Contenders for life at the dawn of the twenty-first century: approaches from physics,biology and engineering

Abstract

My theme is the concept, and the term, ‘self-organisation’. Originally introduced by Immanuel Kant to characterise the unique properties of living organisms, the term's history is inseparable from the history of biology. Only in the second half of the twentieth century, however, does it begin to acquire the promise of a physicalist understanding. This it does with two critical transformations in its meaning: first, with the advent of cybernetics and its dissolution of the boundary between organisms and machines, and second, with the mathematical triumphs of non-linear dynamical systems theory and accompanying claims to have dissolved the boundary between organisms and complex physical systems. This paper focuses primarily on the second transformation.