Organizational Principles of Biological Systems

Area of Science:

• Physics and Information Theory
• Systems Biology
• Theoretical Biology

Background:

• Life's complex organization appears emergent, yet its precise relationship with fundamental physical laws remains debated.
• Understanding life's autonomy and agency requires bridging the gap between physics, information, and biological systems.

Purpose of the Study:

• To propose universal organizational principles as a physical and informational grammar underlying living systems.
• To explain the emergence of life's autonomy, agency, and complexity from fundamental physical constraints.
• To synthesize thermodynamics, information theory, and biology to reveal a continuous trajectory from physical laws to cognition.

Main Methods:

• Review and synthesis of principles governing dissipative structures, scaling laws, and self-organized criticality.
• Application of the Free Energy Principle to explain cognition as active inference.
• Analysis of organizational principles across multiple scales, from molecular networks to ecosystems.

Main Results:

• Living systems are dissipative structures with organizational closure, exhibiting autonomy and agency.
• Fractal and modular scaling laws, self-organized criticality, and active inference are universal principles.
• Evolution is a directional expansion of functional complexity, driven by a thermodynamic gradient towards agency.
• Organizational principles exhibit holography, replicating across scales.

Conclusions:

• Life fulfills, rather than violates, physical laws by operating in regimes of high informational complexity.
• A continuous, physically constrained, and potentially inevitable trajectory exists from thermodynamics to cognition.
• The proposed physico-informational grammar unifies physics and biology, illuminating the continuity between physical processes and the mind.