[Alamo-Girl]

Thank you for your reply! I see your "will to live" as part of a failed attempt to reduce biology to physics.

Er, the physical laws are preeminent in space/time. If there were failure, they would not be physical laws.

Matter has different properties and behaviors at different levels of organization. Physics can set limits to the component behavior of matter, but it cannot predict the behavior of matter at biological levels of organization.

Again, physical laws are preeminent in space/time. However, I do agree with you that biological systems are like machinery man invents to counter physical laws, e.g. the refrigerator.

For instance, information in biological systems is the reduction of uncertainty (Shannon entropy) in the molecular machine in going from a before state to an after state. Each bit gained has a corresponding dissipation of energy in the local surroundings (thermodynamics).

IOW, even though the biological organism acts willfully, it must always pay the tab of the physical laws in space/time.

Your problem concerning the will to live is really just a restatement of the problem of abiogenesis, which is admittedly unsolved.

It is not a "problem" to me and it is much, much more than abiogenesis!

The issue at bottom is the rise of complexity in biological systems - information, autonomy, semiosis. It may or may not look at abiogenesis v biogenesis. Complexity arose all along the fossil record. The investigators are mathematicians and physicists; the two main avenues are algorithmic information theory (Kolmogorov complexity) and self-organizing complexity (the von Neumann challenge).

IMHO, the biologists seem to have a much too simple concept of what life is. H.H. Pattee said they weren't even interested in the question.

[js1138]

Er, the physical laws are preeminent in space/time. If there were failure, they would not be physical laws.

But the human science of physics does not cover all possible physical laws. It does not cover the laws of matter as they relate to living things. I suppose it could in principle, but in practice it doesn't. The laws of matter for living things are a superset which include the laws that physicists study, but add properties that emerge in the more complex structures of living things.