Modeling Life and Consciousness as Qualities (LB853)

Abstract

We are familiar with the so called seven characteristics of life, featured in text books. These by themselves only describe a typical living being, but not what represents “life”. While mathematical modeling in dynamical systems have been done, by many investigators including this author, to simulate biochemical and biophysical processes in vivo, in health and in disease, a description of what life is has been elusive.One may ,however, say that at the moment of death, everything in the body ( viz molecules and their motions ) remain identical to what it was at the last moment of life. The difference being that Life has something more than the underlying physical and chemical aspects, more than the reductive elements. 'Life' is a totality, which is more like a flow, i.e. a time derivative or differential, as in Zeno’s paradox on “arrow in flight”. This is what may be called , in a dialectical sense, a new quality that is 'life'.Something else accompanies life in animals having a full‐fledged nervous system . Through the sense organs, the system, a living being or an animal, perceives all that happens ; it also stores, compiles and integrates all incoming information as on a hard disk for later use. This has to do with what we call consciousness, a much discussed aspect of life. Now if one becomes unconscious but still alive, we may use the same metaphor as above; i.e. that all the molecular information are the same at the moment one conscious animal becomes unconscious, making the flow of consciousness a 'totality'. Call it manifestation, emergence or qualia, it really represents a quality in the dialectical sense.This ability, however, needs the input of vital energy from life, implying that consciousness needs life but not vice versa, though ‘life’ may need the autonomic nervous system (involuntary nervous system) acting largely below the level of consciousness.