Biological Autonomy: A Philosophical and Theoretical Enquiry

Book Preface

Life as Autonomy

If we were to point out in a few wordswhat characterises the phenomenon of life, we would probablymention the amazing plasticity and robustness of living systems, the innumerable ways they adapt, and their capacity to recover from adverse conditions. All these capacities have been on the surface of our planet since the origins of life, and for this reason we have become accustomed to seeing life as something almost “normal”. And yet, looking at it from a more global perspective, life is quite an extraordinary phenomenon. In a short period of time (compared to the history of the universe), in a very tiny portion of the cosmos, a set of entities has managed to attain extremely improbable configurations, to keep them in farfrom- equilibrium conditions, and to thrive under these conditions: self-organising, proliferating, diversifying, and even increasing their complexity. Furthermore, this persistently organised system (or, rather, this global system formed by millions of local, individualised systems, which combine decay and reproduction) has been able to deploy a set of selective forces, modifying its environment so as to enhance its own maintenance. In a word, life seems to be at the same time an extraordinarily precarious (and improbable) phenomenon and a powerful, robust, and easily expansive one.

Actually, this astonishing capacity to maintain highly organised systems seems to be the easiest way to recognise universally living matter beyond the specificities of terrestrial life. Present-day theories estimate that the universe came into being 13.7 billion years ago, while our planet was formed approximately 9 billion years later. In this period of time, or perhaps later, forms of organisation similar to early living systems on our planet possibly appeared in other parts of the universe. Indeed, if life appeared on our planet when certain physicochemical conditions were met, other planets with similar conditions could also have once supported forms of life. This raises the question of how we could recognise these hypothetical extra-terrestrial living systems, and what would be the essential features of any form of (possible) life. In the last decades, this question has been widely discussed.

For some (Cleland and Chyba 2007), it is impossible to say how such “essential features of life” should be conceived, because we only knowlife as it manifests itself on Earth. Yet, if what we mean by “life” is anymaterial organisation that has evolved from non-living physicochemical systems (therefore obeying the universal laws of physics and chemistry) and has attained at least a degree of complexity capable of generating the properties we associate with the simplest forms of terrestrial life, we should be capable of recognising it anywhere in our universe, regardless of how differently these systems may be constituted (Ruiz-Mirazo et al. 2004). At the same time, the huge variety of life forms that have appeared during the very long history of life on our planet (Ward and Brownlee 2004) might downplay the argument that we have had access only to a unique example of life among a hypothetically huge set of extra-terrestrial biological systems. Be that as it may, when facing the question of the nature of life, we could not do otherwise than formulate theories based on – and tested against – life as we know it

Contents

• 1 Constraints and Organisational Closure
• 2 Biological Emergence and Inter-level Causation
• 3 Teleology, Normativity and Functionality .
• 4 Agency.
• 5 Evolution: The Historical Dimension of Autonomy .
• 6 Organisms and Levels of Autonomy .
• 7 Cognition..
• 8 Opening Conclusions