| Sumario: | A description is provided of the current state of scientific knowledge regarding the subsystems of living systems, concentrating on the first three information processing subsystems. Living systems theory (LST) maintains that all of the huge variety of living entities that have been produced through evolution are complexly structured open systems that maintain within their boundaries their thermodynamically improbable energic states by continuous interactions with their environments. LST reveals that living systems exist at eight levels of increasing complexity, with the principal components of a system at each level forming a system at the level below, and it identifies 20 essential processes that together with one or more components constitute the 20 subsystems of living systems. The current form of LST as it applies to the first three subsystems that process information—the input transducer, the internal transducer, and the channel and net matter-energy routes for information—is analyzed.
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