Sep 28, 2026 · 24 min · 10 segments
Physics always obeys equations. Biology does not. Sometimes... but not always! There is scarcely any formula in biology that is 100% true. In biology, there is no precise definition of life, species…
So in life, in the world, I see three very different levels of causation that exist.
The first level is physical chemical laws, and those are the things that Eugene Wigner was talking about in his paper.
Gravitation and electromagnetics and waves and all the things in physics that very often exact equation, exact answer exist.
And as far as I know, if you go to a dead planet with no life on it, that is the only kind of causation that you will find, as far as I am aware.
So these are universal laws, and change over time within these laws is order to disorder, entropy.
Then the second layer is logic, symbolic logic, like we have in computers or DNA.
symbols, communication, computation, languages, machines, algorithms, genetics, that occupies a middle level.
And as far as we know, these laws are not derivable from physics and chemistry.
Nobody knows how to derive the genetic code or English or any other language from the laws of physics and chemistry because the symbols are freely chosen.
And they are local rules that are local to a system or a culture or to a cell.
Then there's the highest level of causation is cotton, which is choice, which is at least somewhat synonymous with consciousness.
Cognition is inductive reasoning, not deductive reasoning, which I will get to in a second.
And change over time is disorder to order, which is negentropy, which is a term that Erwin Schrodinger coined in 1943 in his book, What is Life?, I raised $10 million from private equity investors and organized a $10 million prize for the origin of the genetic code.
That's me with Dennis Noble, who is a fellow of the Royal Society and an Oxford professor.
Saigat said there are almost always exceptions to any proposed biological law.
So in life, in the world, I see three very different levels of causation that exist.
The first level is physical chemical laws, and those are the things that Eugene Wigner was talking about in his paper.
Gravitation and electromagnetics and waves and all the things in physics that very often exact equation, exact answer exist.
And as far as I know, if you go to a dead planet with no life on it, that is the only kind of causation that you will find, as far as I am aware.
So these are universal laws, and change over time within these laws is order to disorder, entropy.
Then the second layer is logic, symbolic logic, like we have in computers or DNA.
symbols, communication, computation, languages, machines, algorithms, genetics, that occupies a middle level.
And as far as we know, these laws are not derivable from physics and chemistry.
Nobody knows how to derive the genetic code or English or any other language from the laws of physics and chemistry because the symbols are freely chosen.
And they are local rules that are local to a system or a culture or to a cell.
Then there's the highest level of causation is cotton, which is choice, which is at least somewhat synonymous with consciousness.
Cognition is inductive reasoning, not deductive reasoning, which I will get to in a second.
And change over time is disorder to order, which is negentropy, which is a term that Erwin Schrodinger coined in 1943 in his book, What is Life?, I raised $10 million from private equity investors and organized a $10 million prize for the origin of the genetic code.
That's me with Dennis Noble, who is a fellow of the Royal Society and an Oxford professor.
Saigat said there are almost always exceptions to any proposed biological law.
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