Lee Cronin – Living Process Flourishes if We Make the Present “Thick” (Stewarding the Flame, Ep 2)

ByAnnelize Potgieter July 17, 2026July 17, 2026 July 17, 2026

This new installment of the Stewarding the Flame series is an interview with Lee Cronin, Regius Professor of Chemistry at the University of Glasgow and founder and CEO of Chemify.

What distinguishes Lee’s approach is that he refuses to answer “what is life?” the way most people expect. Rather than starting from cells, metabolism, or reproduction, he comes at it as a chemist: asking what living matter actually does that non-living matter doesn’t. That reframing lets him sidestep questions he considers unproductive – is a virus alive? is an AI alive? – in favor of a sharper one: did evolution produce it? does it carry a lineage of memory from past into future? It’s also what puts him at odds with much of the AI conversation happening right now – he argues current AI systems aren’t intelligent in the way living things are, because they only look backward into data, never forward into genuinely unseen problems. 

In this conversation, Lee argues that life is best understood as a process that creates increasingly complex objects through evolutionary lineages, explores how Assembly Theory may help explain the emergence of life before biology itself, and discusses why understanding causation, memory, and the “thick present” may be essential to understanding intelligence and the future of the living process.

The interview is the second installment in The Trajectory’s Stewarding the Flame series, where we ask: What is intelligence, and what is the “flame” that life has which non-life does not?

This series references the article: Stewarding the Flame – How to Build an Ideal Future for Intelligence.

I hope you enjoy this fascinating conversation with Lee Cronin:

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Below, we’ll explore the core takeaways from my conversation with Lee, focusing on three of the central questions that shape the Stewarding the Flame series: what makes life, life, what humanity still needs to discover in order to better understand the living process, and the role of human augmentation in carrying that process forward.

What Makes Life, Life?

For Lee, the question of what makes life, life begins by separating what life is from what life does. Rather than defining life through familiar characteristics such as cells, metabolism, or reproduction, he approaches the problem as a chemist by asking what living matter does that non-living matter does not.

Lee argues that life is defined by a lineage of connection between the past, present, and future. In his view, the key thread is the ability to carry memories from the past into the future through the present, as living systems continue unfolding and finding ways to survive.

“That thread is what defines life. The ability to carry memories from the past into the future via the present.”

What Do We Still Need to Discover in Order to Understand the Flame?

For Lee, understanding the “flame” of life requires understanding how evolution begins before biology itself. He argues that humanity still lacks a fundamental explanation for how non-living matter transitions into living systems and believes that Assembly Theory provides a framework for studying that transition.

Lee believes this question also requires a better understanding of causation itself. He argues that explaining how matter comes to preserve memory, develop lineages, and produce increasingly complex structures depends on understanding physical causation rather than treating life as something fundamentally separate from the material world.

What Should We Do if We Want the Greater Process of Life to Flourish?

Rather than offering a single prescription for the future, Lee argues that humanity should focus on making what he calls “the present” thicker. By this, he means strengthening the connections between past, present, and future by preserving knowledge, building on previous discoveries, and creating new possibilities that future generations can continue developing. In Lee’s view, every scientific discovery, technology, and cultural achievement that remains available to those who come after us expands humanity’s ability to influence what happens next.

For Lee, this “thick present” is not simply about remembering the past. It is about keeping ideas, knowledge, and technologies active so they continue shaping the future rather than fading away. He argues that humanity’s growing ability to store information, share knowledge across generations, and intentionally bring imagined futures into reality gives us an increasingly powerful role in shaping the trajectory of the living process.

Lee also argues that a flourishing future depends on maintaining diversity across technologies, cultures, and ways of thinking. Rather than converging on a single approach, he believes resilience comes from preserving many different paths forward. Scientific ideas, technologies, and cultures should be able to coexist, compete, and evolve, creating a more robust foundation for whatever comes next.

“My wish would be that humanity builds technologies, scientific approaches, cultures that are robust. And the only way to have them robust is to have many of them.”

Concluding Notes

Throughout this conversation, Lee presents life not as a collection of organisms, but as an ongoing process through which matter preserves memory, creates increasingly complex structures, and carries evolutionary lineages forward through time. Rather than treating biology as the starting point, he argues that understanding life requires looking deeper into the physical processes that allow evolution, causation, and memory to emerge before the first cells ever existed.

For Lee, humanity’s responsibility is not simply to preserve what already exists, but to expand the possibilities available to the future. He argues that by creating a “thicker” present – one that preserves knowledge, encourages diverse approaches, and continually builds new capabilities – we strengthen the foundations upon which future generations can continue the living process.

This idea sits at the heart of the Stewarding the Flame series. Before we can responsibly build increasingly capable forms of intelligence, we must first deepen our understanding of the living process itself. We cannot steward what we do not more deeply understand.

I hope you’ll join me for the next conversation in the Stewarding the Flame series as we continue exploring what intelligence is, what makes life, life, and what it will take to carry the greater process of life successfully into the future.

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