Assembly Theory
Assembly Theory
What makes a molecule alive? Not what it's made of—carbon and hydrogen are everywhere. Not even what it does—plenty of complex chemistry happens in dead systems. What makes a molecule biological is how hard it would be to make without selection.
This is Lee Cronin's insight: complexity isn't about pattern or information. It's about history. It's about the minimum number of recursive assembly steps needed to construct something. And that number—the assembly index—might be a universal biosignature, a way to detect life anywhere in the universe without assuming anything about its biochemistry.
Assembly Theory is more than origin-of-life science. It's a new way of thinking about what it means for complex things to exist at all.
Why This Matters for Coherence
Coherence doesn't just happen. It has to be constructed, step by step, through processes that build on previous results. High assembly—the kind only found in biological molecules—requires selection, memory, and iterated construction. It's coherence made measurable.
Understanding assembly helps us understand how meaning itself gets built: not as patterns that spontaneously emerge, but as structures that can only exist because something maintained continuity across construction steps.
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