Since ancient times living things have been distinguished from inanimate objects by their ability to move themselves. Yet when such an animated "self" dies, it returns to inert physical matter. An inanimate object can only move as the result of physical forces imposed on it by other objects. Is there some "vital" immaterial element added to the material body, a "breath of life" that leaves the body at death? This was the ancient idea of an immaterial spirit or soul (psyche) inhabiting the body. Information philosophy has identified that immaterial entity in living things.

This spirit or soul is somewhat similar to the idea popular in recent centuries known as "vitalism." French philosopher Henri Bergson called it the elán vital." This was something, perhaps a substance, that distinguishes living things from the non-living. Information philosophy finds no such material substance.

While modern biology has discredited the idea of vital force explaining life, many modern philosophers and psychologists have not abandoned a similar idea that all matter includes a psychic or mental aspect. Pan-psychism is the belief that all material particles have a mental capacity and some elemental consciousness.

Pan-psychists do not believe that minds could emerge from matter. So they simply assume that even the most elementary particles of matter must contain a mind-like element and, moreover, all particles share in a kind of "cosmic consciousness." As a scientific explanation, this is less satisfactory than one that shows how mind (and life) can appear later than those times when physical conditions were extremely hostile to living and thinking organisms.

This is the goal of information philosophy's cosmic creation process, which starts by explaining how inanimate "information structures" can come into existence or "emerge" despite the second law of thermodynamics. This law claims that any order or information in a closed system must eventually be destroyed by the increasing entropy or disorder. But the universe is not a closed system. It is open and rapidly expanding, which provides more possibilities for novel Information structures, including galaxies, stars, and planets, which were impossible in the early universe. Even atoms and molecules were not stable in the very early universe.

We cannot today explain how the universe itself might have a "beginning" at time = zero, the emergence of "something from nothing," although we have made a radical suggestion. But information philosophy, based on cosmology and physics, can describe the first appearance of orderly physical objects that stand out as distinguishable from their disorderly surroundings.

This includes the emergence of neutrons and protons (nuclear particles) from combinations of quarks. Protons could not combine with electrons to form stable hydrogen atoms until 380,000 years after the universe origin, when the temperature fell below 5000 degrees Kelvin. At that temperature, the entire sky was as bright and hot as the surface of our Sun today. Above this temperature, a newly formed hydrogen atom would be instantly ionized back to an electron and proton by the hot thermal radiation (photons).

Below that temperature, the electrons bound into hydrogen atoms no longer scatter those photons as strongly as free electrons scatter them. Photons then could suddenly travel great distances in straight lines. Some of those travelled for nearly 14 billion light years through space, where our radio telescopes today see them as the sky-filling uniform cosmic background radiation of the early universe, red-shifted and cooled down to the extremely low temperature of just a few degrees above absolute zero.

The expanding universe continued to cool and the sky darkened.

It would be millions of years before the universe temperature was low enough that the force of gravity could collapse the warm dust and gas (hydrogen mostly) into large astronomical objects like the planets and stars visible today. The earliest stars to form may have had so much mass that they quickly passed through the stages of stellar evolution and exploded violently, distributing heavy elements enriching the cosmic dust.

Our own solar system with its life-supporting planet did not form until nearly nine billion years after the universe origin. By that time the dust of the solar nebular disk had all the elements necessary for life, like carbon, nitrogen, oxygen, phosphorous, etc.

See the cosmic creation process for details, including our radical suggestion of creating something from nothing.