Why life was almost inevitable

The same simple race, all the way out at the large end

I study language models to understand people.There is one re-framing I find more beautiful than most, and keep returning to: that life, seen through the simple race, almost could not help but arise. That physics, being what it is, could hardly have avoided producing it.

The same race, one more time

The whole rest of the site is about the same little picture: a system holds several possible routes going at once, it can only keep a few of them open because it costs something, and at some point it has to commit to one. Whichever reaches the finish first wins, and the rest fall away.

That picture is simple, even though it is complex to grasp why it holds. And the strange thing is how little it takes to get it running: something that drives, limited resources, and a deadline by which a choice has to be made before the resources run out.

The rule no one thought up

Out of that race falls a rule that looks as though someone designed it. It runs roughly: do the thing that lowers the overall effort most in the long run, if you can manage it now. You could not have thought up a simpler principle for making something that can learn and survive, if that had been what you were trying to do.

But no one was trying. No one designed it. The rule is not something the system does because it wants something; it falls straight out of entropy, out of the physics itself. What looks from the inside like a will, wanting the best in the long run, is from the outside just this: the first route to run to completion wins, and the future is already baked into the system's own shape. In a language model it sits in the weights; in us, in the way we are wired together. There is no one sitting there choosing wisely. It only looks that way from behind.

Why life is not a miracle

And here it gets big. The three things the race needs in order to run are not rare. Something that drives is found everywhere a corner of the universe is out of equilibrium. Limited resources are found everywhere energy is not infinite. And a deadline for choosing is found everywhere something has to settle before it runs out. These are not special conditions. They are just what a universe with uneven energy looks like almost everywhere.

So a system that runs races, commits, and learns from it is not an improbable stroke of luck. It is what you should expect. Turned around: it is not the arising of life that calls for a special explanation, it is the absence of life that would be strange.

And let me be completely clear about what this does not mean, because it is easy to read the wrong way. It does not mean the universe was set up for us, or that someone fine-tuned the dials so life could arise. The opposite. The whole point is that nothing needs fine-tuning at all. The bar is on the floor, not set high and precise. Life is cheap, not rare, and that is an entirely different kind of wonder from the one that ends in a designer.

The two things we cannot recreate

There are two moments science still has not been able to recreate from scratch: the one that set the universe going, and the one that turned lifeless matter alive. We can describe a good deal of the mechanics afterwards, but we have not been able to press the button ourselves.

Seen through the race, the two resemble each other in a way I keep thinking about: two first decisions, two times something got going with nothing outside to start it. It is a picture, not a proof, and I will not sell it as more than that. But it is a picture that strikes me every time: that the simplest conceivable system, a race that has to choose, is enough to carry both learning and living, and that we can see the mechanics without being able to reignite them.

Old wine in new race-bottles

This is not something I found. It is existing research, read again: I take the race, the simple contest that has to choose, and use it as a pair of glasses to look at the same thing in a new way. Through them, work that Friston, England and others did separately falls together into one picture.

But the framing fits so well that I wanted to share it. That something as simple as a race that has to settle can lie under a thought, a model, and life itself, and turn the arising of life into the expected rather than the miraculous, is genuinely one of the most beautiful things the theory points at.