A New System of Life

Until now, our planet has only known the replicate system of life. Replicate life persists through the march of generations with the genome carrying the information of life. After four billion years our species emerged, the only one with mind. Mind’s informational power has allowed our species to gain planetary dominion in an evolutionary instant. Now we discover that mind is a powerful self of the descriptive information field able to move from body to body, enabling a new system of omniphysical life in which life’s persistence is vested in living individuals. Omniphysical mind is the new information store of life. The new unit of persistence is the individual able to instruct the creation of bodies enabling its persistence.

Our powerful replicate species has jolted our planet far from its historical path of low entropic cost. While the power of omniphysical life creates the potential to fulfill our aspirations for life, those can only be fulfilled on a foundation of goodness and cooperation. The ethical and organizational principles of low entropic cost are those of otherness and cooperation, the only ones capable of fulfilling our aspirations for life over far horizon.

In our dissipative material reality, each particular body must wear out and fail and thus replication is the only means to life’s persistence. The information of replicate life is conserved in the genomic information store able to copy itself and to instruct the creation of individuals carrying the store, themselves able to reproduce. Confined to the physical information field in which all information is embodied in physical form and function, the power of these creatures is extremely limited; they are stuck with their bodily facts which can only be altered by chance-driven alterations to the genetic information store and selected through evolutionary processes. The opening of the descriptive information field and the advent of mind vastly enhances the power of life while enabling a new means of life’s persistence in the form of living individuals.

For four billion years, all creatures acted in the small, their power limited to the forms and functions nature was able to create. But then came our species, opening a new information field and unleashing the power of mind. Thanks to mind we have elevated ourselves and built a powerful planetary civilization. But we are still replicates with our metabolic needs and a food chain that is exhausting and despoiling our tiny planetary home. Competing for resources and power, individuals and nations resort to force to achieve their purposes even as we try to keep the lid on civilization-level conflicts.