How does the normativity of life arise and what does it consist of?

Authors: Nathaniel F. Barrett, Miguel García-Valdecasas and Javier Sánchez-Cañizares.
Unpublished text
Publication date: 2025.

summary
Life and its origin remains a fascinating problem for scientific research . Despite countless advances in fields such as molecular biology, we still do not have a peacefully accepted model of how life originated on Earth, nor, of course, the probability of life on other planets. Various approaches to the problem prioritize the replication of systems (reliable transmission of information with the capacity to adapt), metabolism (capacity to receive and administer energy available in other systems), or a symbiosis of both capacities from an initial biomolecule that could bring together the best of them (RNA world). There are also, of course, more radical approaches that speak of an extraterrestrial origin of life or even external to the Milky Way.

Regardless of how they have arisen, the living systems we know are characterized, synchronically, by a complex self-production, self-organization and adaptation to the environment, which allows them to maintain and regenerate themselves, under certain conditions, when their identity is compromised by a threat. The Philosophy of biology, the field of Philosophy that studies life from a fundamental perspective based on biological data , usually describes the activity of the living as normative behavior: the ability to distinguish between better or worse states and to act accordingly. But if we accept that inert systems are insensitive to such a distinction, how does normativity arise in organisms?

Living beings, in general, behave in agreement reasons beneficial to their survival even before they are able to know or represent these reasons, much less know why they are beneficial to them. The "enactivist" current in the Philosophy of biology, inspired by the ideas of the philosophers Maturana and Varela, holds that every living being is normative because of the autonomous activity through which it generates, regulates and maintains its own organization.

Although it cannot be reduced to them, life also depends on physics and thermodynamics. From this perspective, every living thing embodies a tendency to partially oppose the general increase of entropy in the universe. As is known, entropy is a measure of the Degree of disorder or dispersion of energy available in a system. That is why all living things have to keep their entropy in leave . In this sense, they take advantage of the entropy leave the energy they consume from the outside (ultimately from sunlight) to self-organize, keeping their internal entropy limited, while expelling to the outside a degraded energy, of high entropy, which is no longer useful to them.

Some philosophers of biology such as Rod Swenson, influenced by "ecological psychology", claim that living beings are characterized by performing such energy exchange in an optimal way, according to the so-called "Law of Maximum Entropy Production": given the circumstances, living beings consume quality energy at the highest possible rate. However, other dissipative natural systems that are not necessarily living (such as whirlpools in the air, eddies in water, or even black holes in the universe) also comply with this principle. So, even if it is necessary, as Jeremy England has shown in recent years, is the thermodynamics of non-equilibrium sufficient to understand the normativity of life?

More recent approaches, such as the "teleodynamics" of Terence Deacon, consider that it is impossible to understand life without teleology; that is, it can only be understood with a more robust idea of normativity that incorporates finality. Living beings are distinguished from other beings by the emergence of a new way of organizing thermodynamic work for the benefit of themselves. This would be made possible by the synergistic coupling of two common chemical processes: autocatalysis (self-stimulating chemical reactions) and the self-assembly of molecules (to form an insulating barrier). This primordial symbiosis between processes of opposite sign may have made possible the emergence of the first form of normativity. However, not all biologists nor all philosophers of biology admit such a description as sufficient because it would imply the existence of a "Chemistry rules and regulations" before the training of LUCA ("the Last Universal Common Ancestor").

The project "Normativity and Origin of Mind" (NOM), led by researchers of the Mind-Brain group of the Institute for Culture and Society of the University of Navarra, and funded by the Ministry of Science, Innovation and Universities of the Government of Spain, explores the similarities and differences between the aforementioned currents of Philosophy of Biology and puts them in dialogue with scientists and philosophers. Starting from a non-reductive naturalism, in which concepts such as agency, values and ends have a place, the NOM project aims to find a common ground from which to advance in the understanding of the origin and characteristics of the normativity of life.