In my blog of a week ago, I talked about one big question, namely the origin of life, as a core element in ELSI's research program. It is natural to ask: what are comparable big questions?

Before trying to come up with an answer, let us see what makes the origins of life such a `big question'. I can think immediately of two ways to approach that topic, a subjective and an objective one.

Subjectively, as a human being, I can ask myself: why am I here in the first place; why am I alive; and why am I conscious of being here and being alive?

Objectively, as a physicist, I can start from scratch and ask: why is there anything at all, in other words, why is there a Universe, stretching out in space and time, filled with matter and energy in an intricate pattern of galaxies, stars, planets? That is the first question, and one to which we have at least a partial answer, in the form of the Big Bang theory in cosmology.

Given that there is such a Universe, again as a physicist, I can come up with pretty good theories about the formation of galaxies, stars, and planets, but the appearance of life is baffling. The sheer complexity of life, and the processes of
evolution and adaptation, are totally unlike the theories in physics and chemistry that we can come up with to describe all else that we know, hence the second question: why is there life?

Given that there is life, a third question, at least as profound as the second one, is: why is there consciousness? It is not so difficult to see that life, evolving to ever more complex forms, developed the ability for complex information processing, as part of the evolutionary process of optimization of survival probability. But why are objective electro-chemical processes in the brain accompanied with subjective experience? Who ordered that? What advantage does it have, and even more profound, what relationship does a subjective experience have with the so qualitatively different objective electrical and chemical processes that are correlated with it?

Interestingly, both ways of asking, subjectively and objectively, can lead to the same three Big Questions, of the origins of the Universe, of Life, and of Consciousness.

It is a nice twist of history that the first pure science institute funded under the Japanese WPI program was Kavli-IPMU, focusing on the question of the origin of the Universe, founded in 2007. ELSI, as the second pure science institute funded under WPI, has chosen the origins of life as one of its core themes, got its start in 2012. I expect to see another WPI institute to appear in 2017, focused on the origins of consciousness. :-)

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