What Is Life?: Evolution as Computation

by Blaise Aguera y Arcas

What life is, and how its essence can be understood as computation that grows more complex over time in symbiotic relationships.

In 1944, quantum mechanics pioneer Erwin Schrödinger wrote a slim but influential volume, What Is Life?, posing the primary question that rendered biology so mysterious to a physicist. How can life and all its attendant complexities come to exist in a random universe, governed by simple laws, whose disorder only increases over time?

This small book, richly illustrated and written for a general audience, offers a deep and surprising answer, drawing on decades of theory and existing literature as well as recent experiments in artificial life. Beginning with ideas developed by Alan Turing and John von Neumann in the mid-twentieth century, Agüera y Arcas shows how self-reproduction, hence life, is inherently computational. Life evolves spontaneously in environments capable of supporting computation, like our own universe, and grows more complex over time as it enters symbiotic relationships with itself.

is also the first part of Agüera y Arcas’s larger book What Is Intelligence?, which further develops a computational and symbiotic perspective on intelligence, from simple organisms to brains and societies to AI.

Genres: Science, Philosophy, Nonfiction, Evolution, Biology, Artificial Intelligence

170 pages, Paperback

Published March 11, 2025

Reviews

[Sam Ackerman · Rating 5 out of 5]

As someone who doesn't read in this field too often, this was both accessible and completely mind-blowing. One of the best-designed books of the year too.

[mira p]

This book taught me the word symbiogenesis — an evolutionary process where two distinct species, tissues, or organisms merge through cooperative relations to form more complex lifeforms. This creates leaps in evolutionary development, a sort of exponential-scale merging of evolutionary lineages. This book asks… could the relationship between humans and technology be one of symbiogenesis?

I found this question fun and illuminating to explore, as the perceptible world around us gets slipperier and drippier. Thinking scale in this way is weird, for one, because we have gotten quite used to thinking we are independent beings with subtle moments of collective awareness, suggesting that we are life experiencing itself in THIS particular way… and therefore to think of more complex forms of life emerging from us (and quite quite quickly) is a bit unsettling.. but perhaps something along this line is happening whether we like it or not?

So I guess what I’ll say is, this book is smart, well written, and scratched my Deleuze-twitter itch. I would recommend it to any of the interdisciplinary science-tech-consciousness curious.

But also ….and perhaps most importantly… don’t forget to beware of AI’s dreams.…

[William Dorrell · Rating 4 out of 5]

A vaunting tour of a series of big ideas and what they can teach us about the famous 'what is life?'

At times I found myself aggravated by the sweepingness of the claims. Despite this, I ended up really enjoying almost every page. The ideas are really beautiful [so too is the book itself], and they are described in a superbly brain-tickling way.

I'm never sure if grand questions like 'what is life?' are useful. This time I was wholly convinced; I left with a pretty clear answer and many interesting corollaries.

I read this in a fevered 3 hours while unable to sleep on my friend's floor. I recommend you do the same.

[Craig · Rating 3 out of 5]

Full text available online at whatisintelligence dot antikythera dot org