Life as Plasmas: Autonomy and Interactivism in-materio
Abstract
When is a material system a candidate for life at all? We argue that this question is prior to behavior, functional architecture, or computational capacity, and that at root it is one of physical admissibility. We develop a framework in which minimal autonomy, taken in the interactivist sense of normativity grounded in self-maintaining far-from-equilibrium organization, corresponds to a distinct non-equilibrium phase of matter, and we take complex plasmas, a physical and non-biological system, as its in-materio exemplar. We formalize a diagnostic phase-space whose criteria (sustained free-energy throughput, organizational closure, active information maintenance, and regulated noise sensitivity) constitute necessary conditions for life-attribution. We instantiate the diagnostics across contrasting systems and fix the boundaries of the phase space via Bénard convection as a driven baseline lacking closure, and a digital self-replicating soup that carries measured informational heredity while its physical closure remains a structural zero. We demonstrate that plasmas satisfy every admissibility condition for minimal physical autonomy while carrying none of the informational heredity that open-ended evolution requires, sharpening the distinction between physical admissibility and biological sufficiency, and bounding downstream questions of machine sentience.
Versions
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BibTeX
@misc{hinrichs2026life,
title = {{Life as Plasmas: Autonomy and Interactivism in-materio}},
author = {Nicolás Hinrichs and Mahault Albarracin and Felipe Engelberger and Leonardo Christov-Moore and Daniel Polani},
howpublished = {arXiv},
year = {2026},
month = jul,
doi = {10.48550/arxiv.2607.09747},
eprint = {2607.09747},
archivePrefix = {arXiv},
url = {https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.09747},
note = {CC BY 4.0},
}
RIS
TY - UNPB
TI - Life as Plasmas: Autonomy and Interactivism in-materio
AU - Nicolás Hinrichs
AU - Mahault Albarracin
AU - Felipe Engelberger
AU - Leonardo Christov-Moore
AU - Daniel Polani
PY - 2026
DA - 2026/07/19
PB - arXiv
DO - 10.48550/arxiv.2607.09747
UR - https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.09747
AB - When is a material system a candidate for life at all? We argue that this question is prior to behavior, functional architecture, or computational capacity, and that at root it is one of physical admissibility. We develop a framework in which minimal autonomy, taken in the interactivist sense of normativity grounded in self-maintaining far-from-equilibrium organization, corresponds to a distinct non-equilibrium phase of matter, and we take complex plasmas, a physical and non-biological system, as its in-materio exemplar. We formalize a diagnostic phase-space whose criteria (sustained free-energy throughput, organizational closure, active information maintenance, and regulated noise sensitivity) constitute necessary conditions for life-attribution. We instantiate the diagnostics across contrasting systems and fix the boundaries of the phase space via Bénard convection as a driven baseline lacking closure, and a digital self-replicating soup that carries measured informational heredity while its physical closure remains a structural zero. We demonstrate that plasmas satisfy every admissibility condition for minimal physical autonomy while carrying none of the informational heredity that open-ended evolution requires, sharpening the distinction between physical admissibility and biological sufficiency, and bounding downstream questions of machine sentience.
ER -