What Is Life
Introduction: A Process, Not a Property
What does it mean to be alive? Historically, answers have ranged from divine essence to metabolic lists. From Aristotle’s animating soul to 20th-century biochemistry, every era defined life using the tools it had.
Contemporary science still wrestles with the question. NASA, for instance, defines life as “a self-sustaining chemical system capable of Darwinian evolution.” Others rely on checklists: metabolism, growth, reproduction, response to stimuli, and homeostasis. These are useful—but they describe outcomes, not principles. They tell us what life does once it's humming along, not how it keeps humming.
Biogenics offers a different frame.
Instead of traits, it defines life by three interdependent processes:
Self-Organisation (SO): the system structures itself from within.
Self-Production (SP): it builds, repairs, and maintains itself.
Self-Correction (SC): it detects error, adapts, and stays viable.
Together, these form the biogenic triad.
This model isn’t just elegant—it scales. It applies to cells, ecosystems, minds, even machines. It defines life not as a state, but as a thermodynamically open pattern that persists against entropy. And it leads us to a fourth concept: Biotropy.
Biotropy is the statistical tendency of living systems to maintain internal coherence by exporting disorder. It’s life’s thermodynamic signature.
The Triad Unpacked
Self-Organisation
Order emerges from interaction, not imposition. Whether it’s protein folding, neural wiring, or ant colony logistics, SO describes how local actions generate global coherence.
Self-Production
Autopoiesis in action: a living system doesn’t just contain order—it manufactures and regenerates it. This includes metabolism, cellular repair, and even cultural transmission.
Self-Correction
Systems drift. Error accumulates. SC is the feedback mechanism that keeps SO and SP from collapsing. It shows up as enzyme inhibition, immune response, emotional recalibration, or social reform.
Biotropy: Life’s Resistance to Entropy
According to the second law of thermodynamics, systems tend toward disorder. Life is the exception that proves the rule—by working around it. Open systems import energy (sunlight, nutrients) and export entropy (heat, waste).
Biotropy captures this behaviour: the recursive drive toward coherence. It doesn’t violate physics; it dances with it.
A Hierarchy of Persistence
Biogenics sees life as a nested hierarchy of organisation, each level exhibiting the core triad of SO, SP, and SC in distinct forms:
Subcellular Components: atoms, molecules, macromolecules, organelles
Cells: the minimal unit of autonomous biogenic process
Organisms: integrated systems that grow, adapt, and reproduce
Ecological Systems: populations, communities, ecosystems, biomes
The Bioverse: the totality of life—including theoretical or non-carbon-based systems elsewhere in the universe
Each level introduces new emergent properties while retaining the logic of the triad.
Technologies, while not yet fully autonomous, are beginning to exhibit biogenic behaviours—looping, adapting, and self-correcting—and may eventually integrate into higher levels of this hierarchy.—SO, SP, SC—in different forms.
Continuity and Communication
The levels of life communicate across scale:
Bottom-up: neurons shape thought; users shape platforms.
Top-down: institutions regulate behaviour; organisms alter ecosystems.
This recursive dialogue is what makes life not just complex, but adaptive.
Definition Revisited
Life is any system that persistently self-organises, self-produces, and self-corrects within an open, energy-driven environment.
This definition works for biology, psychology, ecology, and emergent AI. It excludes passive order (crystals) and inert code (unexecuted algorithms), while including processes that persist and adapt.
Why It Matters
This chapter lays the foundation for everything that follows. If you can grasp SO, SP, SC, and Biotropy, you have the core logic of life itself.
It’s not a checklist.
It’s a blueprint.
It explains not only what life is, but why it works—and how it might evolve.