Life's Chemical Secret: The Origin of Purpose and Mind with Addy Pross (MIT Press, 2026)

Addy, I want to start with the first chapter, Science Black Hole, where you lay out the problem.

Namely, biology's theoretical base cannot be sought within biology, but needs to be sought within physics and chemistry.

And you say at some point in the chapter that there's a conceptual gap separating living and non-living systems, and that we lack a physical theory of life.

With that as context, science can certainly measure, model, and explain the non-living material we encounter every day.

But it struggled to explain living systems that display purpose, agency, mind, and consciousness or may display those qualities.

Why is that? Why that struggle there?

You see, we understand physics and chemistry, the inanimate world, because all inanimate things behave according to the laws of physics and chemistry.

So we're very comfortable with our understanding of that inanimate world.

We understand the principles that govern behavior in that world.

When it comes to biology, living things, they behave in ways that physics and chemistry simply don't seem to – they're not able to address.

I mean, the great physicists of the 20th century, Erwin Schrödinger and – Niels Bohr, Eugene Wigner.

Basically, if I were to paraphrase what they had to say about life, it was that biology makes no sense to a physicist.

And now that was a century ago, and you'd think, well, we've moved on from there, and there have been, in fact, developments.

But the bottom line is we're still stuck with the fact that we have here a form of matter that's all around us that is us, and we don't understand how it operates in physical, chemical terms.

The three central questions remain unanswered.

How did dead stuff become living stuff? And we certainly believe that happened.

There's very good evidence for that.

So how is it possible? Physics and chemistry should be able to give a clear answer.

It doesn't.

Secondly, we have those extraordinary characteristics that I've already mentioned, you know, consciousness, mind, agency.

How can they be explained in physical terms when physics doesn't even acknowledge their existence, let alone offer an explanation? So that's a problem.

And, you know, biology has resorted to things like these are illusions.

They don't really, you know, they're not really there or emergent properties.

But these are all sidestepping the problem.

And it all comes down to this.

Addy, I want to start with the first chapter, Science Black Hole, where you lay out the problem.

Namely, biology's theoretical base cannot be sought within biology, but needs to be sought within physics and chemistry.

And you say at some point in the chapter that there's a conceptual gap separating living and non-living systems, and that we lack a physical theory of life.

With that as context, science can certainly measure, model, and explain the non-living material we encounter every day.

But it struggled to explain living systems that display purpose, agency, mind, and consciousness or may display those qualities.

Why is that? Why that struggle there?

You see, we understand physics and chemistry, the inanimate world, because all inanimate things behave according to the laws of physics and chemistry.

So we're very comfortable with our understanding of that inanimate world.

We understand the principles that govern behavior in that world.

When it comes to biology, living things, they behave in ways that physics and chemistry simply don't seem to – they're not able to address.

I mean, the great physicists of the 20th century, Erwin Schrödinger and – Niels Bohr, Eugene Wigner.

Basically, if I were to paraphrase what they had to say about life, it was that biology makes no sense to a physicist.

And now that was a century ago, and you'd think, well, we've moved on from there, and there have been, in fact, developments.

But the bottom line is we're still stuck with the fact that we have here a form of matter that's all around us that is us, and we don't understand how it operates in physical, chemical terms.

The three central questions remain unanswered.

How did dead stuff become living stuff? And we certainly believe that happened.

There's very good evidence for that.

So how is it possible? Physics and chemistry should be able to give a clear answer.

It doesn't.

Secondly, we have those extraordinary characteristics that I've already mentioned, you know, consciousness, mind, agency.

How can they be explained in physical terms when physics doesn't even acknowledge their existence, let alone offer an explanation? So that's a problem.

And, you know, biology has resorted to things like these are illusions.

They don't really, you know, they're not really there or emergent properties.

But these are all sidestepping the problem.

And it all comes down to this.