We are surrounded by a living world. There are plants growing, insects humming, birds flying, animals and humans walking all around us. They all have something in common: a body, made of a just a few dozen different elements. The same elements we also find elsewhere: in the air, in the soil, in the water. In living creatures those elements are arranged in a way that can only be found there. And we wonder, how does this structure come into place? What causes it? And why isn’t it permanent, why does every living organism age and die?
Many individuals and cultures have approached those questions, and they did it in different ways. In the past decades, much time and effort was spent to find answers based on natural science. The The approach is as follows: We observe physical objects. We disassemble them, take them apart, split them up in the parts they are made of. We investigate how those components interact with each other. We find rules and establish chemistry. We make a model that can explain and predict the phenomena we observe. The atom model with its protons, neutrons and electrons in various energy levels are working well to grasp the behavior of matter. But only as long as this matter is not part of a living organism. There is no law in chemistry or physics that describes how a living organism shapes by putting together certain elements in the correct amount and condition. Living organisms exist, but how they came into existence cannot be explained with the laws of physics. An approach that refuses to accept anything but the laws of physics can assume that the first living organism capable of reproduction was the result of particles arranging randomly. This is rather unlikely from a statistical point of view and does not explain what drives the multiplication in the organism.
We can see that the laws of physics are valid in living organisms as well. We know the particles that they are made of, and we know the forces that they interact with. And we want to explain the formation and development of organisms with the laws of physics. So we look for the rules that cause the formation of elements visible in living things. The fact that those formations appear, even in our own body, suggests the theory that there must be forces and laws of nature causing such a structure. Our modern science assumes that there are dead particles to begin with, and looks for the cause of life within the rules that those particles create or are subject to. With that approach we can explain why the sun emits light and heat, and how a plant can use this to break the connection of carbon and oxygen. What cannot be explained is why the plant exists and why it grows.
A growing plant is not in conflict with the laws of physics, but cannot be explained by them. There are no features embedded in an atom that cause it to participate in the growth of a plant or another living creature. The exploration of life must therefore go beyond the atoms. Within modern science with its particle-based worldview there is hope that when further splitting up the components of the atom, the understanding of those even smaller pieces, or the translation of those pieces into energy, will at some point be able to explain life.
As a part of life we can also include thinking. Thinking shall also be originated in the laws of physics, in the forces between the particles. Thinking is viewed as a a phenomenon that occurs in complex living organisms and is assumed to be caused by the interaction of the particle structures the body of that organism is made of. Concluding from this both thinking and self-awareness and life in general is seen as a byproduct of structures predetermined by the laws of physics. Everything not rooted in matter is seen as speculative metaphysics or labeled “unscientific”.
On the other hand there is the idea that thinking is not produced be the interaction of particles in the body of complex living organisms, but becomes apparent in the physical world through those organisms. As an electromagnetic wave becomes hearable for the ear with a radio, thinking becomes visible in the physical world within living organisms. With this in mind it becomes clear that with an observation of the physical processes in an organism we can only investigate an outer appearance of thinking. To explore the nature of thinking and living, it is necessary to observe and study thinking itself. In other words, if we want to learn about music, we should not disassemble the radio, but we should listen to it.