Abstract

One of the great mysteries of life is that science can’t find anything mysterious about it. This exploration approaches the question of ‘what is life’ from looking at the blinders that science and other kinds of formal representational thinking have built into them that serve to hide the life. Science teaches us to ‘make sense’ of things, using self-consistent models with no independent parts. Emergence seems to come from indescribably complex real things diverging from any model. Perhaps we could then use our models in reverse, to help us see the emergence of life in things around us by contrast, but we’re taught to not do that. We’re taught to look at the independent parts of things only through the fixed definitions with which the models are built. That gives us confusing ‘functional fixations’ to block learning about changing things, and results in large mistakes. Any exploration begins with some accumulation of small steps, after stumbling around a bit to find a productive direction. Hopefully this essay will offer some productive stumbling around, and some more places for an accumulation of small steps toward a new way of thinking about life. Some new scientific methods for exploring a living world are mentioned