What is life

I think we give too much importance to ourselves when we ask if we are the only planet with life or what makes us living or what gives us a conciousness or when we wonder that there must be a soul or a spirit that makes us different from all the other innate objects around us. I have started beliving that seemingly complex problems have simple solutions. What makes them complex is our inability to identify that solution. What makes them complex is the problem's ability to overwhelm us so that we don't think of simple answers but keep digging deeper and deeper. I think the answer to 'what life is' is pretty simple. We are simply designs of a feed-forward control. It is a nature's experiment. 

First, Universe is evolving - into what - I don't know - but different entities in it are playing a role in its evolution by the interactions they impose on each other. All non-living things follow a simple cause-effect relationship, and that's how the universe has been evolving (as far as I understand). It is a linear mechanism. But, to change the way it evolves, if nature decided to introduce a feed-forward device then it would be us, the living beings. If we try to list the most basics of what is required to have a feed-forward control, we find that those characterstics very well overlap with and are unique to living beings. Before I explain further, let me briefly write about what I mean by a feed forward device or mechanism. In control systems, a feed forward mechanism is basically identifying a signal upstream and using it to change the process downstream. It is what Macbeth did. Extrapolating the present signals to improve his future way of living. A device that pre-empts a happening is a feed-forward device. It's like you look at the inputs and pre-empt the effect and work accordingly. 

Every action of living beings is a pre-emptive action. For example, we eat food before our body is totally starved. We sleep before we lose all our ability to function. Complex devices like humans, even pre-empt the need to learn by sending their kids to schools (which in other species happens only by experience). The kids who go to school at the age of 3 do not understand why they are being sent away from home and so cry and resent. But, the society understands that learning by only experience later on in life would be wasteful (at least in some part) and even dangerous. We reproduce before we are dead. We dress up even before we can feel the cold outside and so on and so forth. The above is broadly applicable to all life-forms. Now if I try to list the basics of what a feed forward mechanism would require - it is an amazing match. First, you need to understand what effects an input will cause to have a feed forward mechanism. For that you need to store the input - brain. Analyze it - brain. Have to analyze many many different kinds of inputs - a learning mind, memory. Need to execute what our analysis of inputs predicts - for that we need mobility, energy, modes of communication. What else is life? All the basic requirements for a feed-forward device exactly match the basic characterstics of all living beings. Over it, nature was clever enough that it should not be needed to keep re-inventing the wheel, so is introduced reproduction. 

Lets go back to how we design a chemical plant in a process control class. There is a reaction in a reactor with some input streams and some output streams. To get a desired output, we need to constantly tune the input. So, we attach a feed back loop to the reactor. This is simple cause-effect relationship. Then, to reduce the lag time associated with it - we start noticing the quality of the input feeds and use them to tune the reaction conditions. That's feeding forward. This feed-forward control requires modeling of the reaction - so a model predictive control is required. That's how a chemical plant improves performance. Quite parallel to what nature did. But, I don't know what is the Universe evolving into and what for.