Biology asks how life works, while meta-biology or philosophy of biology asks what life fundamentally is. The meta of every science examines bigger questions, judges fundamental assumptions, and evaluates historical evolution. It questions practices, theories, and concepts, distinguishing facts from hypotheses. However, materialist tendencies have reduced philosophy of biology to a focus on reducing biology to lower-level sciences like chemistry and physics. With vitalism dismissed as an option, the door is closed to explanations for higher phenomena such as the uniqueness of human intelligence, purposefulness in humanity and nature, and the uniqueness of life itself.
The Physical Definition of Life and Its Limitations
Simple biology describes life as an organized, self-maintaining, energy-using process that preserves structure, interacts with environment, carries heritable information, and belongs to a lineage capable of evolution. Physicist Erwin Schrödinger suggested life is an ordered physical process that avoids decay by drawing order from the environment, preserving and transmitting hereditary order through a molecular code—life defies entropy as the individual actively maintains order. Life seems to coexist with the animate form in harmony, but the animate form's struggle against disorder serves to accommodate life, the vital force or soul that thinks, feels, contemplates, discovers, designs, chooses, and exercises profound agency.
Abstract Concepts Without Physical Basis
Life requires explanation in terms of functions, purpose, organism, fitness, adaptation, information, normality, individuality, and meaning—concepts without physical basis. The idea that all physical complexities and abstract concepts defining life can be reduced to physics and chemistry is naïve. Even physics and chemistry are not reducible to each other, and each science has controversies and unexplainable gaps. Many aspects are riddled with anomalies, which scientists often fill with hypotheses and theories that allow progress in desired directions. Theories are constructed even without factual data or empirical evidence.
Quantum Physics Challenges Materialism
In quantum physics, elementary particles display entanglement—they communicate regardless of distance. Two pre-entangled particles do not have specific spin but a probability of either. If particle A is measured as 'up', particle B instantly exhibits 'down'. This 'spooky action at a distance' is not explainable in classical materialism, so physicists bend materialism into physicalism or broader materialism, stating that physical systems can have shared states whose properties are not reducible to independent properties of their parts. If subatomic particles can connect across millions of miles, why cannot the human mind—filled with ideas, emotions, and spirituality—connect with reality at a distance? Deep human emotions should not be dismissed as nonsense or wasteful side-effects of evolution.
The Human Mind and Its Unique Capacities
The human mind is the seat of all scientific endeavors, philosophical striving, and questioning. Dismissing its uniqueness and higher intelligence compared to inanimate things and other living things would be self-deprecating. Materialism despises non-material connection, but humanity must decide whether to depose itself from being the most spiritually potent object in the universe to mere matter and atomic interactions. Life is not merely matter interacting with itself, organizing itself, or having an illusion of thought. It is matter that sees, hears, eats, wears clothes, discovers abstract structures, creates novel art and tools, and is conscious of itself and surroundings, recognizing love, purpose, and destiny.
Life as a Complete Experience
Life is a complete, fulfilling experience embodied in an animate form with organs, functions, growth, a sense of being alive, and self-preservation. When life exits, the form stops all functions and loses its sense of being alive. Life grows, nourishes, and flourishes with the animate form, loving its embodiment but urging for purpose and connection beyond mere matter. There is longing, passion, adventurism, inquiry, discovery, and belief that more is to be known. This urge gives human thought wings to explore subatomic realms and the edge of the universe, removing the person from mere survival and reproduction to an appetite for understanding, uncovering, traveling, and finding—remaining unfilled and urging for more after every finding.
