30/04/2025
What is life? It is a question that seemed impossible to explain for centuries. Then Darwin came about and explained how emergent phenomena could be created from almost nothing. Lately, however I had to modify my views on life due to the great thinkers Karl Popper and David Deutsch. The all-important thing that's created during evolution is knowledge. But what is this knowledge that defines existence? It is no mere collection of facts or idle data—it is information with causal power. Due to this causal power selection act on the substrate in which it is written, namely, the genes, which are judged arcording to their knowledge content. Across millions of generations the cells of all species get filled with knowledge. This knowledge is the key defining characteristic of life and it is this that makes life so infinitely distinguishable from the rest of the universe. It is this specific type of information that give life its wings to escape the merely dark relentless processes of the mechanical universe. Without this escapism, the cosmic arena, is purely dominated by big things crushing lesser things beneath their weight, brutally destroying order. However, knowledge lays forward a path where small things can affect big things. Consider this example: knowledge in the genes of early life filled the entire earth with oxygen using a small protein engine a few billions of a meter in size. How do we understand this phenomena? can we use the same mode of explanation as we do when we describe the mechanical universe? No. To get a deep understanding of how the atmosphere got filled with oxygen one cant do so by simply writing out the reactions of photosynthesis beacuse the deepest explanation for the sudden transformation of the atmosphere is knowledge creation in genes and not some simple explanation involving chemistry will do here. The emergence of knowledge therefore introduced a new mode of emergent explanation is which the deepest explanations exits at the level of knowledge and not atoms. In this view, the genome is like a book one that has been “written” by natural selection and encodes the history of Earth’s environments. Those genes persist precisely because they “understand” the conditions in which they evolved..
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