the history of evolution, from the inert to the living world to the human, is a magnificent story of emancipation of the forces of conservation constantly opposed to the forces of alteration. They are present in the inert, of course, engaging counter-entropic forces (antimatter, etc.).
The constitution of organisms (with a membrane with an inside and an outside), with a first stage of complexity organized around an autonomous functioning and a logical capacity to react to an environment trying to alter them, constituted the first threshold of emancipation of the forces of conservation with respect to inert matter. The grouping into eco-communities and then into multicellular organisms constituted a second threshold. Reproduction constituted the third threshold crossed by the forces of conservation in their long process of emancipation. To illustrate this, it has recently been shown, for example, that the aging of bacteria has been controlled by nature through reproduction. Indeed, these bacteria age and die by accumulating “waste” proteins that are generated by their metabolism and not eliminated. The reproduction of bacteria allows an ongoing dissolution of this level of “waste” proteins and therefore the survival of the species.
The mobility achieved by living creatures probably marks a fourth threshold which, as we have seen, led to the first spatio-temporal formalisms in hominids and probably in a certain number of animals in different forms to those associated with consciousness. The conquest of the conscious mind by humans constituted the fifth, allowing them to compensate for their poor physical performance in terms of survival through intelligence and imagination. Transhumanists also believe that history is not to be written in the traditional theories of evolution and that other thresholds in terms of conservation will soon be crossed, such as the eternal safeguarding of a dematerialized human being, placed in memory, or the emergence of an indefinitely repairable post-human.
To use the word purpose therefore means crossing a very delicate line between the physical and the metaphysical, a barrier that Max Planck crossed in a somewhat chance way at the end of his life:
As a man who has devoted his whole life to the most lucid science and the study of matter, I can tell you this in conclusion to my research on atoms: there is no matter as such. All matter originates and exists only by virtue of a force which causes the particles of an atom to vibrate and which sustains this entire atomic system together. We must assume behind this force the existence of a conscious and intelligent mind. This mind is the matrix of all matter3.
It is no coincidence that this statement by Planck, one of history’s great physicists, in Florence in 1944, three years before his death, has been widely reported on the Internet. It has given rise to heated debates on social networks. Attempts to lay claim to it are legion. Many who do not have the scientific background to understand what Max Planck was talking about embark on vague theories about “God, or no God”. Believers, sometimes in a breathtaking esotericism of stupidity, use this phrase to say that “non-believers” are idiots. Or they refer to this sentence to try not to be taken as such if they believe in God or in the forces of the spirit, a famous phrase from François Mitterrand’s farewells. We know to what extent this attempt to cross the line between the physical and the metaphysical is a high-risk exercise. It unburies the hatchet between science and religions, even if metaphysics is a broader concept. It opens the way for the conscious self to take possession of spirituality, according to Erich Neumann (1954).
From a temporal point of view, another fundamental difference can be deduced from the above. Thus, the temporality of a machine is thought of as a succession of times “following” a “current” time, whereas for a living organism, the current time is entirely stretched towards the next time in the name of a contingent teleology which is conservation. The living world is endo-contributive, its contribution being entirely directed towards this contingent teleology.
From this point of view, there is a second, even more interesting, difference. A dog continuously exhibits the phenomenological reality of a dog in its environment. It is continuous as a dog, and it is the mathematization of its biological localities that will produce a discontinuity. For example, the equation of its morphogenesis and the mathematization of its cardiac functioning will segment it while its complex reality, including its relationship with the human living with it, will be fundamentally unified.
We have seen that in the mathematical–physical epistemological space, formal continuity creates real continuity. For the biological living being it is the opposite because the living object is substantiated by a continuous self-referencing of its behaviors.
The question that will be key to the development of non-programmable artificial intelligence – i.e. a “machine” place where the existence of the machine (experiential learning for deep learning machines) would take precedence over its essence – is: Is it capable of breaking the hermetic barrier between the inevitably exo-distributive machine and the inevitably endo-contributive living machine? We will return to this by asking the question: Can an endo-contributive machine be considered alive? This obviously brings the question back to that of the possibility of consciousness of a machine which immediately opens the debate on transhumanism. Are we on the eve of a new dawn of emancipation of the forces of conservation?
1 1 Homeostasis is the stabilizing ability of living organisms to perform dynamic adjustment functions according to the environment or the stresses it is subjected to (temperature, pressure, chemical composition, etc.).
2 2 By coding the possible proofs in a formal theory given by arithmetic numbers, Gödel shows that statements that we would intuitively consider true are neither provable nor refutable in this formal theory.
3 3 Max Planck’s famous speech given in Florence, Italy in 1944 entitled Das Wesen der Materie (“The Nature of Matter”). Retrieved from Archiv zur Geschichte der Max-Planck-Gesellschaft, Abt. Va, Rep. 11 Planck, Nr. 1797.
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