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Perhaps it is time now to throw away our collective magnifying glasses and climb up the mountain with you and start looking at the cosmos?! After all, if we recognize the fecundity principle, the difference between living and non-living and that there is no known source for information in space/time - then we probably ought to redirect our inquiry about the principle of life.

Thank you oh so much, Alamo-Girl, for your kind words. You embolden me to say more.

(Though I do note I can hear the crickets chirping right about now.... Maybe i should just shut up. :^) Naw!!!)

Rod Swenson "draws the line" for the purposes of his argument at the planetary system -- at the Earth, conceived as one living and therefore evolving system of which all life forms are the “living sub-systems.” But I see no reason in principle why we should draw the line there. That is to say, it seems to me whatever is valid for the system of the Earth can be extended to the system of the cosmos itself (since the Earth is a subsystem within that system, empirically speaking; and its order points to a larger principle). This would seem to be an indicated exercise if indeed we want to see whether there is, in fact, a "paradigmatic order" at work in the universe – such as is figured in, say, the graphical elaboration of the Mandelbrot Set.

If there is such a paradigmatic order at work, it would need a way of translating into space-time reality (3+1D spacetime) such that it can become effective in the natural order of the universe. Which is why I imagine that there would need to be a universal field at work that provides scope for, and can dynamically integrate events taking place in 4D spacetime –- that also carries the “language” expressing the cosmic motive that drives the evolution of the world and everything in it. Such a universal field hypothetically would constitute the integrating “ground” of the cosmos, accommodate non-local events, and transmit “biological information” – that is, the information set specifying life in all its forms – the paradigmatic order that drives a system that has “an in-built bias” towards the manifestation and evolution of “Life, and Life more abundantly.” Down deep, I suspect this information is essentially geometrical: simple, clean, universal, elegant, beautiful, devoted to problems of “form.” And I strongly doubt the universal field that carries it could be a property or function of 4D spacetime reality as we humans normally experience it, but “resides” in a fifth, “timelike” dimension that can be engaged empirically only in the life of the mind – because there’s no way I know of that one can “test” any phenomenon that does not exist tangibly in 4D spacetime; since any “test” depends on “measurement.” And it seems the fact is we humans can’t “measure” anything unless it’s physical, thus contained within 4D spacetime.

But that’s not the same thing as saying: Ergo, nothing exists outside of 4D spacetime.

Or so it seems to me. (I’m ruminating!) Thanks for listening, dear A-G. Thank you so much for writing.

p.s.: Dear A-G, please don’t lose that magnifying glass of yours, or your interest in trees.... Your researches are not only helpful; they are indispensable.

Thank you so much for your excellent post! Not to worry about the magnifying glass, I always keep a spare in my back pocket (LOL!) - I never know when someone might need one.

And let the crickets chirp! The fecundity principle is compelling – that life emerges at the earliest opportunity and takes advantage of environmental opportunities quickly. There is nothing in the physical laws known to me that would lead to such aggressiveness – in fact, the reverse would be true. As an example (magnifying glass up for just a moment here) – we have seen that each bit gained in biological information content must dissipate energy into the local surroundings. There must be a cause for this aggression, this fecundity principle.

Likewise, the ”theory of evolution” has a very narrow focus, the speciation of biological life on earth – while biological life is only some (arbitrary) sub-view of a larger system – much like tortoise described in post 475. Categories fabricated by observers risk misrepresenting the whole. He said:

Uncertainty is created by how we choose to model the system; if we were smarter, the uncertainty would disappear. In that sense, the uncertainty exists in our own mind but not in the channel. The "noise" we ascribe to the channel does not really exist in the channel, it exists in the models of the "channel" we build in our minds.

IOW, I believe we have been so keenly focused on speciation and abiogenesis that we are missing the “system” as you have observed and as is supported by tortoise's insight.

This would seem to be an indicated exercise if indeed we want to see whether there is, in fact, a "paradigmatic order" at work in the universe – such as is figured in, say, the graphical elaboration of the Mandelbrot Set.

I agree with you that Swenson - by drawing the line at the earth - has committed the same tunnel vision he points to in the theory of evolution. We must look to the cosmos, as Einstein said “the lofty structure of all that there is”.

If there is such a paradigmatic order at work, it would need a way of translating into space-time reality (3+1D spacetime) such that it can become effective in the natural order of the universe. Which is why I imagine that there would need to be a universal field at work that provides scope for, and can dynamically integrate events taking place in 4D spacetime –- that also carries the “language” expressing the cosmic motive that drives the evolution of the world and everything in it. Such a universal field hypothetically would constitute the integrating “ground” of the cosmos, accommodate non-local events, and transmit “biological information” – that is, the information set specifying life in all its forms – the paradigmatic order that drives a system that has “an in-built bias” towards the manifestation and evolution of “Life, and Life more abundantly.” Down deep, I suspect this information is essentially geometrical: simple, clean, universal, elegant, beautiful, devoted to problems of “form.” And I strongly doubt the universal field that carries it could be a property or function of 4D spacetime reality as we humans normally experience it, but “resides” in a fifth, “timelike” dimension that can be engaged empirically only in the life of the mind – because there’s no way I know of that one can “test” any phenomenon that does not exist tangibly in 4D spacetime; since any “test” depends on “measurement.” And it seems the fact is we humans can’t “measure” anything unless it’s physical, thus contained within 4D spacetime.

The speculation concerning a universal vacuum field is very engaging. We ought to expect a medium of that sort whereby the fecundity principle is manifest in the cosmos.

A field exists at all points in space/time – it is believed that gravity extends between dimensions and thus, the universal vacuum field could likewise transcend a higher dimension, spatial or temporal.

Or to put it differently, fields are geometric per se - gravity even effecting the very fabric of four dimensional space/time. I see no reason a universal vacuum field could not have a similar reach to communicate or inform inter-dimensionally by a similar provocation of form.

Moreover, there have been some exciting discoveries concerning mirror symmetry which may be pointing to just such a field – a field which manifests geometry in four dimensional space/time, creating strings with their vibrations (physical reality to our four dimensional senses), informing and thus provoking life aggressively.

I also strongly agree with you on the third point, a fifth higher, “timelike” dimension of the mind which may be the host dimension of the universal vacuum field but interactive by consciousness. Such an additional temporal dimension would render what we perceive as a timeline in four dimensions as actually being a plane and not a line thus providing a framework for solutions to a number of issues in physics as well.