Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of contributors
- Foreword
- Editors' preface
- Preface
- Acknowledgments
- Part I An overview of the contributions of John Archibald Wheeler
- Part II An historian's tribute to John Archibald Wheeler and scientific speculation through the ages
- Part III Quantum reality: theory
- Part IV Quantum reality: experiment
- Part V Big questions in cosmology
- Part VI Emergence, life, and related topics
- 26 Emergence: us from it
- 27 True complexity and its associated ontology
- 28 The three origins: cosmos, life, and mind
- 29 Autonomous agents
- 30 To see a world in a grain of sand
- Appendix A Science and Ultimate Reality Program Committees
- Appendix B Young Researchers Competition in honor of John Archibald Wheeler for physics graduate students, postdoctoral fellows, and young faculty
- Index
29 - Autonomous agents
from Part VI - Emergence, life, and related topics
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 29 March 2011
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of contributors
- Foreword
- Editors' preface
- Preface
- Acknowledgments
- Part I An overview of the contributions of John Archibald Wheeler
- Part II An historian's tribute to John Archibald Wheeler and scientific speculation through the ages
- Part III Quantum reality: theory
- Part IV Quantum reality: experiment
- Part V Big questions in cosmology
- Part VI Emergence, life, and related topics
- 26 Emergence: us from it
- 27 True complexity and its associated ontology
- 28 The three origins: cosmos, life, and mind
- 29 Autonomous agents
- 30 To see a world in a grain of sand
- Appendix A Science and Ultimate Reality Program Committees
- Appendix B Young Researchers Competition in honor of John Archibald Wheeler for physics graduate students, postdoctoral fellows, and young faculty
- Index
Summary
Writing in Dublin in 1944, Erwin Schrödinger sought the source of order in biological systems. Given the recent radiation mutagenic evidence on the target size of a gene showing that a gene had at most a few thousand atoms, Schrödinger argued that the familiar order due to square root N fluctuations around an equilibrium was insufficient because the fluctuations were too large to account for the hereditary order seen in biology. He argued that quantum mechanics, via stable chemical bonds, was essential for that order. Then he made his brilliant leap. Noting that a periodic crystal could not “say” very much, he opted for genes as aperiodic crystals which, via the aperiodicity, would carry a microcode specifying the ontogeny of the organism. It was a mere two decades until the structure of the aperiodic double helix of DNA and much of the genetic code were known.
But did Schrödinger's book, What Is Life? actually answer his core question? I think not, and the aim of this chapter is to propose a different definition, one concerning what I call an “autonomous agent,” that may have stumbled on an adequate definition of life. I will not insist that I have succeeded, but at a minimum the definition leads in many useful and unexpected directions with import for physics, chemistry, biology, and beyond.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- Science and Ultimate RealityQuantum Theory, Cosmology, and Complexity, pp. 654 - 666Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2004
- 13
- Cited by