1. What Is Life?

   The key ideas here start from Erwin Schrödinger. Read my page on him.

   "Living organisms have goals and purposes – the product of billions of years of evolution – whereas atoms and molecules just blindly follow physical laws."

   "Patterns of information flow can literally take on a life of their own, surging through cells, swirling around brains and networking across ecosystems and societies, displaying their own systematic dynamics. It is from this rich and complex ferment of information that the concept of agency emerges, with its links to consciousness, free will and other vexing puzzles. It is here, in the way living systems arrange information into organized patterns, that the distinctive order of life emerges from the chaos of the molecular realm.

   "Scientists are just beginning to understand the power of information as a cause that can actually make a difference in the world.

   Demon in the Machine, pp.1-2

   "The thing that separates life from non-life is information." and "The essence of biological reproduction, then, is the replication of heritable information.

   Demon in the Machine, p.24

2. Enter the Demon

   Key idea is Maxwell's Demon. Read his I-Phi page and Boltzmann's.

   Information makes a difference in the world. We might say it has causal power. The challenge to science is to figure out how to couple abstract information to the concrete world of physical objects.

   Demon in the Machine, p.35

3. The Logic of Life

   Key idea here is the Game of Life and computational models of Life.

   Biological information is the software of life. Which suggests that life's astonishing capabilities can be traced right back to the very foundation of logic and computation.

   Demon in the Machine, p.67

   See John Conway and Stephen Wolfram, who claims his cellular automata can explain all of quantum physics, general relativity, and the origin of life..

   Some discussion of networks. For more, see Veritasium on Six Degrees of Separation
   10 years ago
   youtube.com/watch?v=TcxZSmzPw8k
   1 month ago
   youtube.com/watch?v=CYlon2tvywA

4. Darwinism 2.0

   Key idea is Evo Devo. See my Beyond the Modern Synthesis.

   When facing challenges, cells have many ways to ‘rewrite’ their genomes, just as computer programs have bugs removed or are upgraded to perform new tasks. James Shapiro, a collaborator with Barbara McClintock as a young man, has made a comprehensive study of the mechanisms involved. One of these is called reverse transcription, whereby RNA, which normally transcribes sequences from DNA, is sometimes able to write its own sequence back into DNA. Because there are many mechanisms for RNA sequences to be modified after they have transcribed the information from DNA, reverse transcription opens the way for cells to alter their own DNA via RNA modification.

   The upshot is that proteins, and modifications they have acquired during the life cycle of the cell, can influence genomic content: the epigenetic tail wagging the genetic dog. In all, Shapiro has identified about a dozen different mechanisms whereby a cell, operating at a systems level, can affect the information content of its own DNA, a process he calls natural genetic engineering. To summarize the central dogma of neo-Darwinian biology, information flows from inert DNA to mobile RNA to functional proteins in a one-way traffic. To use a computer analogy, the Darwinian genome is a read-only data file. But the work of McClintock, Shapiro and others explodes this myth and shows it is more accurate to think of the genome as a read–write storage system.

   Demon in the Machine, pp.129-130

5. Spooky Life and Quantum Demons

   Key idea is Quantum Computing and "Weird" Entanglement. See my Explanation

   Also see my John Bell page as well as Paul Davies and John Bell discussing Superdeterminism in Davies' 1986 book The Ghost in the Atom.

6. Almost a Miracle

   Key idea is When, Where, and How Life Began. See my Origin of Life.
   

7. The Ghost in the Machine

   Key ideas are Mind and Consciousness.

   See these pages and my purely biological (non-computational) Model of the Mind

8. Epilogue

   Key idea is the Source of Meaning in the Universe.

   There is no evidence whatever that the known laws of physics are rigged in favor of life; they are "life-blind." But what about new state-dependent informational laws of the sort I am conjecturing here?...It's an uplifting thought that the laws of the universe might be intrinsically bio-friendly in this general manner.

   These speculations are very far from a miracle-working deity who conjures life into being from dust. But if the emergence of life, and perhaps mind, are etched into the underlying lawfulness of nature, it would bestow upon our existence as living, thinking beings a type of cosmic level meaning.

   It would be a universe in which we can truly feel at home.

   Demon in the Machine, p.217

We will come back and finish up with the source of Meaning in the universe, but first I want to explore how Davies understands the emergence of information and order from the chaotic origin of the universe, and how Agency and Purpose then emerge with Life.

In his book The Physics of Time Asymmetry (1974), Paul Davies explored the "arrow of time."

David Layzer, my mentor, published The Arrow of Time in Scientific American in 1975, showing order (negative entropy) can increase at the same time as entropy increases!

Layzer's article showed that if the equilibration rate of the matter (the speed with which it redistributes itself randomly among all the possible states in phase-space) was slower than the rate of cosmic expansion, then the "negative entropy" (defined as the difference between the maximum possible entropy and the much lower actual entropy) would increase.

I learned much later that Layzer's idea was based on the following suggestion made by Arthur Stanley Eddington in his 1935 book New Pathways in Science.

The expansion of the universe creates new possibilities of distribution faster than the atoms can work through them

(New Pathways in Science, 1935, p. 66)

In the 1977 second edition of The Physics of Time Asymmetry, Davies briefly cited Layzer's 1975 article on the Arrow of Time in Scientific American.

In 1990, Layzer published his book Cosmogenesis: The Growth of Order in the Universe.
The title was clearly based on Teilhard de Chardin's Cosmogenesis, which introduced his divine purpose in the nöosphere.

I know that Layzer admired Teilhard. David was the adviser for my wife Holly's 1968 Ph.D. thesis Relativistic Z-Dependent Corrections to Atomic Energy Levels. Holly and I read and commented on every draft of his book.

In Cosmogenesis, Layzer reiterated his model for the growth of order and drew a graph comparing the rates of universe expansion and equilibration reaction rates. He wrote,

It follows that the rates of equilibrium-maintaining reactions must have exceeded the rate of cosmic expansion early in the cosmic expansion. Eventually, however, the rate of any given equilibrium-maintaining reaction must become smaller than the rate of cosmic expansion. The curve representing the reaction rate is steeper than the curve representing the expansion rate.

Cosmogenesis, p. 144

Based on these two simple curves and Layzer's verbal description in Scientific American and Cosmogenesis, I produced this diagram.

A few years after Cosmogenesis, Davies and two colleagues edited the 1994 volume Physical Origins of Time Asymmetry. Davies contributed the article, "Stirring up Trouble."

Without mentioning David Layzer's 1975 "Arrow of Time" article or Layzer's 1990 book on the Growth of Order, Davies coined the term "entropy gap" to describe how the maximum possible entropy goes up faster than the actual entropy (clearly this was Layzer's insight).

Does this transition from equilibrium to disequilibrium not constitute a violation of the second law of thermodynamics? No. What has happened is depicted in Fig. 3. At some time around one second, the material content of the universe was in a state of equilibrium, having the maximum possible entropy for the constraints at that time. As the universe expanded, however, the maximum possible entropy rose. The actual entropy also rose, but less fast. In particular, the relaxation time for nuclear processes to allow the cosmological material to keep pace with the changing constraints (due to the expansion) was much longer than the expansion time, so the material began to lag further and further behind equilibrium conditions ( equilibrium meaning in the nuclear case that this material is in the form of the, most stable element - iron). Hence an 'entropy gap' opened up. The continuing expansion of the universe serves to try and widen that gap slightly (though now through other processes than nucleosynthesis), while physical processes such as starlight production serves to try and narrow it.

It is important to realise that the crucial effect of the expansion was in the early universe - hence the sudden widening of the gap early on. Today it seems likely (though I haven't checked) that the gap is narrowing: the universe produces copious quantities of entropy at a rate which I imagine is faster than the (now rather feeble) expansion raises the maximum possible entropy. The actual entropy will presumably asymptote toward the maximum possible entropy in the very far future.

Physical Origins of Time Asymmetry, p.33

Once again Davies does not mention Layzer's work, but he develops a diagram much like mine, clearly mostly agreeing with what Layzer said.

But Davies suggests (though he says he hasn't checked!) that the entropy gap will eventually close, leading to the 19th-century Kelvin-Helmholtz "heat death of the universe."
David Layzer had no such pessimism.

William Thomson (Lord Kelvin) was first to describe this entropy increase and it was Hermann Helmholtz called it the “heat death” of the universe. But did the universe begin with "low entropy" and lots of information as they thought?

Here we should review a short clip from the excellent Veritasium presentation mentioned on Edu-Talk a few weeks ago. (We need to skip over the ads!)
"ENTROPY: The Most Misunderstood Concept in Physics"

The Veritasium clip includes the Past Hypothesis, which Kelvin, Helmholtz, James Clerk Maxwell, Ludwig Boltzmann and many others since, believed meant that the universe began with a high degree of organization or order (negative entropy or information) and that it has been running down ever since as positive entropy increases.

As we see clearly, both Layzer and Davies agree that the entropy at the universe origin was much lower than the entropy today. They also clearly label that early entropy as maximum entropy for the extreme density and temperature conditions at the origin.
So there was no room for any information at the beginning of the universe..

In chapter 6 of Demon in the Machine, Davies writes...

The universe abounds in complexity, from everyday systems such as turbulent streams and snowflakes to grand cosmic structures like nebulae and spiral galaxies. However, one class of complex systems – life – stands out as especially remarkable. In his Dublin lectures Schrödinger identified life’s ability to buck the trend of the second law of thermodynamics as a defining quality. Living organisms achieve this entropy-defying feat by garnering and processing information and directing it into purposeful activity. By coupling patterns of information to patterns of chemical reactions, using demons to achieve a very high degree of thermodynamic efficiency, life conjures coherence and organization from molecular chaos. One of the greatest outstanding questions of science is how this unique arrangement came about in the first place.

Demon in the Machine, p.166

We must clarify "life's ability to buck the trend of the second law." It is not an "entropy-defying feat." done "by garnering and processing information and directing it into purposeful activity."

All that Schrödinger's "What Is Life" said in 1944 was that life “feeds on negative entropy.”

It is this source of negative entropy, or free energy, i.e., energy available to do work, that allows living things to communicate with their body parts and with other living things,
to process information (though without computer processing), and to act purposefully.

Schrödinger’s source for negative entropy was our Sun. With the bright Sun as a heat source and the dark night sky as a heat sink, the Earth is a thermodynamic engine.

I made a crude still illustration of solar photons coming to Earth.

This conversion of high energy photons to low energy is again illustrated much more beautifully by Veritasium's "ENTROPY"

But Schrödinger didn't know how the Sun (and all the stars) came to be such a source of negative entropy or free energy.

Following Eddington and Layzer (and now Davies), I've explained how a star can become a source of free energy with what I'm calling the cosmic creation process.

The expansion of space created new possible locations in phase-space, producing pockets of negative entropy. When an actual information structure forms locally, it will not be stable unless it radiates away positive entropy to satisfy the second law globally.

Two steps, first possibilities, then one actuality, are the core of the cosmic creation process.

These two steps or two stages are first indeterministic (random) possibilities, second an adequately determined (not pre-determined!) choice or selection.

This is exactly how Claude Shannon's theory of the communication of information works, showing the intimate connection between negative entropy and information!

Information philosophy identifies four such processes creating new information.
They are all driven by random possibilities followed by one selected as actual.

1. For Shannon, there must be multiple possible messages. If there are three possible messages, 8 bits are communicated. If only one, no information is communicated.
2. For the universe, without the expansion opening new phase-space possibilities,
   the universe would be closed and suffer a "heat death"!
3. Ernst Mayr called Darwinian evolution a two-step process.
   Without chance variations, there would be no new species.
4. For my two-stage model of free will endorsed by two dozen philosophers and scientists,
   without the mind producing random new thoughts, there would be no free actions.

As Davies said, before life was created on Earth, there were no "agents" with "purposes" and no "conscious minds." But there were values and meaningful information structures. There were just no living "agents" in the abiotic universe to see and appreciate that meaning.

Non-living objects like atoms, molecules, planets, stars, and galaxies are passive information structures. They are entirely controlled by fundamental physical forces - the strong and weak nuclear forces, electromagnetism, and gravitation. These objects do not control themselves. They are reducible to physical forces as causes. They are not acting. They are acted upon.

Living things, you and I, are active dynamic growing information structures, forms through which matter and energy continuously flow. And it's the top-down communication of meaningful biological information that controls those flows!

This communication capability emerges with the appearance of life.

The objective value in the universe before the existence of life was the vast creation of negative entropy and free energy, most critically their flow from the Sun to the Earth (as Schrödinger told us) to support the evolution and development of life in the biosphere, our original home in the universe.

The universe began with primeval quarks, gluons, electrons, and photons. In the first few minutes after the origin, the cosmic creation process produced the earliest information structures, protons and neutrons. 380,000 years later, the ionized plasma cooled to the surface temperature of the Sun and allowed those protons and electrons to form atoms, making the universe transparent. That allows us today to see back in time to the cosmic microwave background., now cooled to 2.7K.

Galaxies, stars, and planets began to form about 400 million years after the origin.

The Sun, a population I star, formed only about 4.5 billion years ago, along with its planets, and life emerged rather quickly about a half-billion years later.

The Sun will continue to support life on Earth for another 5 billion years, after which it will grow into a red giant star whose surface will reach to Earth's orbit.

Well before then, humans will have populated Mars. And, in the unlikely case that we have not yet connected with any extraterrestrial intelligent life, we will have seeded life on many exoplanets within habitable zones and long-lived stars like brown dwarfs.

Giulio Prisco, who did research with the European Space Agency, and I, who advised NASA on its Long Range Program in Space Astronomy, have some suggestions for future space exploration

In his book Futurist Spaceflight Meditations, Prisco writes...

We must strenuously push toward our cosmic destiny among the stars. Beginning to expand beyond the Earth before it’s too late is our most important task at this moment in history. Many actors have important roles to play, and there’s room for everyone...
But the road to the stars is full of impediments and roadblocks. We will not advance as fast as we wish. Therefore we must keep our mood strenuous and our drive strong. We need an optimistic spaceflight culture oriented to the future, with energizing visions of interplanetary, interstellar, and cosmic futures.

Futurist Spaceflight Meditations, p.1

Our suggestions...

1. First and most important, Mars should be prepared for human habitation by robots, like Tesla's autonomous humanoid Optimus, not by expensive and fragile astronauts.
2. Second, in advance of humans, we should send seeds of critical plants that will modify the Martian atmosphere, turning the red planet green (reverse panspermia).
3. Third, expeditions to nearby exoplanets may find them in the early stages of evolving life, shortening the time needed to support intelligent life.
4. In sum, if it turns out that we are alone, that life on Earth is the only case nearby in our Milky Way galaxy, we humans will colonize our neighborhood, extending life perhaps another ten billion years if we find a habitable planet near a long-lived brown dwarf star, longer if some of Freeman Dyson's ideas are realized.

Davies' 1983 book God and the New Physics was a landmark. It argued that the new twentieth-century physics of relativity and quantum mechanics "is pointing the way to a new appreciation of man and his place in the universe." (p.xii)

In particular, Davies explored the theologian's view that life is the supreme miracle, and human life represents the crowning achievement of God's cosmic masterpiece." (p.58). In a private communication, Davies says this theologian's view "works only if you go on to say that I wholeheartedly reject that. I explore it, sure, and find it wanting (I hate “The God of the gaps”). So please set the record straight on that one."

Some members of the Evo Devo community for whom I've created I-Phi web pages, including Brendan Graham Dempsey, Robert Ulanowicz, and Clément Vidal, believe that life would be meaningless without a divine purpose.

Other members seek a "cosmic purpose" before the origin of life. Did "Universal Darwinism" control cosmic evolution in the pre-biotic universe. or even in a previous universe?

But a source much closer to home for Meaning, Purpose,Values, Agency, Mind, and Consciousness is in the billions of years of meaningful and purposeful living beings who preceded us and those living with us now in our biosphere. See Meaning in the Biosphere.

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