Life as Plasmas: Autonomy and Interactivism in-materio

2026-07-03

AI Summary

This study establishes the necessary physical conditions for material systems to qualify as living, prioritizing physical principles over behavioral, functional, or computational criteria. Building on an interactionist conception of minimal autonomy, it formulates a nonequilibrium phase framework and introduces a four-dimensional diagnostic phase space centered on physical autonomy, clearly distinguishing physical permissibility from biological sufficiency. Integrating nonequilibrium thermodynamics, information dynamics, and phase-space analysis, the work examines complex plasmas as a candidate system, with Bénard convection and digital self-replicating soups serving as comparative benchmarks to assess their physical basis for life. The findings indicate that while complex plasmas fulfill all minimal conditions for physical autonomy, they lack the informational inheritance mechanisms required for open-ended evolution, thereby delineating fundamental physical boundaries relevant to debates on machine consciousness and artificial life.

Abstract

When is a material system a candidate for life at all? We argue that this question is prior to behavior, functional architecture, or computational capacity, and that at root it is one of physical admissibility. We develop a framework in which minimal autonomy, taken in the interactivist sense of normativity grounded in self-maintaining far-from-equilibrium organization, corresponds to a distinct non-equilibrium phase of matter, and we take complex plasmas, a physical and non-biological system, as its in-materio exemplar. We formalize a diagnostic phase-space whose criteria (sustained free-energy throughput, organizational closure, active information maintenance, and regulated noise sensitivity) constitute necessary conditions for life-attribution. We instantiate the diagnostics across contrasting systems and fix the boundaries of the phase space via B\'enard convection as a driven baseline lacking closure, and a digital self-replicating soup that carries measured informational heredity while its physical closure remains a structural zero. We demonstrate that plasmas satisfy every admissibility condition for minimal physical autonomy while carrying none of the informational heredity that open-ended evolution requires, sharpening the distinction between physical admissibility and biological sufficiency, and bounding downstream questions of machine sentience.

Problem

• autonomy
• life
• non-equilibrium
• plasma
• physical admissibility

Innovation

• minimal autonomy
• complex plasmas
• non-equilibrium phase
• organizational closure
• physical admissibility