Nicole Flynn
Every position in this debate, Thiel's included, rests on two words used as if they were understood: biology and technology. Neither is. There is no agreed definition of life. NASA's working definition, a self-sustaining chemical system capable of Darwinian evolution, is a convenience for instruments, not an account of what life is. Schrödinger's is thermodynamic; a system that holds itself away from equilibrium by feeding on order. Maturana and Varela's is autopoiesis; a system that produces the components that produce it. Prigogine's dissipative-structure view treats life as one class of the patterns that Earth's energy gradients throw off, not a separate kind of thing at all. Hundreds of definitions have been published and the reviews of them say plainly that they do not converge. 2 "Biology" names a discipline and a collection of observed cases. It does not name an understood object. The same is true of technology, in a stronger form. Technology is not reducible to human intention; the self-organizing tendencies it channels are older than life. 3 But neither has it achieved independence from the biological, material, and institutional assemblages through which it is produced. The channeling still runs through organisms, and, as Butler saw in 1872, humans may be part of the machines' reproductive system. Their reproduction is real, but it is not independent. Physics supplies a third case. Quantum mechanics is the most successful theory ever constructed, and its practitioners do not agree on what it says; surveys of working physicists find no majority for any interpretation of the measurement problem. 4 The largest quantum programs in the field's history are building computers on a formalism whose meaning its builders have not resolved. The apparatus does not wait for the definition. It selects the part that can be engineered and proceeds, and the unresolved part is filed as philosophy. So the pattern holds across all three terms. Life, technology, and the physics beneath both are known by what they do under Earth's conditions and by what the human apparatus can make of them, not by what they are. The definitions do not converge. What if there are things we cannot know because we lack the senses to perceive them, the tools to measure them, or the language to hold them? What if the limit is not one we will someday cross, but a constitutive feature of being what we are? Our representations are products of what we can transduce; we ourselves are formed within everything that exceeds those representations, whether known or not.