Life has traditionally been studied through the separate lenses of biology, physics, chemistry, and philosophy. Yet the growing recognition that living systems are fundamentally informational and computational structures suggests that these disciplines may be describing different aspects of the same underlying phenomenon. This work explores the idea that life can be understood as a physical process in which matter organizes itself to store, process, and propagate information under the constraints of thermodynamics. The book develops an interdisciplinary framework that integrates thermodynamics, information theory, molecular biology, complexity science, artificial life research, and modern computational theory. It begins by examining the physical foundations of living systems, focusing on non-equilibrium thermodynamics, self-organization, and the emergence of ordered structures in energy-driven environments. Building upon these principles, the work analyzes biological systems as information-processing entities, emphasizing the role of genetic encoding, regulatory networks, feedback mechanisms, and evolutionary algorithms in shaping the structure and behavior of life. Further sections explore the computational aspects of biology, including DNA computing, molecular logic gates, synthetic genetic circuits, and programmable biological systems. The emergence of artificial life, digital organisms, and evolutionary simulations is examined as an extension of biological principles into computational environments. These developments suggest that the fundamental properties of life—information storage, replication, adaptation, and evolution—may not be limited to biological chemistry but could arise in diverse physical substrates. The book also investigates the relationship between biological intelligence, neural information processing, and artificial intelligence. By examining the evolution of cognitive systems and the computational architecture of the brain, it explores how intelligence and consciousness may emerge from increasingly complex information-processing networks. Finally, the work extends these insights to cosmological and philosophical questions. If life is understood as a thermodynamic process that transforms energy into organized information, then biological evolution may represent a broader cosmic tendency toward increasing informational complexity. This perspective raises the possibility that life, intelligence, and consciousness are not accidental anomalies but natural consequences of the physical structure of the universe. Through this synthesis, the book proposes that life may be interpreted as matter that computes, organized by thermodynamic constraints and shaped by evolutionary information processing. Understanding life in this way provides a conceptual bridge between physics, biology, computation, and philosophy, offering a framework for studying both natural and synthetic forms of intelligence in the future.
Rajiv Singh (2026) studied this question.