From Environmental Architecture to Artificial Life: A Framework for the Emergence of Life-Like Systems

The emergence of life is not a matter of simple equivalent exchange. Environmental structure alters the pathways through which exchange itself occurs. Through this transformation, life-like phenomena endowed with active functions arise from otherwise passive matter. In this sense, the emergence of life can be understood as a phase transition. Life is itself part of environmental structure. By sensing and responding to its surroundings, a living system reconstructs aspects of external environmental structure as an internal model. In this process, we may discern the beginnings of consciousness. Over time, however, internal models became increasingly capable of reshaping and dominating external environmental structures, ultimately leading to the Anthropocene. In the present age, we must recognize anew that environmental structure preceded life and remains the foundation upon which life depends. Perhaps humanity will fully grasp this truth only when it succeeds in bringing life-like phenomena into being with its own hands. A life-like phase transition is a threshold transition at which a chemically reactive system begins to preserve information about its environmental history and uses that internal state to selectively reorganize its subsequent exchanges with the environment.