What Lives? A meta-analysis of diverse opinions on the definition of life
Reed Bender, Karina Kofman, Blaise Ag\"uera y Arcas, and Michael Levin

TL;DR
This paper uses large language models and advanced clustering techniques to analyze diverse definitions of life, revealing a continuous conceptual landscape that bridges reductionist and holistic perspectives across disciplines.
Contribution
It introduces a novel computational methodology combining semantic analysis and clustering to map and understand the complex, multi-disciplinary landscape of the definition of life.
Findings
Revealed a continuous landscape of life definitions
Identified distinct conceptual archetypes within the definitions
Bridged reductionist and holistic approaches through semantic analysis
Abstract
The question of "what is life?" has challenged scientists and philosophers for centuries, producing an array of definitions that reflect both the mystery of its emergence and the diversity of disciplinary perspectives brought to bear on the question. Despite significant progress in our understanding of biological systems, psychology, computation, and information theory, no single definition for life has yet achieved universal acceptance. This challenge becomes increasingly urgent as advances in synthetic biology, artificial intelligence, and astrobiology challenge our traditional conceptions of what it means to be alive. We undertook a methodological approach that leverages large language models (LLMs) to analyze a set of definitions of life provided by a curated set of cross-disciplinary experts. We used a novel pairwise correlation analysis to map the definitions into distinct feature…
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Taxonomy
TopicsOrigins and Evolution of Life · Space Science and Extraterrestrial Life · Language and cultural evolution
MethodsSparse Evolutionary Training
