My name is Dmitry Kukuruznyak. I am a scientist working on a first-principles theory of life. I investigate the physical nature of the soul. From a philosophical perspective, I follow Aristotle: I contend that the soul belongs to the physical body, and that it is a perfectly natural phenomenon. On this webpage, I identify the difference between animate and inanimate matter and explain where the soul comes from. In addition, I roughly explain how to breathe life into inanimate objects.
Current Employment: I work as a principal materials scientist at the Animate Condensed Matter Company, where I create artificial animate materials for hardware-realized artificial intelligence applications. The aim of the company to develop a living-like artificial brain.
Professional Experience: Max-Planck Institute for Intelligent Systems (MPI-IS), Germany; Max-Planck Institute for Solid State Research (MPI-FKF), Germany; National Institute for Materials Science (NIMS), Japan.
Education: Ph.D. in Materials Science and Engineering from University of Washington, Seattle, WA, USA; M.S. in Physics from University of Miami, Coral Gables, FL, USA; Diplom in Physics from St. Petersburg State University, St. Petersburg, Russia.
From a physical standpoint, a living body is a collection of interacting electrons and nuclei, which jointly solve the many-body problem: They search for energetically favorable configurations by moving each other. The energetic minima (i.e. the solutions of the many-body problem) correspond to specific atomic arrangements bound together by particular chemical bonds. For this reason, the atoms that reconstruct their chemical bonds are very selective; they strive to produce very specific actions. The animate body reconciles these efforts by elaborating collective reconstructions, in which relatively large pieces of the body move with respect to each other in an organized and orderly manner. In this regard, every transforming atom, which builds chemical bonds and actuates the living body, carries a tiny fraction of the soul.
Biological cells have a specific structure that allows them to repeat similar reconstructions. These orderly movements carry out so-called vital functions: They extract nutrients from the environment, distribute them across the body of the organism, control chemical transformations, build new ordered structures from the obtained products, and integrate them into the living body. Likewise, the orderly reconstructions extract old (used) elements from the body, and release them into the ambient.
Essentially, the living organism replaces old (used) structural elements with new (fresh) elements in order to restore the ability to perform orderly actions aimed at its own further renewal. In doing so, the living organism sustains its structure and function. In the process, the amount of living matter may grow; this can lead to the emergence of an offspring organism. However, reproduction is not a necessary condition for being animate.
The structure of the soul — which shapes the purposeful actions of the organism — is determined by the structure of the entire organism (and not only DNA, or any other similar template). Additionally, these actions depend on the material inputs from the outside world. For this reason, the behavior of the living organism is adaptive.
The selective purposeful actions of the living bodies come from the interactions between electrically charged elementary particles, and from the quantum laws of motion. They cause orderly atomic rearrangements in transforming molecules during chemical reactions. But inanimate matter can also undergo chemical transformations. Then, what is the difference between the living and dead substances?
The living bodies have special structures at the molecular level, thanks to which the interconnected molecules move and work cooperatively, forming large collective reconstructions. In contrast, inanimate matter is arranged in such ways that different chemically transforming molecules interfere. They do not produce any orderly collective movements above the atomic scale. Instead, they move as Brownian particles. Consequently, they do not perform any useful functions.
In order to turn inanimate matter into the animate matter, one has to modify its molecular structure, supply it with suitable metabolites, and initiate special self-sustained chemical and structural transformations. That is pretty much what I do at work. I develop techniques aimed at creating artificial animate materials for the hardware-based artificial intelligence. My results are outlined in the following webpage.
On this webpage, I briefly explain what biological life is about. I contend that biology obeys the laws of physics. However, regular chemistry, thermodynamics and chemical kinetics cannot adequately describe living matter. The reason is that they neglect the constructive actions of the component parts of the atoms (valence electrons and nuclei), which occur during collective chemical transformations. The existing molecular theory assumes that different chemically transforming molecules move independently. Scientists wrongly conclude that chemically transforming matter generates only random (and therefore unproductive) molecular motion. This is true for inanimate substances. However, in living organisms, cooperating transforming molecules act jointly, producing sequences of constructive actions. (The actions are constructive because, in animate matter, atoms build new chemical bonds. Consequently, living matter creates new ordered material structures.)