1. Introduction

A primary difference between living creatures and non-living things is the capacity for reproduction. However, if one considers only individual life rather than the existence of species, the major paradox is that living things actively counteract degradation in a continuously changing environment or being injured through homeostatic protection. By homeostasis, we refer to the ability of living organisms to maintain viability and stability of physiological functions in a changing external environment. The system remains alive as a consequence of homeostasis maintaining system integrity in the presence of perturbing influences. Cessation of homeostasis leads to inevitable death. In living systems, the relationship between cause and effect is paradoxical: organisms are characterized by poorly predictable motility, which is supposedly managed by their internal motives. Homeostatic motivation transforms an object into a subject by virtue of its own behavior. Thus, the mystery of arbitrary actions may be disclosed by

© The Author(s). Licensee InTech. This chapter is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0), which permits unrestricted use, © 2017 The Author(s). Licensee InTech. This chapter is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.

distribution, and eproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.

exploring homeostasis [1]. It should be noted that homeostasis may evidently produce both maintenance of life and the will to act [2].

Although homeostasis is present in all living systems and relates to large numbers of different biochemical and physiological mechanisms, it reveals amazingly similar features and behavior. Such universality is not unique in the physical world. For example, physical systems, from crystals to large biomolecules, demonstrate universal behavior near critical points in spite of considerable differences in its structures and intermolecular interactions. This occurs due to the critical behavior of the systems being determined by the analytical properties of free energy near critical points, while the peculiarities of system structure and intermolecular interactions are "hidden" within the phenomenological parameters of the free energy.

We assume that the universality of homeostasis is a consequence of the analytical properties of the S-Lagrangian, which determines the dynamic equation associated with homeostasis, while peculiarities of the biochemical and physiological mechanisms determine phenomenological parameters of the Lagrangian. We show in Section 2 that plausible assumptions about S-Lagrangian properties lead to good agreement between theoretical descriptions and observed homeostatic features.
