How Does Evolution Produce Consciousness/Reason?

[Fist and Faith]

Fist, it means that unique among all phenomena in the universe, consciousness is the only thing that is about something else (i.e. the object of consciousness). Even self-consciousness is about something other than itself, since the consciousness I'm aware of as "me" also includes the consciousness of that consciousness, of which I can also be conscious, and so on . . . entailing an infinite loop like a dog chasing its tail but never catching it. But that's not to say that the object is entirely separate (paradoxically)! The object is part of consciousness, in the sense that it forms the content of the consciousness; however, in addition to the content is the phenomenon of being directed to that content, which is the possibility of something being "content" in the first place. So there are two "parts" here. The two are inextricably tied.

Let's back up. Rocks aren't about the ground. Seeds aren't about trees. Material things in the universe can be tied together in relationships (e.g. planets in the sun's gravity), but this relationship is "blind." The earth isn't "about" the sun. This aboutness is so unique, I think it is the beginning of the apprehension of meaning. It is the first step, the necessary precondition for meaning to be known. First you must have aboutness in the universe, the condition of one thing being turned toward another thing. And the entire (or sole) essence of that "being turned toward" is a connection of pure meaning, nothing else.

So for the universe to contain aboutness, this means that there are links of pure meaning in the universe! Consciousness, specifically intentionality, is a connective feature of the universe that transcends physical connections. As I said, a connection of pure meaning. And since (I believe) meaning is inherent in the universe already (prior to inquiring minds), consciousness is like a "loop of meaning." It appears when meaning loops back upon itself such that aboutness arises.

These links are real. Their immateriality doesn't make them figments. We can know what's going on inside stars, even though there's no way we could ever possibly go to the interior of a star, because we are able to apprehend meaning in the world. We put this meaning together into explanations that take us (or our consciousness) deeper into the universe, far beyond the reach of our senses. And we know these explanations for things far away are real because we can replicate the consequences of such reasoning locally, in our experiments. We can bring about material effects that otherwise would not have been able to happen because we apprehend this meaning. For instance, by figuring out what powers the stars, we were able to use that knowledge to build atomic weapons and nuclear power stations. Clearly, we latched on to some real features of the universe!

So the connections are real, despite being immaterial (again: connections of pure meaning). Thus, there exists within the universe not only meaning, but ways to link this meaning into loops. And the natural way that the universe links meaning into loops is in the form of living things. I suspect this is why we can assume that other lifeforms are conscious, and not zombies, because life is not just a survival package for genes, it's the universe's way to loop meaning. I suspect that lifeforms "wrap themselves" around this loop, or get wrapped up around it, rather than the other way around (i.e. lifeforms evolving until they are advanced enough to become conscious). I think a "meaning loop" is the "seed" and lifeforms evolve out of that. Thus, physical organisms might be like the accretion disc of the early solar system: a "whirl of order" that develops organically around an organizing principle, except the organizing principle here is one of pure meaning, instead of gravity. The genesis of consciousness, of meaning apprehending itself, is so unique, I think it gives birth to life. [This might be why reductive materialism has failed to give us an explanation for the genesis of life, because it is starting with the wrong point, assuming that life gives birth to consciousness instead of the other way around]

So this is similar to panpsychism, without saying that the entire universe is conscious. Meaning is everywhere, not consciousness. Matter has an immaterial dimension in virtue of having relations with other matter (and time, space, energy, etc.). These relations aren't material. They are meaningful. And the relations can relate not only to matter, but to themselves as well. When relations are related to relations, they become "about" themselves, and aboutness arises.

This is also why teleology is introduced into the universe, along with purpose and will. The possibility of something being about something, for meaning to be apprehended, allows for these other phenomena that seem to defy the laws of physics. (They don't really defy them, they "ride on top of them.")

I've been thinking about this lately, because I heard of semiotics and biosemiotics. What is information?, by Marcello Barbieri, is excellent. I think DNA is about something it is not. DNA is two complimentary strands of nucleotides running along sugar phosphate backbones, and joined by hydrogen bonds. DNA means chains of amino acids and proteins, which, once constructed, build living organisms. But DNA doesn't mean chains of amino acids and proteins to us. Well, it does. But if we never existed, if no intelligence or consciousness existed, it would still mean what it means. And the molecular machines would still be using the information in DNA to manufacture amino acids. Still putting things together, building then from scratch, as the information in DNA requires. Which was happening before there was any intelligence or consciousness interpreting or observing.

[Zarathustra]

I'll definitely be checking out that link! I've only read the abstract, but I can already tell that's right where my mind is, in that space.

Deutsche talks about knowledge in a weird way, e.g. DNA itself has knowledge. It sounds odd to say that molecules can have knowledge, but he defines "knowledge" as "information with causal reach." So the info in DNA causes something--namely, the organism itself--and therefore it has encapsulated this knowledge of how to build an organism via molecules that encodes the info.

Obviously, I take the view that information and meaning are real aside from the chemistry itself, i.e. an emergent level of meaning that cannot be deduced from the laws of physics or chemistry themselves. It's simply impossible to take the laws of physics and deduce from them the existence of living, conscious beings in the same way you can deduce the existence of black holes from relativity. And I think they can't be deduced from the laws of physics because they literally aren't *in* them. It takes an emergent level of information for life itself to emerge. And for that, you need information processors, which is what DNA does.

[Fist and Faith]

Information with casual reach is an excellent way of saying it. I've been calling DNA active information. As opposed to static information. A book is an example of static information. A book is filled with information, but does nothing. A book about architecture does not construct buildings. It doesn't even draw blueprints. Further, I can read the book, and learn about architecture, yet I might never construct a building, or even draw blueprints. I need not act on information. The information can just sit in the book, and in my head, and nothing ever has to come of it.

Now that we exist, and have learned what we have learned, we can interpret DNA. But when we do interpret it, we don't have to do anything with that information. We can, and often do. But it's a choice.

DNA is active information because that which was interpreting the information long before we existed has no ability to choose whether or not to act on the information. The laws of physics require certain things to happen under certain circumstances. For example, when the stem of an apple hanging on a tree weakens below a certain point, the laws of physics are such that the apple falls. Likewise, the laws of physics are such that the enzyme helicase unzips DNA by breaking the hydrogen bonds that bind the base pairs. Helicase unzipping DNA is part of a series of physical events, all driven by the laws of physics, that processes information as it runs its course.

Of course, the information within DNA has to be in its original medium. The same information can be written down in a book. It can be written in a book using any type of notation we want. We can write it in binary. We can write it in English, French, or any other language. We can write pages ofstrings using the characters A, C, G, and T. We can write pages of strings using the words adenine, cytosine, guanine, and thymine. We can draw any DNA molecule, in every detail, representing every atom in any way we want. But in no case is the book going to build amino acids and proteins. The information has to be "written" in its original form, with molecules.

[Zarathustra]

Cool! We're thinking along similar lines. Active info is exactly the distinction Deutsche is making (I don't know if he makes it in this book; this book is his first).

While the info has to be encoded molecularly in order to build an organism, the info is nevertheless transferable through different media and it survives the translation just fine, without degradation. For example, we can learn about the info in DNA and then start doing genetic engineering. So there is something there besides the physical relations that survives as "pure" information, even as nothing more than a concept in consciousness. Meaning.

What's mind-blowing is that the entire universe is continuously unfolding due to information with causal reach. What is doing the processing?? Every second the previous state of the universe is "erased" and a new state is "created" in a way that conforms to the laws of physics. If we think of the universe we see as the display of a computer, and the laws of physics is the computer code that generates the output, then what is the processor? What is the universe running on?

[Fist and Faith]

In this article, Barbieri discusses it in a way that works even better for me than that other link.
The Definitions of Information and Meaning

Cool! We're thinking along similar lines. Active info is exactly the distinction Deutsche is making (I don't know if he makes it in this book; this book is his first).

While the info has to be encoded molecularly in order to build an organism, the info is nevertheless transferable through different media and it survives the translation just fine, without degradation. For example, we can learn about the info in DNA and then start doing genetic engineering. So there is something there besides the physical relations that survives as "pure" information, even as nothing more than a concept in consciousness. Meaning.

I suspect active information is a key to life and consciousness, and we won't create either without the active part of it.

What's mind-blowing is that the entire universe is continuously unfolding due to information with causal reach. What is doing the processing?? Every second the previous state of the universe is "erased" and a new state is "created" in a way that conforms to the laws of physics. If we think of the universe we see as the display of a computer, and the laws of physics is the computer code that generates the output, then what is the processor? What is the universe running on?

Not sure if I'm understanding how you mean this. I'm thinking the computer code is the laws of physics, and the processor might be strings.


To throw more into all this, I'm going to recommend a book. Incomplete Nature: How Mind Emerged from Matter, by Terrence Deacon, is Incredible. Here's the blurb:

As physicists work toward completing a theory of the universe and biologists unravel the molecular complexity of life, a glaring incompleteness in this scientific vision becomes apparent. The "Theory of Everything" that appears to be emerging includes everything but us: the feelings, meanings, consciousness, and purposes that make us (and many of our animal cousins) what we are. These most immediate and incontrovertible phenomena are left unexplained by the natural sciences because they lack the physical properties—such as mass, momentum, charge, and location—that are assumed to be necessary for something to have physical consequences in the world. This is an unacceptable omission. We need a "theory of everything" that does not leave it absurd that we exist.

Incomplete Nature begins by accepting what other theories try to deny: that, although mental contents do indeed lack these material-energetic properties, they are still entirely products of physical processes and have an unprecedented kind of causal power that is unlike anything that physics and chemistry alone have so far explained. Paradoxically, it is the intrinsic incompleteness of these semiotic and teleological phenomena that is the source of their unique form of physical influence in the world. Incomplete Nature meticulously traces the emergence of this special causal capacity from simple thermodynamics to self-organizing dynamics to living and mental dynamics, and it demonstrates how specific absences (or constraints) play the critical causal role in the organization of physical processes that generate these properties.

The book's radically challenging conclusion is that we are made of these specific absenses—such stuff as dreams are made on—and that what is not immediately present can be as physically potent as that which is. It offers a figure/background shift that shows how even meanings and values can be understood as legitimate components of the physical world.

[Zarathustra]

I suspect active information is a key to life and consciousness, and we won't create either without the active part of it.

Oh I absolutely agree, and so would Deutsche (I think). But it's not just life and consciousness that is produced by this, but also every state of the universe, moment by moment. The entire universe is running on "active info." That's what causation by the laws of physics is.* So these two issues are exactly the same problem. The mystery in both situations can be summed up as: how does information exert a causal force upon physical reality? Information isn't just a tag-along riding on matter, it is the constitutive structural feature of physical matter without which it would not exist--or even move forward from moment to moment. Cause-effect have to proceed by this structure, or not proceed at all. That's why it's a "law."

So the constitutive structural feature of the physical universe is information. Pure meaning. Eidos.
And the constitutive structural features of consciousness reduce down to the same thing: pure meaning, Eidos.

In each case above--in each Hinge--we have an actual instantiation of pure meaning in some medium, whether that medium is physical or phenomenal. And despite how different these media seem ontologically, the meaning flows freely between them, and it does so in a way that is not just symbolic or metaphorical, but CAUSAL, literally connecting.This is a metaphysical connection between dimensions of reality, not merely epistemological (though the former justifies and grounds the latter).

I'm surprised you didn't give me any pushback on my claim to have solved the transcendental problem. It's a pretty arrogant claim! But this is literally what I'm talking about. The connection between consciousness and the world happens through pure meaning as if Eidos is the "One True Hinge" of existence around which consciousness and the universe swing. But their "swinging" about this pivot is also a connection, just like any ordinary hinge. The mind-body problem is solved by realizing that the monism here is Eidos, and "phenomenal" and "physical" are merely two ways in which this meaning can manifest. They're not separate. In fact, mind is a "loop" of meaning within matter, an emergent eddy in the swirl of the Possible turning into the Actual, such that the Actual can turn back upon possibility itself, through knowledge and information processing, to bring about "theorems" that are not deducible from the formal language of the laws of physics. I say "theorems" in the sense of Godel's incompleteness theorem, such that any formal system will have true statements or theorems that can't be proven from the axioms and rules of that system. That's where we work our magic, in that space of true "theorems" that the universe never caused. We cause them. Not by violating the laws of physics, but by working within those "gaps" that Godel was talking about. This is where the universe escapes determinism.

We matter far more than we realize. There is magic here.

Not sure if I'm understanding how you mean this. I'm thinking the computer code is the laws of physics, and the processor might be strings.

If the laws of physics are the "program" that produces the output of each successive state of the universe, and the medium upon which that programs runs--in order to produce output--is the physical universe itself, then the output and the processor are exactly the same thing, which is not merely paradoxical but I believe logically impossible. It seems there needs to be more than just A) laws of physics and B) stuff. What connects the two??

Since there are only three Hinges--and nothing else in all of reality--and A/B are two of those Hinges, then the only thing left is: C) consciousness. The Phenomenal Hinge. So Eidos wasn't the One True Hinge after all. Or maybe there is a sense in which each is the primary Hinge. I don't know. I'm still working on it.

* (Or at least that's how most scientists think of causation; I think it might be deeper.)

[Fist and Faith]

I'm surprised you didn't give me any pushback on my claim to have solved the transcendental problem. It's a pretty arrogant claim!

I've solved it all myself, so I'm not going to give anyone else a problem for doing so.

But it's not just life and consciousness that is produced by this, but also every state of the universe, moment by moment. The entire universe is running on "active info." That's what causation by the laws of physics is.

I don't know what you mean. Where is the information in, say, Titan revolving around Saturn? Or water running, and wearing away the dirt? Or a star going supernova?

Gonna pass out. I'll say more tomorrow. Have to read through it again.

[Fist and Faith]

While the info has to be encoded molecularly in order to build an organism, the info is nevertheless transferable through different media and it survives the translation just fine, without degradation. For example, we can learn about the info in DNA and then start doing genetic engineering. So there is something there besides the physical relations that survives as "pure" information, even as nothing more than a concept in consciousness. Meaning.

I glossed over this earlier. But I want to address it. I'm not sure I'm going to be able to express myself, but...

We create information systems all the time. They're all systems for coding whatever we want. But they are always systems that we create, whereby one thing means something else. Events, ideas, objects, whatever. We invent the code whereby certain sounds mean certain things. Then another system whereby certain squiggles on paper mean those sounds. Then another system whereby certain strings of 0s and 1s mean those squiggles.

In all cases, we create the whole system. Which is an extraordinary thing, to be sure! It allows us to store what we've learned, to store memory, outside of our bodies. Specific, detailed facts that can be passed on to others. Others can learn facts through means other than personal experience. Even if the one who personally experienced any given fact has been dead for centuries.

But there is also active information. All examples of which are naturally-occurring. 'Active Information' and 'Naturally-Occurring Information' don't mean the same thing, but the members of the two sets are identical. We are coding pre-existing information when we talk about, write down, or code in any other system, naturally-occurring information.

This seems pretty significant to me. We are not just blobs of the universe that are aware of itself, and not just blobs of the universe that learn facts about itself. We are blobs of the universe that understand itself! At least at a beginning level.

[Zarathustra]

I'm surprised you didn't give me any pushback on my claim to have solved the transcendental problem. It's a pretty arrogant claim!

I've solved it all myself, so I'm not going to give anyone else a problem for doing so.

But it's not just life and consciousness that is produced by this, but also every state of the universe, moment by moment. The entire universe is running on "active info." That's what causation by the laws of physics is.

I don't know what you mean. Where is the information in, say, Titan revolving around Saturn? Or water running, and wearing away the dirt? Or a star going supernova?

Gonna pass out. I'll say more tomorrow. Have to read through it again.

If there was no information in the Titan-Saturn system, how could we possibly land a probe on Titan? Our ability to predict where it will be is done entirely through processing the information in that system, which is "encoded" in the laws of physics. Every position they have relative to each other (and to us) is a bit of information. Every moment this information changes. And yet we can jump into that flow and predict those future positions because we understand how and why they move, i.e. how they generate their information.

Anything that is computable has information. That's what computation is, information processing.

I say this is "active" information because the laws of physics are (apparently) causing each successive state of Titan's orbit. You could say gravity is causing it, but gravity is just curvature of spacetime. And that curvature has a geometry, which is pure information instantiated in a physical medium. So it comes back to information. If it's not active, then there would be no causation here.

[Fist and Faith]

Ok, valid points. But it's different. At least it's different to our perceptions. DNA is an information system. We can see how the information is coded. We can see how it works; how the sequences of bases code for amino acids, and how the sequences of amino acids make proteins. We can see how the laws of physics bring about the processing of all that information. We can translate the information to many of the information systems we have created.

Where is the coded information within the laws of physics? Or perhaps the better question is: Where is the coded information that gives rise to the laws of physics? If we could find the code - the equivalent of DNA - and translate its code to one of our information systems, maybe we could understand things more deeply, and create scientific marvels that make what we have today look like a Tinker Toys.

The information we use in our computations is not translated from the original. It's what we've been able to figure out. The best analogy I can think of is Mendel coming up with laws of inheritance by observing. We certainly have a better handle on things than he did, but we're still only working with our own deductions.

Schrödinger didn't predict the actual code of DNA, nor the material. But his prediction that an aperiodic crystal is the material carrier of life was pretty darned good. What predictions are there for the code of the laws of physics?

[Zarathustra]

You're right, it's different. The information in DNA is doing much more. It doesn't just create an organism, but through that organism it interacts with both the environment and other DNA. And that interaction--phenotype to genotype and vice versa--represents an emergent level of order that has its own "laws" that aren't deducible from the laws of physics (which is different from merely conforming to the LoP). And this emergence is why it's able to create life and consciousness. Higher levels of reality are being engaged by DNA than by Titan.

The coded information in the LoP are all the possible states of the universe and every particle within it. Where is that coded information? In the Eidetic realm, a Platonic reality. I believe at the root of everything is pure meaning/information. So to ask "where is it?" is like a fish asking where's the water. It's everywhere. It is not only the actual universe, but the possible universe as well.

Deutsche calls that "possible universe" the multiverse, except he thinks it's real and not merely possible. In other words, he thinks every possibility is an actuality in a parallel universe, neatly solving the possibility/actuality problem.

[Fist and Faith]

This is another good quote on the subject. Paul Davies in The Demon in the Machine: How Hidden Webs of Information Are Solving the Mystery of Life.

In living things, most chemical activity is handled by proteins. Metabolism – the flow of energy and material through organisms – is necessary for life to achieve anything, and proteins do the lion’s share of metabolic work. If life got started (as Prigogine believed) via elaborate energy-driven chemical cycles, then proteins must have been early actors in the great drama of life. But on their own, proteins are largely useless. The all-important organization of life requires a great deal of choreography, that is, some form of command-and-control arrangement. That job is done by nucleic acids (DNA and RNA). Life as we know it involves a deal struck between these two very different classes of molecules: nucleic acids and proteins. The conundrum as most scientists see it is the chicken-and-egg nature of life: you can’t have one without the other. Without a legion of proteins to fuss around it, a molecule of DNA is stranded. In simplistic terms, the job descriptions are: nucleic acids store the details about the ‘life plan’; proteins do the grunt work to run the organism. Both are needed. So a definition of life must take this into account. It needs to consider not just complex pattern-creating organized chemistry but supervised or informed chemistry: in short, chemistry plus information.

LIFE = MATTER + INFORMATION

‘Nothing in biology makes sense except in the light of information.’ Bernd-Olaf Küppers

We have now arrived at a critical juncture.

The thing that separates life from non-life is information.

The coded information in the LoP are all the possible states of the universe and every particle within it. Where is that coded information? In the Eidetic realm, a Platonic reality. I believe at the root of everything is pure meaning/information. So to ask "where is it?" is like a fish asking where's the water. It's everywhere. It is not only the actual universe, but the possible universe as well.

But we can't examine this code, as we can DNA; photons hitting retina, sending signals up too the brain; aspects of our immune system; or any code humans invented. It's not as easy to talk about.

[Zarathustra]

Why can't we examine this code? Isn't that what theoretical physicists do on a daily basis?

[Fist and Faith]

We can't examine it the way we can DNA. We can see DNA. We know what it's made of, that its building blocks give it its structure, and how the sequence of its building blocks encodes the information. We can even see how it's nature insists that the information it embodies be realized.

The information you're speaking of is rather hidden. We can only try to figure it out by observing everything. So we have mathematical formulas that describe the relationships of things to each other. When we want to tell someone about it, we can only point to our symbols. We can't explain how mathematics causes the universe to behave as it does, the way we can explain how DNA causes protein synthesis.

[Fist and Faith]

I've been wracking my brain over this. What I am looking for is one thing that means another thing. DNA is an information system. As I said above, it's about something that it is not. DNA is two complimentary strands of nucleotides running along sugar phosphate backbones, and joined by hydrogen bonds. DNA means chains of amino acids and proteins, which, once constructed, build living organisms.

Tree rings aren't an information system. We can learn some things about a given year's weather by looking at its ring, because we know how the weather affects it's growth. But the rings don't mean the weather of that year. Not even if they were affected in much more detailed ways, and we could learn much more detail about the year's weather. Just as fossilized dinosaur footprints don't mean a dinosaur walked there. Rings and footprints are signs of something that happened. Information can be gleaned from them. But it's inadvertent. Rings and footprints don't exist for the purpose of the information that can be gleaned from them.

This is in contrast to DNA, which actually causes the construction of physical things that are encoded in the information it embodies/within itself. And it contrasts with the squiggles on your computer's or cell phone's screen, which are deliverer there specifically for the purpose of transmitting information from my mind to yours, and which were created long ago for that exact reason.

Can you tell me about the information in the laws of physics that is any of these categories? Or is it in another category?

[Zarathustra]

It's a deep, fascinating puzzle. There are several different ways of looking at it. I think causality is perhaps the most useful. DNA causes something to happen. While it's also an effect of natural selection and mutation, our interest here is in its causal role. Tree rings don't cause anything. They are just an effect.

The laws of physics (LoP) can't be viewed as an effect, not unless we can figure out why the universe has these particular laws--i.e. their cause. So we are interested in them the same way as we are with DNA: their causal role. They are information with causal power, much like DNA.

But you're right, there is a distinction between LoP and DNA. The next useful distinction we can make is signal vs signified. DNA molecules (or genotype) can be viewed as the carrier signal of the meaning encoded in their relations, which assembles the organism (i.e. phenotype), which is what this carrier signal signifies. So now it occurs to us to ask, what is the "carrier signal" of the LoP? If it's a code, then where is it encoded? Is the carrier signal simply all matter and fields? How are they simultaneously the carriers of this signal and also its effects (i.e. the meaning, the signified)? It seems like there is a missing piece here. I'm honestly having trouble even describing what I mean, so I understand wracking your brain. But it's akin to asking how do the LoP make anything happen at all? How does this information have causal power? It's like there is some processing going on in a dimension we can't see, and the universe is the display of that computation. It really does make one think about simulation theories. But I digress . . .

[Fist and Faith]

The laws of physics (LoP) can't be viewed as an effect, not unless we can figure out why the universe has these particular laws--i.e. their cause.

Maybe We can think of it this way...

Matter warps spacetime. If there was only one bit of matter in the universe, it would warp spacetime. But gravity doesn't exist if there is only one thing. Gravity is ... how too say it ... a relationship between at least two things. There would be no way of knowing there is gravity if something else did not enter the region of warped spacetime. In this way of thinking, gravity is in the same category as tree rings. It is a force, rather than an object. But it is an effect; the effect of warped spacetime.

Although tree rings are only an effect, we can gain understanding of things by studying them. There is information to be found in them. The same can be said of gravity. But, being a force, we can't study it the way we study objects. We can only study it by studying it as a cause; by studying its effects on other things. Understanding it's effects on things gives us specific information about it. If there is active information causing gravity, it seems it would be coded into the system of matter/spacetime.

This seems similar to DNA. It is not the information in DNA, by itself, that makes it active. It is DNA being subject to the LoP that causes the action; the processing of its information/protein synthesis.
-It is matter being subject to warped spacetime that causes gravity.
-It is matter and spacetime being subject to the laws of metaphysics that causes the warping of spacetime.

Obviously, this regression doesn't help. But it makes the LoP effects that are also causes. I just wonder if information is encoded anywhere, as it is in DNA.

[Zarathustra]

I ultimately believe like you that DNA is doing something different than, say, gravity, and that's because it's producing emergent meaning. The whole reason biology exists is because you can't reduce an organism's behavior to molecules, even if we can reduce its assembly to molecules. The phenotype has its own unique relation to reality described by patterns on an entirely different level than the genotype, much less its atoms. Organisms might as well be in another dimension as far as atoms are concerned, one "orthogonal" to each individual moment, something that only has meaning and reality as it unfolds through time. A rock is still a rock, even if you could freeze all its motions. But life would be nothing but matter in such a case. It literally wouldn't be alive.

But just because these two levels are vastly different, it doesn't mean there isn't a similar problem with the lower level. Even in classical terms, it's a mystery how the universe "runs," what makes it unfold moment by moment (and it's even crazier in quantum physics). Learning the LoP, we learn the universe's "computer code." But code is timeless on the page (or in a file). You have to process that code for it to run, you have to open that file and execute it on a physical medium for it to advance step-by-step and produce its output. But if this code also creates the physical medium itself, then we have a fundamental paradox: it needs a physical medium to run, but it creates the physical medium. This is one of the reasons I think it's all just information. That's what matter literally is, not figuratively. "It from bit."

There's an interesting theory from a guy named Chris Langan. He has an alleged IQ of over 200, the "smartest man on the planet," but he's self-taught, not an academic. So he had to create his own specialized technical language which is difficult to understand. He has developed a Theory of Everything that describes a universe simulating itself. Self-simulation! This might solve what I'm talking about here: there seems to be a missing piece that accounts for the "computation" that the universe is doing as it runs forward moment by moment. It has sent me down a rabbit hole watching his Youtube videos. But beware, he is ridiculed by people who don't understand him. You'll see a lot of that if you look him up. I'd stick to this one:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N-bRM1kYuNA&t=4369s

[Fist and Faith]

Learning the LoP, we learn the universe's "computer code." But code is timeless on the page (or in a file). You have to process that code for it to run, you have to open that file and execute it on a physical medium for it to advance step-by-step and produce its output. But if this code also creates the physical medium itself, then we have a fundamental paradox: it needs a physical medium to run, but it creates the physical medium.

You have possibly already said, and I'll look above. But I don't know why this must be the case.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N-bRM1kYuNA&t=4369s

I will check it out today.

[Zarathustra]

Just as DNA is impotent in a text book as a list of nucleotides--it must have a physical medium to "go"--so too do the laws of physics need a physical medium to "go." Equations in a physics book won't do anything, either. But gravity isn't coded in matter like DNA is; its "code" exists on a purely mathematical level, the inverse square law, for instance. Or Einstein's equations. While DNA assembles organisms based on a physically instantiated code, gravity assembles planets etc. without any such physical carrier of its code. The mathematical structure "sits below" matter, so to speak, without a literal manifestation. If there were a physical manifestation, we could just read it like we sequence DNA and simply decode it, solve all the mysteries of gravity (for instance, how it unites with quantum mechanics in a Grand Unification Theory--the absence of which has been a long-running crisis in physics).

The real paradox occurs when we think of the LoP as creating matter. Surely that creation was not lawless. That's the same as saying it was magic. So for the LoP to have created matter, it would first have to "run" to bring its code/meaning/information into physical reality. But prior to the creation of matter, there would be nothing physical for this code to "run" on. Therefore, it's a paradox how the LoP created matter. Was it magic? God? Or did matter simply always exist? But that can't be true since our universe had a beginning and we know the process of how atoms condensed out of the Big Bang.