Reimagining Life. Emergent Complexity from Non-Living to Living

Preprint, 2024

The development of naturalistic approaches to complexity of life continues a lineage of thought from Prigogine’s thermodynamics to contemporary complexity science. The paper highlights the central themes of self-organization, emergence, and the interplay between physical, informational, and biological processes. Prigogine’s concept of dissipative structures and irreversibility provided a foundation for understanding complexity in physical systems, which later expanded into biology through Kauffman’s models of creativity and evolution. Margulis's endosymbiosis theory illuminate the cooperative dynamics underpinning life’s complexity, while Walker's work integrates thermodynamics and information theory to bridge the gap between chemistry and biology through multiscale interactions and adaptive dynamics. By synthesizing these perspectives, this article situates life as an emergent phenomenon shaped by interactions across scales, proposing a unified framework for understanding complexity in the natural world.