What laws do life follow?
Is everybody familiar with Newton's laws of motion?
How about the laws of thermodynamics?
And Ohm's law?
And every other law we've discovered? My goodness, there are many. Anybody who has studied physics has studied these laws and uses them to make predictions, both of the future and the past. Engineers use them to build systems which provide our desired functionality.
How were they discovered? Richard Feynman once likened the discovery of such laws to the discovery of chess' rules by merely observing countless games of chess. That's a peculiar thought. We know chess' rules because we created them. We don't know the laws of the universe, because we didn't create them. The only way to discover them is through observation, trial and error.
But something that has always bothered me about these laws is which of them are used to describe life? Some state life abides by the very same laws which the rest of the universe does. I am sure this is correct. But I am also sure that none of the discovered laws explain why the cross-section of a forest may look something akin to the following...
Imagine you have never observed life before and you don't know what it is. Try explaining the above pattern using only our current laws of physics. Assume all you can see is none-life (i.e. the dirt) and tell me how the dirt came to be displaced like that. I don't think it's possible.
So if our universe is governed by laws, and none of them can be used to explain the above, there must be a law or laws we haven't discovered/defined yet.
I now propose a set of such laws which all life abides by.
Axiom - Life, by definition, has a self.
Laws -
Life acts in accordance with its self.
Life takes those actions which are best for its self.
Life can be created and destroyed.
Principal of Continuation - Life's most fundamental goal is to keep living.
The Relativistic Good Postulate - Good and bad exist only if life exists and are relative to life's self.
With these laws in mind, I believe life can be modeled as a control loop, where the self is the control algorithm, sensors provide input, and anything that can be moved by the self provide output.
Now, using these laws, I can explain why the forest floor looks like that picture. This particular lifeform needs certain nutrients to survive. It senses such nutrients exist most within the surrounding soil. In an attempt to access such nutrients, it burrows part of its self into the earth and starts absorbing the nutrients.
It learns once the nutrients is taken, it becomes depleted. It senses that its self is not very mobile, so it decides to keep growing its self in multiple directions. This increases the probability that it will find the nutrients it needs at any given time, as it continues living. Additionally, it learns that spreading its self further and deeper allows it to live longer and survive the push of outside forces, which may knock it over and kill it.
I believe describing life in such a way has far reaching impacts on how we understand ourselves and our relationship with the universe. We are a component of the universe and we affect it. Just look at Earth. Earth would not look anything as it does now without the life living on it.
In order to understand the future of the universe, we must add life into the equation. In order to add life into the equation, we must discover its laws. Hopefully this is a good first step.
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