Any arbitrary complex chemical reaction system perceives itself as life, from its viewpoint

That was taken into account in my statement.

What do you mean?

 

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Life in the beginning was limited spatially into a small chemical system, interacting with external energy. It was thus, a unique and separate chemical system. Through the eons, that system got larger and more complex, and it created us that we live inside it, as a part of it. However, for an outside observer, life nowadays came from, and remains exactly the same system as it was before, only it became larger and more complex.

Indeed, no cell or animal or plant can be created is isolation. They are integrated inside a bigger system that is: Life as a whole.

And if life as a whole is studied only as a unique entity (without subdiving into cells, organisms, etc), what about its entropic changes over time, from the beginning up to now, with all the complexity we see? Maybe that of any complex chemistry that interacts with external energy and increases its entropy? What are the scientific data on this?

 

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Fortunately, i think many steps in our understanding of how life have emerged will be made in the near future. We have recently discovered liquid water on Mars. Very soon we will be able to rule in or rule out all those water-based theories. Additionally, we have found that crater Gale is the bottom of an ancient watery lake that existed for a significant amount of time in the past. This is evidence that the climate of Mars used to be warmer and the atmosphere thicker. However, to my opinion, no fossils or any organic remnants of ancient microbial life suggests that life probably never existed there despite the presence of water.

Additionaly, scientists have recently found blue skies and complex light-induced chemical interactions near the surface of Pluto that lead to more and more complex molecules....

Moroever, some recent experiments are degrading living cells to test what are the boundaries between biology and chemistry!!

We definitely live in exciting times...

 

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Recent understandings on the mechanisms behind carcinogenesis and metastasis can be summarized on the following 2 key points:

1)All tumors (and other diseases) are different from person to person. Even tumor cells from a single individual are different.

2)Cancerous behavior is not only a matter of genetic material. It has to do with a complex and reciprocal cross-talk between cells and their environment. Extra-cellular matrix is not static, but on the contrary is very dynamic. Genes by themselves are not enough.

In a nice lecture, Mina Bissel explains all these findings



And my question is this:

Isn’t it obvious that all these discoveries suggest that actually it is all just a matter of complex chemical reactions after all? They (reactions) all belong in a system that can be seen as a catalogue of chemical reactions. Some happen intra-cellularly and others happen extra-cellularly, but why does this matter? They all belong in a unique catalogue of spontaneous chemical interactions.

And as explained before, the whole life can be explained in that way…

 

What do you mean 'after all', I do not recall anyone disagreeing that life is essentially a series of rather complex chemical reactions?

 

As a bi-monthly modified reiteration: Bacteria can detect changes in temperature, surrounding chemical conditions, signals from other bacteria, etc. But they lack the information processing complexity (cognitive creativity and type discrimination) to produce conceptions or classifications of themselves as "life". Lesser organizations or systems of matter would be minus even primeval receptors and simple mechanistic responses, and thus would be further removed from a capacity for any thought or interpretation (not just the abstract variety). What can be said is that if something possesses structure and engages in activities that conform to a human definition of life, then it is sort of outwardly proclaiming itself to be such to existing intelligent agents which carry that concept. But internally that doesn't always mean it has sensations and the equipment (especially memory) to output ideas in applicable response to certain electrochemical stimulations and patterns (or via whatever mediums happen to input / convey and substantiate excitation and pattern).

 

To clarify; life involves a series of complex chemical reactions, however a complex chemical reaction no matter how complex does not by itself mean that it is life.

 

Ok! A complex chemical reaction system by itself is not life, but tell us what will dictate the fate of these complex chemical reactions that avoid equilibrium (suppose there are some organics as well, with complex stereochemistry and isoforms that its difficult to reach chemical equilibrium anyway!!!). After many many years, or even eons what will be the phenotype of this system? What will dictate what kind of chemical reactions will be there in the end? Maybe a kind of chemical selection and survival of those reactions with survival capacities?

Once again, this is not life, but If the resulting system is identical to life, who cares about human made definitions?

Don’t forget that we are the observers of all this. Imagine that you see natural laws from the perspective of bacteria. Human seems to do exactly the same things as them (eat, interact with environment, replicate etc), but in a different, more human-centered way. Compared to simple organisms, we have more complicated social (and chemical) networks, possibly similar to ants or bees…Unless that you think that our ability to make plans how to flirt or to become rich, to ensure our food is something different in quality, than the ability of bacteria to do things to achieve essentially the same goals (food, reproduction etc). As per self perception and philosophy, never forget that even these functions are chemically based, and you can easily figure this out with the imaging analysis of a person that is thinking…..


FURTHER CONSIDERATIONS:

In the chemical machine of the human body, the first and initial substrates that fuels everything are the products of the interaction between food, gut bacteria and gut epithelial cells. Theoretically, in a mechanistic way, alterations in these initial complexes can profoundly influence the function of the entire body. We are just beginning to explore this…


On the other hand, cancer immunotherapy constitutes one of the most promising new areas of research, as it is known that some patients can achieve vigorous tumor responses. However, only a minority can benefit. The question is why, and what can we do to unlock this mechanism of tumor destruction in more and more patients.


A ground braking research published in “Science” (Sivan et al.) very recently has shown that by selectively modulating gut bacteria, you can boost a strong anti-tumor effect of specific immune cells to destroy the tumor cells. To my opinion, this is very important step in our effort to unlock and exploit the immune system towards the directions we want…

 

In a system in which living beings are mechanistic systems of chemical reactions, actually what is there is extremely complex (and complicated) chemical automatons. Aging comes as a process that involves a change in chemical systasis of the system over time, as the phenotypes of younger and older organisms are different.

As we said, this implicates that we can theoretically control the change rate, by controlling the initial substrates of the system (e.g. food, gut bacteria). In theory you can have a certain combination of initial substrates and environmental factors in which changes in the living system are reduced to a minimum.

But, how do we know how to reach this state of stability?

Answer: By analyzing the end products of the system. If they have constant synthesis, this means that the chemical reactions are repeated as they are, and no changes occur. If their synthesis changes, it is an indicator that we must modify the initial substrates.

This method can also serve as a way to experimentally test this theory, because if the rate of stability of the gut content is correlated with aging delay, it means that actually living beings are in fact chemical automatons, and it would open new ways to approach human diseases…

Just a thought!

 

Question: How can systems of primordial and inorganic chemical reactions with the help of external energy can avoid chemical equilibrium and go towards a constantly increasing complexity state?

Answer: First of all, if you have a large number of initial substrates and they are reacting with other bidirectly, then the number of substates will be increasing by time. Additionally, at the time that organic molecules with different stereochemistry will be formed, then the possibility of equilibrium will be virtually vanished, as now the possible ways of molecular interactions would be infinite. In fact, after some time, only organic-based reactions will be present and selected, because all the others would be lost in equilibrium.

In conclusion, we see that a perpetually increasingly complex system of organic chemicals with infinite stereochemical variations can easily be created, provided there is a source of external energy in the system. As a result of this complex system, nucleic acids will be formed (inevitably), as well as membranes. Thus, the latter are both not necessarily the starting point of life, as they can easily occur as a consequence of life.