Natural Intelligence: the information processing power of life

Abstract

Merely by existing, all physical systems contain information, and physical dynamics transforms and processes that information. This note investigates the information processing power of living systems. Living systems harvest free energy from the sun, from geothermal sources, and from each other. They then use that free energy to drive the complex set of chemical interactions that underlie life. All molecules -- be they simple molecules such as water, or complex molecules such as DNA -- register information via their chemical composition. When these molecules undergo chemical reactions, that information is transformed and processed. These chemical transformations can be thought of as elementary logical operations: such bio-ops include the absorption of a photon in a chromophore during photosynthesis, the formation or breaking of covalent, hydrogen, and van der Waals bonds in the process of metabolism and reproduction, or the release of a neurotransmitter molecule when a synapse fires in the brain. This paper estimates the total number of bio-ops that have been, and are being performed, by life on earth. We find that the current number of bio-ops performed by all life on earth is around $10^{33}-10^{35}$ bio-ops per second. The cells in an individual human being perform around $10^{20}-10^{22}$ bio-ops per second, comparable to the information processing power of all the computers, cell phones, and server farms on earth. Depending on how one defines a neural operation, at most a few percent of human bio-ops take place in the firing of neurons and synapses in the brain. Over the course of life on earth, about $10^{50}-10^{52}$ bio-ops have taken place.