is *NO* moment of death – such a moment is only a thing that is required legally, and therefore a measure is set which is associated with electrical activity of the brain that is lower than a reasonable threshold – such that experience proves that there is “no way back”. In practice, death is always a *PROCESS* that involves countless physical and chemical activities that influence each other, and it is not an immediate process. throughout this process there are substances that maintain the exact same laws of nature.

John: Can science produce a living cell from organic materials?

Bud: Yes, but with today’s technology it takes a very large amount of time, probably measured in millions of years, to use the appropriate statistical mechanisms.

John: Why is it so complicated to make a living cell from something inanimate? What statistical mechanisms are involved?

Bud: I will use the common term “reaction” to describe a relatively simple chemical or physical reaction/process based on the laws of chemistry and physics (for example: making nitroglycerin from glycerin and nitric acid). A simple living cell that is not formed from a previous cell – should be the product of thousands of different chemical and physical reactions. Given appropriate conditions – these reactions are carried out over a long period of time in parallel with millions of other reactions that are not relevant to the cell’s creation. Each of them separately may be carried out in a deterministic manner, due to previous circumstances. However, when zooming out and because of the size of the environment and the multitude of variables – to the human eye the overall process appears to be something random controlled by statistical laws. A good analogy for this is weather forecasting.