Beyond Complicated Chemistry: Life, Autonomy, and the Future of Physics in an Age of Artificial Intelligence

Life is commonly treated within the natural sciences as a particularly complex manifestation of chemistry governed by known physical laws. While this reductionist framework has yielded significant explanatory and predictive success in molecular biology, it remains insufficient to account for the distinctive organizational properties of living systems, including autonomy, purposive behavior, and self-maintenance. Building on work in thermodynamics, complex systems theory, theoretical biology, and artificial intelligence research, this paper argues that life constitutes a distinct physical phenomenon characterized by constraint-generating organization rather than mere chemical complexity (Schrödinger, 1944; Kauffman, 2000; Moreno & Mossio, 2015). The paper further contends that recent advances in artificial intelligence provide a novel empirical context in which autonomy and goal-directed behavior emerge in non-biological substrates, thereby challenging biology-centric accounts of life and exposing conceptual gaps in contemporary physics (Friston, 2010; Walker & Davies, 2013). Framed as a manifesto-style positioning paper, this work argues that physics must expand its conceptual foundations to incorporate agency, normativity, and viability-based causation if it is to remain adequate to the phenomena it seeks to explain.