Overview

Our universe enables two systems of life. Replicate life is the foundational one, the only way life can be wrested from the elemental. The other is omniphysical life, life whose individuals are omniphysical, able to command the nature of their physical being, achieved by the ability of mind to move from its current body to others.

The possibility of omniphysical life arose in the last moment of evolutionary time with the emergence of our species, the only species with mind. Although our mind is currently tied to a body that dies, this is a vestige of our evolutionary emergence and not a necessary fact of reality. In fact, a person’s mind can move to and command newly-built bodies, enabling omniphysical life.

Both mind and body are essential to our existence. Our mind is our autonomous thinking self. Among other things, it enables our self-awareness, has a deep understanding of reality, acts smartly to its survival and other purposes, is the seat of memory, underwrites our moral capabilities, is the source of imagination and creativity, aspires to and acts toward a future, makes evaluations and decisions, is always home and in charge, and tells body what to do. Our body is our physical self. It provides the material and energetic basis for our existence. It allows us to perceive the world and act capably in it and gives rise to our feelings and emotions. Our body is essential. But it can be replaced by other and ultimately more capable ones. My mind is the me doing the driving, and my body is my vehicle of life.

The path to omniphysical life will be challenging, not so much in the technological means but in adapting our planetary civilization. We have known only one system of life and each of us is deeply a part of that. Life in which individuals persist by commanding their embodiments is new and unexpected. Changes in mindsets, behaviors, and institutions will be needed to bring forth a world of omniphysical life. Those will be forthcoming only if individuals fathom the potential of omniphysical life in its existential, planetary, and cosmic dimensions.

Existentially, omniphysicality shatters our replicate bonds, empowering mind and body. We will choose bodies fitting our needs and desires while multiplying the means through which we act in and experience reality. Most profoundly, omniphysical life ends death. In our current reality, we stand by helplessly as our powers atrophy, as death overtakes those we love, as our own death takes us from the world of life. Free to move to alternative bodies, we can cast aside death and the fear, dread, and longing that are part of replicate life. As omniphysical, we can save ourselves and all that we care for.

Omniphysicality revolutionizes the relations among life, its energy needs, and its environments. The adaptability of bodies to environments and energy supplies increases by orders of magnitude the ability to sustain ourselves while strengthening the environments on which all of life depends. As omniphysical, we can end material want while saving our planet of life. On this foundation of life and plenty, it is possible to unify life and goodness in a cooperative civilization supporting life’s powerful persistence over far horizon.

At its most expansive, omniphysical life would transform the nature of the universe. For billions of years our universe was stuck in the age of the elemental, an epoch without life. That changed here some four billion years ago when molecular structures gained the ability to catalyze their duplicates, wresting life from the elemental and opening the reign of replicate life. After countless evolutionary searches, nature was able to create mind, freeing information from its embodiments and vastly expanding the power of replicate life. Omniphysicality frees life from its particular embodiments, ending death while enabling the full adaptability of life to its environments on Earth and beyond. Empowered and liberated into the cosmos, individuals gain the potential to exist in the possibilities of material reality.

In billions of years and through innumerable trials, nature has been able to create exactly one species with mind – the indispensable foundation for life as omniphysical. For all of our faults and shortcomings, we are it. By creating us, countlessly-searching nature has done its part. Life’s great trying is in our hands. 

Replication is the innovation that both gave rise to life and has enabled its persistence for four billion years on Earth. It is nature’s seminal discovery, the monumental innovation that heaved life from the elemental. You and every entity that has ever lived owe your existence to ancient molecular structures that managed to catalyze their duplicates. Nature found the key to life not in the persistence of individuals but in the capacity to build new ones, creating a way to conserve the embodied information of life despite the death of each and every living thing.

But replication has accomplished much more than endowing life and underwriting its persistence. It has powered life’s searches for survival through billions of years, providing the countless copies on which evolutionary processes could search for, test, and select our planet’s vast diversity and capability of life.

Consider your own replicate existence. You are a biological being. You exist because a universe, sun, planet, replicate system of life, and your many, many ancestors created you. The chances that a path of life would become you are so infinitesimal that your successful existence is a fact only by the force of nature’s innumerable tryings.

You are a physical masterpiece, a trillions-cell symphony whose coordinated complexity allows your every living breathing moment. You are so astonishingly capable because the information enabling your life has been developed and tested over countless generations. That information was not only found and conserved but has been augmented, combined, reshuffled, redeployed, sometimes shelved, and then tested and tested again for its survival value. You exist at this very moment because that information – and astounding good fortune – allowed your ancestors to win untold brave victories, sustaining the thread of life that culminates for now in you.

Despite your many marvelous attributes and capabilities, the central fact at the foundation of life remains: you are a replicate. In this sense, each of us is no different from all other life and no different from those who have gone before. Viewed from the perspective of life’s four-billion-year pageant, we are replicates doing our best to sustain ourselves, our offspring, and therefore life and its information. And despite your own pending demise, life will go on because you and someone you love will create a beautiful bouncing baby who will grow and prosper in her own time of life before death brings a return to the elemental. This is why omniphysical life is of such profound existential significance: that brilliant life – and all others – can be saved.

For other living things, life and death are as real as they are to each of us. But no other beings have the ability to describe reality, including the fact of their impending death. Unable to overcome death but aspiring for life we deploy descriptions that give us solace and hope, inventing explanations in which life continues for ourselves and those we love. But these replicate hopes are without foundation. In our replicate world, life’s persistence is vested in genomic information stores and not the individuals who are the living manifestation of that information. Each of us is a fleeting presence; each of us is soon gone and lost forever.

As the planet’s most powerful species, our dilemmas propel others. Virtually everything that endangers each of us and our planet results from our species exerting within a replicate system of life. Acting to the brief horizons of our truncated existence, we are rapidly undermining the means of life’s persistence, amplifying the scarcities and conflicts that are endemic to the struggles of replicate life. Most deeply, as long as life is joined with death we are left to hope without foundation and to the delusion, despair, and destructiveness that empower evil.

Our problem is fundamental: the replicate system of life is not powerful enough to fulfill our aspirations for life. That takes far more powerful life. That takes omniphysical life.

Omniphysical life is not a new species, genus, family, order, class, phylum, kingdom, or domain of replicate life. It is a new system of life. Replicate life endures through the march of generations: we are born, we live and reproduce, and we die. The information of life is conserved in the genome, passed from parents to offspring and on and on in succeeding generations. As omniphysical, life wins its persistence in an entirely different manner. Both existence and persistence are vested in the individual with the information of life conserved as mind able to move to and command alternative bodies.

We have failed to see the opportunity of omniphysical life because we have been deeply mistaken about our own nature. First, each of us is not one self but two: mind and body. Those two selves are not only completely different but entirely separable. Each particular body must ultimately break down and fail. But mind can persist by the ability to move to and command a new body. Second, and in all essential regards, my mind is who I am. It is only because of my mind that I know myself as the one having my experiences, the one who is aware of my life and history, values, beliefs, aspirations, priorities, likes and dislikes, and on and on. It is my mind who considers, plans, decides, and acts in my interests. It is my mind that makes me powerfully-intelligent, not only aiding my survival but making my life rich and meaningful, allowing me to imagine, to be creative, and to think holistically and deeply. It is my mind that understands my existence in a past, present, and hoped-for future, and allows me to anticipate, plan, and execute actions through time. It is my mind who decides what to do and guides body in doing it. Most profoundly, and being omniphysical, my mind is the me who can command my ongoing existence in an expansive reality of life.

Of course, a capable body is essential. It is my body that enables my physical existence, sensory experiences, feelings, and actions in the world. But my body is the vehicle and not the driver: my mind is. My body will ultimately wear out and fail but as omniphysical it can be replaced with new and ultimately better ones.

Omniphysical life is only possible because of the nature of mind. Mind is a descriptive information entity; all of its content and capabilities exist as part of a system of symbol-based meanings. All of mind’s amazing capabilities: its awareness and self-awareness; its abilities to understand, parse, categorize, and organize information; its abilities to set goals, priorities, express preferences, and make decisions; its abilities to store and recall information and all of its numerous other capabilities exist as part of a descriptive system. Being a descriptive information entity, mind can be supported omniphysically by any number of physical means. Our mind is not inextricably bound to our current body but can move to new ones.

Mind is not just any descriptive system. It is an autonomous self that is able to act in line with its priorities and preferences. The first priority is survival – both of itself and the body supplying its material support. The foundations of mind’s selfdom are its abilities to be aware and self-aware: without these capabilities, there could be no mind and no selfdom in descriptive information terms. The capability of awareness provides the means by which mind is able to experience descriptive information while the capability of self-awareness enables it to be aware of itself as the one who has those experiences. It is mind’s capabilities of awareness and self-awareness that give rise to the subjective ‘I’ through which each of us knows ourselves as the living person we are.

It is not only mind’s omniphysicality and self-awareness that allow it to play the central role in the omniphysical system of life. Mind’s descriptive reach is unbounded. It can describe reality but also imagine, conjecture, form hypotheses, be fanciful, and creatively deploy its descriptive powers in unlimited uses. The linked nature of its descriptive meanings supports an open-ended and extensible semantics allowing new content to be integrated while flexibly permitting revisions and adaptations. Mind’s content can be multilayered and complex, allowing abstract and nuanced description at any desired level of detail – including the self-reference at the heart of individual selfdom.

In the omniphysical system of life, mind supported omniphysically is the persisting self, the enduring basis of identity and autonomy, able to move to, exist in, and direct alternative bodies. Omniphysical mind commands and compels the individual’s living existence – not only providing the means to overcome death but enabling capabilities and experiences far beyond our replicate reach.

The central obstacle to life’s persistence is physical dissipation. That’s why unknowing nature’s discovery and harnessing of replication was of such epochal significance. By discovering how to create replicates, nature found a way to conserve the information of life independently of particular embodiments, thus winning life’s needed omniphysicality. Of course, the problem for each of us is that replication achieves the omniphysicality of the species and not its individuals. We are passing actors on the stage of life.

The passage to omniphysical life requires two main and reinforcing accomplishments. Most essentially, our mind must be freed from a dying animal. While it is not possible to predict when this will be achieved, the information nature of mind – its omniphysicality, transparency, algorithmic basis, and universal computability put this critical achievement within our reach.

Perhaps astoundingly, the nature of mind makes it possible to become omniphysical despite biological death. Just as particular embodiments are not critical to omniphysical individuals, neither is the temporal continuity of the physically-supported individual. Omniphysical mind is self-constituting in its semantics and need not be continually metabolically active. As long as a person adequately conserves their information of life, the individual can become omniphysical even if those semantics are not immediately operational as omniphysical mind or in body. The path to omniphysical life can pass through the shadow of replicate death.

The power of omniphysicality not only brings an end to death but the adaptability of bodies opens wholly new relations among life, its energy needs, and its environments, enabling an end to material want. On this foundation, the way is open to the second major accomplishment, a civilization supporting each person’s success as omniphysical. That civilization must be a cooperative one – the one of least entropic cost and the only form of social organization capable of persistence over far horizon. The ethic and operational principle underwriting a cooperative civilization is goodness as self-interested otherness: each individual is assured as omniphysical by acting to assure all others. This individual responsibility and right unifies self and common interest, supporting a civilization in which each person can be safe, secure, and sustained. Thus assured, the way is open to individual freedom and fulfillment in an expansive reality of good and lasting life.