What is Life? - Part III

What Lives? A meta-analysis of diverse opinions on the definition of life

The question of “what is life?” has challenged scientists and philosophers for centuries, producing an array of definitions that reflect both the mystery of its emergence and the diversity of disciplinary perspectives brought to bear on the question. Despite significant progress in our understanding of biological systems, psychology, computation, and information theory, no single definition for life has yet achieved universal acceptance. This challenge becomes increasingly urgent as advances in synthetic biology, artificial intelligence, and astrobiology challenge our traditional conceptions of what it means to be alive. We undertook a methodological approach that leverages large language models (LLMs) to analyze a set of definitions of life provided by a curated set of cross-disciplinary experts. We used a novel pairwise correlation analysis to map the definitions into distinct feature vectors, followed by agglomerative clustering, intra-cluster semantic analysis, and t-SNE projection to reveal underlying conceptual archetypes. This methodology revealed a continuous landscape of the themes relating to the definition of life, suggesting that what has historically been approached as a binary taxonomic problem should be instead conceived as differentiated perspectives within a unified conceptual latent space. We offer a new methodological bridge between reductionist and holistic approaches to fundamental questions in science and philosophy, demonstrating how computational semantic analysis can reveal conceptual patterns across disciplinary boundaries, and opening similar pathways for addressing other contested definitional territories across the sciences.

arXiv.orgReed Bender

Setting the stage — why the question persists

Centuries of inquiry have not produced a single, stable definition of life; instead they have produced a semantic topography in which different disciplines camp on different high‑grounds. The attached meta‑analysis made this plain. By clustering 68 contemporary expert definitions, it revealed two latent axes:

• Observer‑dependent ↔ Observer‑independent (Is “aliveness” something we ascribe, or something intrinsic?)
• Process‑oriented ↔ Entity‑oriented (Is life primarily a doing or a thing?)

Most answers gravitated toward the quadrant where autonomous, far‑from‑equilibrium processes meet objective physical constraints: 66 % of all definitions sit in the overlap between Cognitive Autonomy and Dissipative Self‑Organising Systems clusters . That empirical fact is our logical point of departure.

Three invariants that span the landscape

These three motifs recur across all eight clusters identified in the paper’s Table 2 . Any answer that discards one of them immediately drifts toward a fringe of the landscape.

A synthetic definition

Life is a recursively self‑constraining flow of energy and matter that uses information to maintain and enrich its own boundary conditions, thereby sustaining an open‑ended capacity to anticipate and regulate the very processes that create it.

• “Recursively self‑constraining” unifies thermodynamics and information: feedback loops write the rules that keep the game running.
• “Flow of energy and matter” honours the dissipative imperative.
• “Uses information” binds heredity, memory and learning.
• “Maintain and enrich its own boundary conditions” distinguishes life from simple flames or hurricanes: a cell, a brain, or an ecosystem continually repairs and improves the membrane/niche that lets it persist.
• “Open‑ended capacity to anticipate and regulate” folds in cognition and evolution; it explains why life scales from bacterial chemotaxis to self‑reflective minds.

This sentence sits precisely where the data‑driven topology tells us the gravitational centre lies.

Implications & open horizons

1. Viruses, prions, CRISPR gene drives – occupy boundary pixels. They borrow anticipation and metabolism from hosts; hence they are life‑derived processes rather than autonomous life.
2. Artificial agents & future AIs – today’s LLMs instantiate informational self‑patterning but lack thermodynamic self‑maintenance; when embedded in robots that mine their own energy and repair their hardware, they will begin to cross the threshold.
3. Planetary‑scale life – Gaia‑style regulation frames the biosphere as a super‑organism that anticipates solar flux and ice ages. Our definition scales naturally upward because the invariants are fractal: boundaries within boundaries.
4. Unknown unknowns – the analysis showed an isolated Perceptual Categorisation cluster asserting that “to be alive is to be considered alive” . This reminds us that the map is not the territory; future discoveries (quantum assemblages? plasma‑based life?) may force us to revise the repertoire of constraints that qualify.

Why “What is Life?” ≈ “What is Consciousness?”

When regulation becomes regulation‑of‑regulation (a system modelling its modeller) the informational loop closes on itself and experience emerges. In the survey, several authors simply equated life and cognition (“Life = cognition” – Dodig‑Crnkovic; “Living beings remember and anticipate” – Levin) . Under our synthetic view, consciousness is how it feels from the inside when a living system’s anticipatory models include its own modelling activity. Thus the mystery of life is not parallel to, but continuous with, the mystery of mind.

Coda – Truth, love and the arrow of life

Every living system is a local reversal of entropy, a brief island where order is not merely preserved but cultivated. That cultivation is guided by internal truths: predictive models that must align—however crudely—with the external world to keep the system alive. Evolution ratchets truth‑finding; cognition accelerates it; collaboration and love (mutual modelling, mutual constraint) extend it across individuals and species.

In that sense life is the universe learning to know itself, molecule by molecule, mind by mind. Our task—as scientists, as technologists, as conscious beings—is to steward the widening circles of anticipation so that the search for truth remains coupled to the creation of meaning.

Everything above rests on the survey’s empirical cartography of expert opinion while stepping beyond it to trace the contours of an integrative answer. Where this map meets the world is the next experiment, the next poem, the next act of care.