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Chalmers famously identified pinpointing an explanation for our subjective experience as the hard problem of consciousness. He argued that subjective experience constitutes a hard problem in the sense that its explanation will ultimately require new physical laws or principles. Here, we propose a corresponding hard problem of life as the problem of how `information can affect the world. In this essay we motivate both why the problem of information as a causal agent is central to explaining life, and why it is hard - that is, why we suspect that a full resolution of the hard problem of life will, similar to as has been proposed for the hard problem of consciousness, ultimately not be reducible to known physical principles.
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Biological molecules chose one of two structurally, chiral systems which are related by reflection in a mirror. It is proposed that this choice was made, causally, by magnetically polarized and physically chiral cosmic-rays, which are known to have a large role in mutagenesis. It is shown that the cosmic rays can impose a small, but persistent, chiral bias in the rate at which they induce structural changes in simple, chiral monomers that are the building blocks of biopolymers. A much larger effect should be present with helical biopolymers, in particular, those that may have been the progenitors of RNA and DNA. It is shown that the interaction can be both electrostatic, just involving the molecular electric field, and electromagnetic, also involving a magnetic field. It is argued that this bias can lead to the emergence of a single, chiral life form over an evolutionary timescale. If this mechanism dominates, then the handedness of living systems should be universal. Experiments are proposed to assess the efficacy of this process.
The origins of life stands among the great open scientific questions of our time. While a number of proposals exist for possible starting points in the pathway from non-living to living matter, these have so far not achieved states of complexity that are anywhere near that of even the simplest living systems. A key challenge is identifying the properties of living matter that might distinguish living and non-living physical systems such that we might build new life in the lab. This review is geared towards covering major viewpoints on the origin of life for those new to the origin of life field, with a forward look towards considering what it might take for a physical theory that universally explains the phenomenon of life to arise from the seemingly disconnected array of ideas proposed thus far. The hope is that a theory akin to our other theories in fundamental physics might one day emerge to explain the phenomenon of life, and in turn finally permit solving its origins.
We axiomatize the molecular-biology reasoning style, show compliance of the standard reference: Ptashne, A Genetic Switch, and present proof-theory-induced technologies to help infer phenotypes and to predict life cycles from genotypes. The key is to note that `reductionist discipline entails constructive reasoning: any proof of a compound property can be decomposed to proofs of constituent properties. Proof theory makes explicit the inner structure of the axiomatized reasoning style and allows the permissible dynamics to be presented as a mode of computation that can be executed and analyzed. Constructivity and execution guarantee simulation when working over domain-specific languages. Here, we exhibit phenotype properties for genotype reasons: a molecular-biology argument is an open-system concurrent computation that results in compartment changes and is performed among processes of physiology change as determined from the molecular programming of given DNA. Life cycles are the possible sequentializations of the processes. A main implication of our construction is that formal correctness provides a complementary perspective on science that is as fundamental there as for pure mathematics. The bulk of the presented work has been verified formally correct by computer.
Metabolic energy consumption has long been thought to play a major role in the aging process ({it 1}). Across species, a gram of tissue on average expends about the same amount of energy during life-span ({it 2}). Energy restriction has also been shown that increases maximum life-span ({it 3}) and retards age-associated changes ({it 4}). However, there are significant exceptions to a universal energy consumption during life-span, mainly coming from the inter-class comparison ({it 5, 6}). Here we present a unique relation for life-span energy consumption, valid for $sim$300 species representing all classes of living organisms, from unicellular ones to the largest mammals. The relation has an average scatter of only 0.3 dex, with 95% ($rm 2-sigma$) of the organisms having departures less than a factor of $pi$ from the relation, despite the $sim$20 orders of magnitude difference in body mass, reducing any possible inter-class variation in the relation to only a geometrical factor. This result can be interpreted as supporting evidence for the existence of an approximately constant total number $rm N_r sim 10^8$ of respiration cycles per lifetime for all organisms, effectively predetermining the extension of life by the basic energetics of respiration, being an incentive for future studies that investigate the relation of such constant $rm N_r$ cycles per lifetime with the production rates of free radicals and oxidants, which may give definite constraints on the origin of ageing.
It has been claimed that different types of causes must be considered in biological systems, including top-down as well as same-level and bottom-up causation, thus enabling the top levels to be causally efficacious in their own right. To clarify this issue, important distinctions between information and signs are introduced here and the concepts of information control and functional equivalence classes in those systems are rigorously defined and used to characterise when top down causation by feedback control happens, in a way that is testable. The causally significant elements we consider are equivalence classes of lower level processes, realised in biological systems through different operations having the same outcome within the context of information control and networks.
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