How Life Works

To what extent life is dictated by this Darwinian memory and to what extent it can draw on spontaneous ordering mechanisms is one of the central questions for understanding how it works. We’ve seen that we are a bit of both—but I do believe that our evolved nature creates a fundamental distinction from other examples of nonequilibrium order, not least because it is what laces our structures and behaviors with purpose and meaning—and with their expression as agency. We are, you might say, dust devils with goals, actively sustaining and maintaining ourselves while spinning off progeny that do the same. In the details of how that process occurs, thermodynamics still rules: we can’t escape its laws. But a thermodynamic description is not enough to encompass life: we are a qualitatively unusual sort of nonequilibrium system, and until we have a theory that accounts for that difference, we will not have a proper understanding of how life works.

What Makes an Agent? The key to agency is that the agent itself acts as a genuine cause of change: agents act on their own behalf...Yet causation is not some kind of mysterious force of nature. It can be measured and understood—and in complex systems it may arise at higher levels of organization rather than flowing up from the most atomized, reductionistic description, through causal emergence (p. 214)...Such an emergent concentration of “causal power” in an agent is what makes it distinct from a mere machine that transmits some event or signal from one locus to another.