Piero Scaruffi

These are excerpts and elaborations from my book "The Nature of Consciousness"

Catastrophes Rene Thom, the French mathematician who “invented” catastrophe theory, assumed that the fundamental problem of biology is a topological problem: how form is built. The biochemistry of life should be explained by morphogenesis, not the other way around. Catastrophe theory is basically a classification of the ways in which forms can change into other forms. Morphogenesis is due to the disappearance of some attractors (in the epigenetic landscape) and the capture by new attractors, i.e. the new form. Death is easily defined: the transformation of a metabolic field into a static field. On the contrary, the birth of life would require an "infinite" number of local transformations in order to achieve the “anabolic” transformation from static to metabolic (from simple ingredients to the complex structure of living tissue). Furthermore, once life occurs it is not clear why it stops at all: the underlying processes are reversible, therefore life should continue forever.   Back to the beginning of the chapter "The Physics Of Life" | Back to the index of all chapters