Eager Information

Recently, after years of almost not recalling my dreams at all, I have been experiencing intense oneiric activity, always related to complicated concepts such as the ones I have adumbrated in previous texts, and sometimes those dreams are not pleasant at all. It almost seems as if some content is trying to express itself, and I am compelled to write it down in some – hopefully – orderly fashion.

Last of such dreams involves exactly that concept, in a wider sense: the idea that not only language exists in potentiality and is trying to be expressed through human cognition, but also the unfolding of the universe is a process of potential information struggling to be expressed or actualized. Think of all heavier atoms that were available as a potentiality developing from the primordial one-proton hydrogen; of stars clustering around a black hole to form a galaxy; of planets and satellites forming from scattered “stardust”. Now think of crystals forming, expressing a specific geometry from amorphous magma in the formation of our lithosphere; of water, that simple and almost magical geometry appearing from two elements only; of an atmosphere developing its layered structure.

With living beings this is particularly striking. First of all, the potentiality of life emerging from the proposed “primordial soup”, which recent reasearch shows might have come as an inevitable consequence of thermodynamic laws. Think now of single-cell organisms as replicating machines, but also as a step towards the eukariotic cell, in which two strains of genetic material, nuclear (combinational) and mitochondrial (matrilineal) allow for variability and evolution. Think of each egg or sperm “hoping” to be lucky enough to form a new organism; of each gene “hoping” not to be silenced and express itself; of each individual “hoping” to pass its genetic information ahead; of complex forms of life “waiting” for its turn to emerge from simpler organisms. Of this thinking animals that humans are or should be already “promised” by the due course of evolution.

I see no reason, to come to an end, to believe that, while the evolution of the universe is deterministic, evolution of life is random and unpredictible. Of course it is way beyond our powers to grasp both the model and enough data to understand and simulate such mechanism, what determines a genetic mutation and which mutations lead to specific differentiation. Let us hope we never do, it could lead to unsettling developments. What I propose is exactly the opposite: human beings should “go with the biological flow”, and not think that thinking makes us a separate entity, least of all the semblance of a supreme creator. We are a image of the universe in that mathematical relations of the cosmos are reflected in our micro- and macroscopical structures: we are an element of this crazy fractal. Evolution will eventually make us stuff for future researchers of another species.