A theory I came up with a few months ago is something I call the Inanimate Theory. The basic idea is that life as we understand it may not be fundamentally alive in the way we intuitively think it is. Instead, living organisms could simply be extremely complex arrangements of otherwise inanimate matter undergoing continuous physical and chemical reactions.
We often think of ourselves as separate entities inhabiting and controlling our bodies, almost as if there is a central observer, soul, or consciousness somewhere inside the brain making decisions, but there is currently no clear evidence that such a separate entity exists. Everything we associate with being alive, including seeing, remembering, experiencing pain, making decisions, reacting emotionally, and even thinking about ourselves, appears to involve physical processes occurring within the nervous system. In this view, there is no additional life force controlling these processes. The processes themselves are what we call life.
A simple analogy would be ice exposed to heat. The ice does not decide to melt. Its physical state changes because of the conditions acting upon it. Similarly, if a rock falls down a cliff, it does not choose its path. Gravity, momentum, collisions, friction, and the physical state of its surroundings determine how it moves. I wonder whether living organisms operate according to the same basic principle, except at an incomparably greater level of complexity.
At any given moment, the body and brain exist in a particular physical state, and interactions with the environment change that state into another. Light reaches the eyes, neural signals are produced, memories influence the response, emotions and thoughts occur, muscles move, and another state follows. From the inside, we describe this sequence as “I saw something, thought about it, felt something, and decided what to do,” but perhaps there is no separate “I” directing the process. The feeling of being a central observer or decision maker could itself simply be another process produced by the brain.
Even things such as pain may not require a separate nonphysical feeling of pain. What we call pain could be the nervous system detecting a certain physical condition, altering attention and behavior, creating memories, producing avoidance responses, and representing those processes to itself.
This would also mean that the boundary between living and nonliving things is less fundamental than it appears. Carbon, water, proteins, DNA, and the individual molecules making up a brain are not independently alive, yet when matter is organized into a sufficiently complicated, self maintaining, adaptive system, we call the resulting behavior life. Consciousness could therefore be another property or process that emerges from extremely complicated physical organization rather than something added to matter from outside of it.
I am not claiming that this proves souls do not exist, that free will has been disproven, or that I have solved consciousness. The main question I am interested in is this. What if life is not a fundamentally different kind of thing from nonliving matter at all, but simply what matter does when it becomes organized into an extraordinarily complex system capable of reacting to its environment, maintaining itself, modeling the world, and eventually modeling itself?
I would still have to do more research into this idea and refine some of its weaker points. If you have any questions, evidence that could support the theory, or arguments that challenge it, please leave them in the comments. I will answer them to the best of my ability.
