On your slouchiest day you still manage to generate 240 billion replacement cells. That’s just one of the many unconscious and unfelt things you do in your ongoing hustle to repair and replace what breaks down in you.

Machines and molecules don’t hustle like that. But all organisms do, even the ones that don’t think or feel like trees, fungi, bacteria. We living beings try to stay alive. That’s what “being” means, basically, a verb about maintaining a state, working to remain a thing, nouning. We living selves make effort to remain selves. We struggle for our persistence.

Nothing about us defies physical laws. We are nothing but chemistry and yet we do something that chemistry and non-living things don’t do. We try. Trying is therefore something different from nothing but chemistry. So what’s the deal? What is trying and how did it start?

A lot of scientists ignore this simple, obvious question. Many think Darwin answered it. He didn’t and he knew it. Many act like we don’t try, like we’re just machines. Many think replicating RNA or DNA molecules explains how trying starts. It doesn’t. Molecules don’t try to do anything.

For 25 years, I’ve worked closely with Harvard/Berkeley biologist/neuroscientist Terrence Deacon, developing an explanation for the emergence of selves trying to remain selves as something different from nothing but chemistry.

Our proposed solution is kind of obvious too. Nothing was added to chemistry to make us come alive and we’re not machines either. Still, we have something in common with machines: The way our parts interact such that they keep each other from doing just anything. It’s like your everyday self-control, you keeping yourself from dithering.

A watch is functional because of how the parts are checks and balances on each other’s movement. An assembled watch is more useful than a bunch of loose parts shook in a bag, because of how the parts constrain each other.

And what’s a constraint? Well, there are hard, static, imposed constraints like watch parts or walls, and then there are emergent dynamic constraints like traffic congestion. Traffic congestion isn’t a static thing. Still it changes likely paths of least resistance. No congestion? You cruise right through. Traffic congestion? You take a path of least resistance around it.

I think of myself as a self-regenerative constraint, an emergent constraint that channels energy into effort to prevent the degeneration of the constraint I am.

What trying is and how it starts – that’s what this page is about including a bunch of 2short2suck videos for non-scientists.

Our question and proposed answer aren’t difficult. They’re just unfamiliar. If you’re like me, you think about yourself, trying to figure out what you should try to do. Still, who stops to wonder what selves and effort really are? I’ve found that having a bit of scientific backstory has helped me make much more sense of myself and my effort.