Fumfer Physics 14: Dynamic Mathematical Organisms

In this dialogue, Scott Douglas Jacobsen and Rick Rosner explore the nature of organisms as products of evolution and information-processing systems. Jacobsen frames organisms as dynamic mathematical objects shaped by natural laws and mathematics, raising questions about higher purposes. Rosner highlights that many microorganisms, even without brains, display behaviours through tropisms and adaptive responses. Organisms survive by building internal models of their environment, predicting outcomes, and adjusting behaviour. They process sensory input through contextual frameworks that give information meaning. Rosner emphasizes evolutionary traits, the seven biological life processes, and the negentropic quality of life that maintains order in the face of entropy.

Scott Douglas Jacobsen: I often characterize people as material objects, but in a more generalized sense—as naturalistic objects. We have natural laws, including the laws of physics and the laws of nature. These generalize into abstract systems, such as mathematics and its descriptions. So I think of organisms as dynamic mathematical objects. Where does an organism fit informationally in the universe? Higher purposes? No higher purposes? Only our own purposes? No purposes at all? How does all of that fit together?

Rick Rosner: Organisms with brains raise one category of questions, but many organisms don’t have brains. Plants don’t. Single-celled organisms don’t. There are plenty of organisms that don’t think, but still display behaviours. When an organism has responses that don’t involve thought, they’re called tropisms, right?

Jacobsen: Sure. Whether an organism can think or not, it can still change its behaviour toward the world in ways that increase its chances of survival.

Rosner: I guess you could say natural organisms, as products of evolution, generally want to survive. In the future, we’ll have artificial organisms that are engineered not to prioritize survival necessarily.

But in general, there’s a tendency for things to want to persist. One of the most effective ways organisms avoid being killed is by developing an internal model of the world around them and using that model to predict what will happen moment to moment—so they can adjust their behaviour to minimize risk and maximize benefit.

As such, organisms are information-processing systems. They have a framework for the information they receive via their senses and by thinking about what they’ve received. For something to be “information,” it must be relevant to the organism. There’s a framework in the organism’s thinking that makes input into information—it provides the context that allows raw sensory input to become meaningful.

By analogy, any information-processing organism provides its own context that turns input into information.

As I’ve been saying recently, we don’t have a good understanding of the contexts of information regarding the universe. We take contexts for granted. We’re so deeply entrenched in our own human frameworks of knowledge that we often overlook the broader contexts of information.

To return to the question of what a natural organism is: organisms are products of evolution, and we can make some general statements. Generally, they’re able to exploit their environment. In the case of animals, they can change their behaviour to increase their chances of survival.

Generally, living things carry out what we were taught in high school biology as the “seven life processes”: breathing, eating, excreting, reproduction, movement, sensitivity, and growth. Those functions help distinguish living things from nonliving things.

Living systems are also negentropic—they maintain order and resist descending into disorder. That’s another core feature of life.

Scott Douglas Jacobsen is the publisher of In-Sight Publishing (ISBN: 978-1-0692343) and Editor-in-Chief of In-Sight: Interviews (ISSN: 2369-6885). He writes for The Good Men Project, International Policy Digest (ISSN: 2332–9416), The Humanist (Print: ISSN 0018-7399; Online: ISSN 2163-3576), Basic Income Earth Network (UK Registered Charity 1177066), A Further Inquiry, and other media. He is a member in good standing of numerous media organizations.