Greetings Everyone from Florence.

I have not written in more than 2 weeks and my excuse is that I’m in the midst of an extended trip in Europe and England. Last week I was at small workshop outside of Siena. Now I am in Florence giving a talk on Technosignatures at the Arcetri Astrophysical Observatory and later this week I will be in London at the HowTheLightGetsIn festival giving a talk on our book The Blind Spot.

It’s all super fun (though I miss my beloved wife and our house and our pooch). The theme through it all though is the one which I write about here often these days- what is life?

What I am thinking about most this week is the problem of insides and outsides.

In trying to deal with building mathematical descriptions of life we have to use equations. But equations are always an outside view. You imagine yourself from a disembodied, objective perspective looking down on whatever system you are interested in: a bridge; an atom; a black hole. Then you write down equations that capture the important parts of that system. A bridge is made of steel cables supporting a road etc. This works really well for almost everything. It even works for living things if you only ask certain kinds of questions like how frequently genes gets passed down from one generation to the next.

But there is the one key aspect of life for which this fails. Life always “sees” the world from an inside persepective. Organisms individuate. They pull themselves out from the background swirl of their environments and become a whole, a unity that can never be broken lest the organism cease forever (death). When science fails to capture that inside view, it ends up with robots: mere collections of mechanisms fully specified from the outside view.

This is central mystery and it’s following me through the hills and cities of Italy. It’s especially poignant given that it was here in Florence that Galileo laid down the powerful foundations of that “outside view” science. So what powerful new foundations are needed for a new science of life?

I’ll be back to regular writing next week and will even have some announcements about future directions for this Newsletter.

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P.S. If you have specific questions or issues you want me to address leave a comment on the website or email me at [email protected]

— Adam Frank 🚀