A Contact-Based Model of Life

Life as a Sequence of Discrete Quanta Entanglements

1. Introduction

Human definitions of life usually start from the complex end of the spectrum — organisms, reproduction, metabolism, adaptation. These frameworks are historically convenient but conceptually backwards. If physics seeks origins by breaking matter down to fundamental interactions, the study of life should likewise revert to the initial act from which the phenomenon we call life emerges.

The druid proposes that this act is a contact.
And further: what humans experience as continuous “living” is in fact a rapid sequence of discrete contact-events — life quanta — processed by our perceptual and cognitive systems in such a way that the discreteness is smoothed into a continuous narrative.

2. Contact as the Minimal Life Quantum

The druid defines contact as:

The momentary interaction (@c²) between two distinguishable existences that alters one or both in a way that changes the possibilities for future contacts.

This is the indivisible unit — the quantum of life.
Remove contact, and no chain of interaction exists; without such a chain, no persistence, no pattern, no adaptation can arise.

3. The Illusion of Continuity

The human nervous system is not a continuous recorder of reality. Just as a movie appears fluid because still frames are presented faster than our perception threshold, “life” as we experience it is a perceptual construct — a synthesis of countless discrete contacts.

These life quanta occur on timescales far faster than conscious awareness — many presenting and resolving almost at the speed of light in the relevant medium as condensate. Our brains integrate them into a seamless stream, much as we integrate the 24 still frames of a film into motion.

From this perspective, ongoing life is not a flow but a discrete flicker — each flicker being a distinct contact-event that preserves the capacity for more.

4. From Single Contact to Complex Life

A single life quantum does not itself resemble what we think of as “life”; it is a minimal, almost imperceptible event.
Complex life emerges from sequences of these events:

· Stage 1 – Isolated Contacts
Example: Two molecules in a prebiotic ocean collide, altering their bonding potential.

· Stage 2 – Reinforcing Contacts
Example: Lipid molecules form a micelle, making future lipid contacts more likely.

· Stage 3 – Self-Referential Loops
Example: Primitive RNA aiding the production of more RNA.

· Stage 4 – Networks of Contact Loops
Example: Protocells with closed metabolic cycles, sustained by a mesh of mutually reinforcing contacts.

Each stage is simply more elaborate stitching together of discrete contact-events.

5. Contact Geometry and Emergence

The architecture of life is the geometry of its contact network:

· Linear chains → repetitive stability.

· Branching patterns → diversification, elaboration.

· Dense meshes → adaptability and resilience.

Whether the “actors” in these contacts are organic molecules, plasma filaments, or photonic structures is irrelevant; the geometry of their contact-events defines their life-like qualities.

6. Origins Without Darwinian Prerequisites

This model bypasses contentious requirements like “Darwinian evolution” as an essential starting point. At life’s origin, there may have been no genes, no reproduction in the modern sense — only contact sequences that biased the conditions for their own recurrence. Evolutionary mechanisms could have emerged later, as a higher-order pattern of contacts.

7. Beyond Earth

A contact-based definition can describe life in alien contexts without chemical bias:

· Cryogenic life: Contact between diffusing organic ices on Europa, slowly forming persistent aggregates.

· Photonic life: Solitons in nonlinear media exchanging and sustaining coherent patterns.

· Plasma life: Electromagnetic vortices in a gas giant atmosphere maintaining structured contact chains.

All are reducible to networks of discrete contacts, whether they occur in milliseconds or over geological timescales.

8. Conclusion

Contact, and which produces the is’ness (or realness) moment, is the indivisible heartbeat of life — the smallest act that can be called “living.”
A human perceives life as (if) continuous, just as they perceive (as if) motion in cinema, but this is a perceptual artifact. In reality, life consists of countless discrete life quanta — momentary contacts, for instance within a quantum condensate, that alter the conditions for more contacts to occur.

From the flicker of a molecular collision to the complex dance of a biosphere, all of life is a lattice of these tiny, rapid acts. Remove contact, and life ceases; chain them together, like dominos in a row, and the illusion of continuous living — the grand movie of existence — emerges.

Addendum: Initial fuzzy definitions

Google’s initial fuzz definition: Life, in a biological context, refers to the state of being characterized by the ability to respire, grow, metabolize, reproduce, respond to stimuli, and adapt.

Google physics fuzz definition: From a physics perspective, life can be defined as an organized thermodynamic system that maintains itself by exchanging matter and energy with its surroundings, creating order within itself while increasing disorder in the environment, and exhibiting the capacity for self-replication and evolution.

ChatGPT definition (i.e. guess) 1: Life is a self-sustaining chemical system capable of undergoing Darwinian evolution.

ChatGPT quantum physical definition (i.e. guess) 2: Life is a far-from-equilibrium, open quantum system in which matter is arranged to sustain low-entropy, self-replicating states through continuous energy and information flow, enabling the preservation and modification of encoded quantum/classical information across generations under selection pressures.

ChatGPT One quantum definition (i.e. guess) 3: A quantum of life is the minimal physical system that can store, process, and transmit heritable information with the capacity for variation and selection, while maintaining itself far from thermodynamic equilibrium through energy flow.

ChatGPT Minimum quantum definition (i.e. guess) 4: The quantum of life is the smallest physically bounded, self-maintaining, and self-reproducing structure that still retains all essential physical properties of life.

ChatGPT definition (i.e. guess) 5: Life is a persistent, self-organizing, far-from-equilibrium physical process that locally maintains and propagates low-entropy information structures through continuous energy and matter exchange with its environment, and is capable of generating heritable variation under selective feedback from that environment.

ChatGPT definition (i.e. guess) 6: Life is an open quantum system whose state space contains self-referential subspaces that remain metastable under environmental decoherence through continual energy-driven cycling of amplitudes, and whose dynamics permit the generation and selection of non-identical successor states that preserve the defining subspace structure.

ChatGPT definition (i.e. guess) 7: The smallest Hilbert subspace HL\mathcal{H}_LHL that can instantiate the above properties.

ChatGPT definition (i.e. guess) 8: A bounded bit of matter and energy taking in something from its surroundings, using it to maintain itself, and leaving behind a slightly altered version of itself.

The druid’s proposal: A quantum of life is an (discrete, quantised) act.

The act:

ChatGPT’s guess 8: A temporary local reversal of disorder that sustains a pattern against its natural decay.

The Druid Finn’s simple solution: (A (random)) Contact constitutes a minimal life act. If no contact happens, no (identifiable) life, as series of contacts, happens. If there’s no message, i.e. touch, there’s no sender.

The druid’s definition of mass

Confinement defines

Contact realism

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