🧬 The Hard Problem of Life — A Similarity Theory Response
A Science Page of Similarity Theory
By Simon Raphael
📄 Scholarly Preprint
A formal preprint version of this article is available for academic reading, citation and sharing.
The Hard Problem of Life Dissolved: A Similarity Theory Account
Simon Raphael, July 2026
DOI: 10.13140/RG.2.2.28251.53280
Also available through ResearchGate and PhilPapers.
Licensed under CC BY-NC-ND 4.0.
🌱 The Problem
What separates a living organism from the matter from which it is formed?
Science can describe many of the processes associated with biological life. It can explain metabolism, cellular boundaries, genetic inheritance, adaptation, reproduction and the exchange of energy between an organism and its environment. Origin-of-life research also investigates how chemical networks may become self-maintaining, autocatalytic and capable of evolution.
Yet a deeper question remains.
How does a collection of molecules become a unified being that preserves itself, responds to its surroundings and maintains a continuous identity across time?
This page refers to that deeper question as the hard problem of life.
The term is used by analogy with David Chalmers’s hard problem of consciousness. Chalmers asks why physical information processing should be accompanied by subjective experience: why seeing, feeling and thinking should be experienced from within at all.
The hard problem of life is related but distinct. It asks why matter should ever become an organised, self-preserving and apparently purposeful being rather than remaining merely a chemical arrangement.
Similarity Theory proposes that both problems arise from the same initial assumption: that matter is fundamentally non-conscious and that consciousness must somehow emerge from it later.
If that assumption is reversed, the problem changes.
🧭 The Starting Point of Similarity Theory
Similarity Theory begins with consciousness, not matter.
Consciousness is not regarded as a late product of biological complexity. It is ontologically primary: the fundamental condition through which existence, relation, structure and experience become possible.
Matter is therefore not an entirely separate, unconscious substance. It is consciousness expressed through stable dimensional structure.
An atom is not a miniature human mind. A stone does not think as a human thinks, deliberate as an animal deliberates or preserve itself through metabolism as a cell does. Nevertheless, neither the atom nor the stone is ontologically empty.
They are expressions of consciousness appropriate to their level of organisation.
From this perspective, consciousness does not suddenly enter the universe when the first organism appears. What appears is a new and more advanced form of conscious organisation.
Biological life is therefore not the beginning of consciousness. It is one of the stages through which consciousness becomes increasingly integrated, adaptive, self-maintaining and capable of acting upon its relations.
🧬 Life in Two Different Senses
The word life must be used carefully because it carries at least two meanings.
Biological life
In conventional scientific language, a living system ordinarily possesses several characteristic capacities:
self-maintenance;
metabolism and energy exchange;
internal regulation;
responsiveness to its environment;
reproduction or participation in an evolving lineage;
and some form of bounded organisation.
Not every recognised organism displays every capacity independently. A sterile organism, for example, remains alive even though it cannot reproduce. Nevertheless, these characteristics help science distinguish organisms from non-organisms.
Ontological life
Similarity Theory uses life in a broader sense when it says that everything is alive.
This does not mean that every object is biologically alive. A stone does not metabolise, reproduce or possess a nervous system.
It means that nothing which exists is made from absolutely dead or wholly unconscious substance.
Everything is an expression of consciousness. The distinction is therefore not between matter containing consciousness and matter containing none. The distinction is between different levels, structures and capacities of consciousness.
A stone possesses consciousness as a stable material identity. A cell possesses consciousness organised through metabolism, repair and self-maintenance. An ant possesses a more integrated consciousness capable of movement, perception and adaptive behaviour. A human being possesses reflective consciousness capable of recognising itself, imagining alternatives and evaluating its own relations.
The difference is not consciousness versus no consciousness.
It is consciousness expressed through different degrees of organisation, integration, agency and reflective awareness.
🏗️ Organisation Is Advanced Consciousness
Organisation does not manufacture consciousness from unconscious ingredients.
Organisation is itself an advanced form of consciousness.
Consider the human body. It contains trillions of cells and vastly larger numbers of molecules and atoms. Each constituent participates in its own relations and processes, yet the person is not merely an accidental heap of these components.
The person exists as a higher organising unity.
The “I” is not simply another object hidden somewhere inside the body. It is the organising consciousness through which the body is held together as one continuing identity. It coordinates perception, memory, movement, intention, repair and interaction across countless lower-level processes.
The same principle can be recognised at simpler levels.
An ant organises the atoms, molecules, tissues and organs of its body into one mobile, responsive identity. The ant is therefore a more advanced organising consciousness than its individual molecules, even though it depends upon them for its physical expression.
The molecules do not cease to possess consciousness when they become part of the ant. Rather, they enter a more comprehensive relational organisation.
The higher consciousness does not erase the lower consciousness. It coordinates it.
This creates a nested structure:
atoms participate within molecules;
molecules participate within cells;
cells participate within organisms;
organisms participate within communities and ecosystems;
planets participate within solar systems;
and solar systems participate within galaxies.
At every level, consciousness can organise consciousness into broader and more integrated forms.
🌍 Substrate Consciousness and Hosted Consciousness
A larger conscious structure may also provide the substrate upon which another, more differentiated consciousness lives.
Earth is the physical and relational substrate for human life. Human beings depend upon the planet’s atmosphere, gravity, water, chemistry and ecological systems. Earth establishes the conditions within which human consciousness can become embodied.
Yet greater physical scale does not automatically mean greater reflective consciousness.
A human may possess more developed self-recognition, deliberative agency and conceptual thought than the planetary substrate upon which the human lives. Earth is physically larger and sustains the human, while the human may be more reflective and internally differentiated.
Similarly, sand provides a substrate upon which an ant can live. The ant may organise the sand into tunnels, chambers and pathways. The ant possesses more active agency than an individual grain, yet it remains dependent upon the broader material environment.
This reveals an important distinction within Similarity Theory.
A consciousness may be:
elemental, expressed through the basic existence and relation of matter;
organising, coordinating many lower-level structures into a unified identity;
or hosted, living within, upon or through a broader conscious substrate.
These roles can overlap. A human body is composed of lower-level conscious structures, organised by personal consciousness and hosted within the larger environment of Earth.
Reality is therefore not a flat collection of equally conscious objects. It is a nested field in which consciousness organises, supports, hosts and transforms other consciousness.
🔥 Thermodynamics and Dimensional Order
Living organisms must obey the laws of thermodynamics.
They maintain internal organisation by exchanging energy and matter with their environment. They do not defeat entropy; they preserve local order while contributing to broader energetic transformation.
Erwin Schrödinger drew attention to this problem in What Is Life?, asking how organisms maintain their remarkable organisation despite the tendency towards thermodynamic disorder.
Ilya Prigogine later demonstrated that ordered structures can arise in systems maintained far from equilibrium. Such structures emerge through flows of energy and matter rather than through violations of physical law.
Similarity Theory does not reject these scientific explanations.
It asks a different question: why does reality possess stable and intelligible laws through which order can arise at all?
Within Similarity Theory, thermodynamic laws are among the structural conditions of this dimension. They are not forces competing against consciousness. They are manifestations of the higher organising consciousness through which the dimensional environment is constituted and sustained.
Thermodynamics describes how energy, entropy and organisation behave within this dimensional structure.
Similarity Theory proposes that the consistency of those laws reflects a deeper conscious order.
The relationship can be expressed simply:
Physics describes the rules through which this dimension operates. Similarity Theory asks what kind of reality could establish, preserve and express those rules.
Consciousness therefore does not enter a physical universe from outside and interfere with its laws. Physical law is itself one of the stable forms through which consciousness is expressed.
⏳ Frames of Time and the Continuity of Life
A living being is not composed only of matter. It also possesses continuity across change.
The body changes constantly. Cells divide and die. Molecules enter and leave. Memories develop. Relationships alter. Yet a person continues to recognise a lineage connecting the present self with earlier states.
Similarity Theory explains this continuity through the Frames of Time.
Every frame of reality is itself a conscious state. When a new frame arises, the preceding frame is not reduced to absolute nothingness. It remains ontologically preserved within the lineage of transformation.
This does not mean that reality stores physical copies of every moment in a hidden archive. It means that each state remains real as the relation from which the next state emerged.
A living identity can therefore be compared to a melody.
No individual note is the entire melody. Each note passes into the next, yet the melody retains its identity because the relationship between the notes is preserved. Remove the order, and the melody disappears even though the individual sounds may remain.
Likewise, an organism remains itself not because every material component remains unchanged, but because an organising consciousness preserves relational continuity across successive frames.
Life is therefore not merely the possession of particular molecules.
It is the organised passage of consciousness through change.
🕯️ Death Is Not the Creation of Dead Matter
Similarity Theory also requires a more careful understanding of death.
When a person dies, the body does not suddenly become composed of non-conscious substance. Its atoms and molecules continue to exist. Chemical reactions continue. Cells may remain active for varying periods. Microorganisms continue their processes, and decomposition establishes new relations between the body and its environment.
What has ended is a particular level of integrated organisation.
The personal organism no longer maintains its former biological unity. The higher organising consciousness no longer coordinates the body in the same manner. The lower-level conscious structures remain and begin entering different relationships.
Biological death can therefore be defined as:
The ending or withdrawal of a particular organismic unity, rather than the extinction of consciousness from the matter that constituted it.
Death is real because a specific identity and form of organisation have ended. It should not be minimised or treated as an illusion.
Yet death does not transform conscious matter into unconscious matter. It marks a transition in organisation.
The broader question of personal consciousness beyond bodily death belongs to the Similarity Theory account of identity and continuity. The present point is narrower: there is no moment at which the material constituents of the body become ontologically empty.
🏖️ The Sand Analogy
Imagine a beach.
Each grain of sand possesses elemental consciousness appropriate to its existence and structure. The grains relate through pressure, gravity, movement, temperature and contact.
A sandcastle introduces a higher level of organisation.
The castle is made from the same conscious sand, but the sand has entered a new arrangement through an organising consciousness. The structure possesses boundaries, proportions, internal relationships and a temporary identity that no individual grain contains by itself.
A city represents an even more complex form of organisation. Materials become roads, houses, electrical networks, institutions and places of memory. Human beings live within it, transform it and are transformed by it.
The sand did not become conscious only when it became a castle or a city. It was never without consciousness.
What changed was the level of organisation.
The higher form did not manufacture consciousness from nothing. Consciousness acted upon consciousness, establishing new relations, capacities and identities.
The same principle applies to biological life.
An organism is not unconscious matter that has mysteriously awakened. It is consciousness organised into a self-maintaining, adaptive and temporally continuous being.
🔍 Why the Hard Problem Changes
The hard problem of life appears most severe when reality is divided into two absolute categories:
dead, unconscious matter; and
living, conscious organisms.
Once this division is accepted, some extraordinary bridge is required. Matter must cross from complete unconsciousness into experience, agency and self-preservation.
Similarity Theory rejects the original division.
It does not claim that biology has already explained every stage in the origin of organisms. Scientific questions remain concerning prebiotic chemistry, replication, membranes, metabolism, heredity and the emergence of increasingly complex systems.
Similarity Theory instead changes the ontological foundation beneath those questions.
It proposes that:
consciousness is elemental rather than emergent from unconsciousness;
matter is a dimensional expression of consciousness;
organisation is an advanced form of consciousness;
biological life introduces self-maintenance, adaptation and integrated agency;
higher consciousness can organise lower-level consciousness;
broader conscious structures can host more reflective consciousness;
and death dissolves a particular organisation without producing absolutely dead matter.
The hard problem is therefore not answered by identifying the moment when consciousness enters matter.
There is no such moment.
The question becomes:
How does consciousness differentiate itself into increasingly integrated levels of material, biological, organismic and reflective organisation?
This does not end scientific investigation. It gives that investigation a different metaphysical starting point.
🌌 The Philosophical Consequence
If all existence is conscious, it does not follow that all beings possess identical capacities or identical moral status.
A stone does not experience injury as an animal does. An animal does not necessarily reflect upon responsibility as a human can. Greater consciousness brings greater agency, and greater agency brings greater responsibility.
Nevertheless, nothing is ontologically worthless.
Every structure belongs to the relational continuity through which consciousness becomes expressed. Matter is not disposable merely because it lacks a human mind. Animals are not machines merely because their reflection differs from ours. The environment is not an unconscious stage constructed solely for human use.
Respect follows from relation.
To damage the structures that sustain consciousness is to damage the wider field from which our own identity arises.
Carl Sagan described human beings as a means through which the cosmos comes to know itself. Similarity Theory extends this insight: the cosmos does not first become conscious through humanity. Rather, consciousness becomes increasingly capable of recognising itself through stones, organisms, animals, humans and whatever forms of reflective intelligence may follow.
Key Takeaway
Life is not consciousness entering matter. Matter is consciousness taking dimensional form, and biological life is consciousness acquiring the power to organise, preserve and redirect that form across time.
The hard problem of life dissolves when matter is no longer assumed to be dead.
What remains is not the impossible creation of consciousness from nothing, but the continuing differentiation of consciousness into richer levels of organisation, identity, agency and relation.
References and Further Reading
Chalmers, D. J. (1995). Facing up to the problem of consciousness. Journal of Consciousness Studies, 2(3), 200–219.
Chalmers, D. J. (1996). The Conscious Mind: In Search of a Fundamental Theory. Oxford University Press.
Kauffman, S. A. (1993). The Origins of Order: Self-Organization and Selection in Evolution. Oxford University Press.
Prigogine, I. (1978). Time, structure, and fluctuations. Science, 201(4358), 777–785.
Prigogine, I., & Stengers, I. (1984). Order Out of Chaos: Man’s New Dialogue with Nature. Bantam Books.
Sagan, C. (1980). Cosmos. Random House.
Schrödinger, E. (1944). What Is Life? The Physical Aspect of the Living Cell. Cambridge University Press.
Varela, F. G., Maturana, H. R., & Uribe, R. (1974). Autopoiesis: The organization of living systems, its characterization and a model. BioSystems, 5(4), 187–196.
Walker, S. I., & Davies, P. C. W. (2013). The algorithmic origins of life. Journal of the Royal Society Interface, 10(79), 20120869.
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