Biological life has a non-material side: Expanding our scientific worldview may be critical for securing the Earth-life system

The future of humanity and the environment are intertwined. Our collective growth shapes and disrupts environmental systems at planetary-scale. We pursue increasingly technological futures, while warning of the need to repair the natural systems and biosphere that sustain us. Facing globally interconnected challenges, the scientific approaches that guide our decision-making have never been more important for informing our future. Physicalist (physical-only), reductionistic worldviews, which strive to eliminate subjectivity, provide conceptual framing for mainstream scientific views and purport to completely frame and describe biological life. However, we observe ample case studies from biology, ecology, human health, animal behavior, and other life sciences where the course of events are shaped by intrinsic cognitive and subjective assessments of benefits and drawbacks. It is argued that such perceptions, informing adaptive goal-directed behaviors, represent an overlooked non-material facet or dimension, linked to bioelectric read/write/compute capacity, that is critical to life at organism-, ecosystem-, and biosphere-scales.