IAS-research seminar by Jules Macome: “Does Origins of Life Research Define Life?”

Friday October 11 at 13:00 in Centro Carlos Santamaria Room 4. The talk will be hybrid. If you want to participate, please contact m.aste.tb2@gmail.com

Abstract: In origins of life research, there is an ongoing debate about whether it is necessary, possible, or useful, to define life in order to study its emergence. These disagreements often rest on varying views about what a definition amounts to. The various definitions of life depend on the field of study, the specific research programs being pursued, the type of definition (e.g., functional definitions are different from mechanical definitions), and the proponents relationship with the definition (e.g., conclusive definitions versus provisional or heuristic definitions). Getting bogged down on typological details about definitions distracts from the fact that, in any scientific field, robust conceptual assumptions about the object of study are made. In this talk, I argue that scientists cannot carry out research on the emergence of life without making significant assumptions about what life is. Thus, engaging with such an implicit understanding is necessary for a philosophically self-aware practice. I show that origins of life research works under two virtually unanimous assumptions about life. These are: (i) evolution by selection (chemical or natural) is the central driver of the origin of living systems (continuity thesis); (ii) explaining the emergence of a self-regulating system capable of undergoing evolution by natural selection would suffice to explain the origin of life. Taken together, these may be seen as a heuristic definition of life. By way of outlook, I question these assumptions and consider what research programs in origins of life research might be currently barred due to the entrenchment of (i) and (ii).

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About tvanes

Thomas van Es is a philosopher of cognitive science at the IAS Research Centre for Life, Mind and Society at the University of the Basque Country in Donostia, Spain, and the Centre for Philosophical Psychology at the University of Antwerp in Belgium. His current work focuses on enaction and dialectics. He has also published on science, autism, and the connection between enaction and the free energy principle and predictive processing.