What Is Life? - Evolution as Computation

What Is Life? - Evolution as Computation
Blaise Agüera y Arcas

Paperback

ISBN: 9780262554091

Pub date: March 11, 2025

Publisher: The MIT Press

170 pp., 4 x 6 in, 45 color photos

In 1944, quantum mechanics pioneer Erwin Schrödinger wrote a slim but influential volume, What Is Life?, posing the primary question that rendered biology so mysterious to a physicist. How can life and all its attendant complexities come to exist in a random universe, governed by simple laws, whose disorder only increases over time?

This small book, richly illustrated and written for a general audience, offers a deep and surprising answer, drawing on decades of theory and existing literature as well as recent experiments in artificial life. Beginning with ideas developed by Alan Turing and John von Neumann in the mid-twentieth century, Agüera y Arcas shows how self-reproduction, hence life, is inherently computational. Life evolves spontaneously in environments capable of supporting computation, like our own universe, and grows more complex over time as it enters symbiotic relationships with itself.

What Is Life? is also the first part of Agüera y Arcas’s larger book What Is Intelligence?, which further develops a computational and symbiotic perspective on intelligence, from simple organisms to brains and societies to AI.