The biological research putting purpose back into life | Aeon Essays
These hypotheses suggest that deep principles govern the emergence of problem-solving matter, principles that push our understanding of modern physics and chemistry towards their limits. They mark a radical departure from life as we once knew it.
David C Krakauer • Life Is Starting to Look a Lot Less Like an Outcome of Chemistry and Physics, and More Like a Computational Process
Weinberg’s vision of a universe without purpose or meaning has become so much the scientific orthodoxy that it is almost obligatory for biologists to insist on it too. Words like purpose, meaning, even function, are treated with a caution bordering on disdain in the life sciences. At best they are corralled with scare quotes that proclaim them mere
... See morePhilip Ball • How Life Works: A User’s Guide to the New Biology
The organism simply needs mechanisms for evaluating the value of that feature and acting accordingly. Looked at this way, life can be considered to be a meaning generator. Living things are, you could say, those entities capable of attributing value in their environment, and thereby finding a point to the universe.
Philip Ball • How Life Works: A User’s Guide to the New Biology
do strive as individuals, but we are also part of something larger than ourselves, with a complex physiology and mental life that we carry out but only dimly understand.