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4. Agent or Phenomenon: That there exists a universal will to live – a life principle, fecundity principle, or evolution of one – which is the primary inception of information (successful communication) in biological systems.

6. Agent: That order cannot rise of chaos in an unguided physical (as compared to mathematical) system.

A-G, I personally am turned to these two to such a great degree. I believe that is where we'll eventually find our organizing principle.

However, there is still the issue of a phenomenon as organizing principle itself being the cause of all the complexity of life that we see.

The current, insufficient paradigm is "natural selection." Its deficiency as an organizing principle is evident in its inability to explain hyper-complexity.

I'm guessing that a more adequate phenomenon-based organizing principle, if another is proposed, will involve an intersection with another dimension....many have proposed time as a 4th dimension.

But -- what if "will" or "life" were to be dimensional intersections that we mistake for this world phenomena?

We ask "what has departed" when we compare a dead rabbit and a live rabbit. Are we really witnessing the end result of a chain of events that led to the separation of an intersecting dimension?

We ask "what has departed" when we compare a dead rabbit and a live rabbit. Are we really witnessing the end result of a chain of events that led to the separation of an intersecting dimension?

Absolutely excellent question, xzins!

You wrote:

I'm guessing that a more adequate phenomenon-based organizing principle, if another is proposed, will involve an intersection with another dimension....

That is my suspicion, as well -- in the sense of a universal field. (What is "universal" does not lie within the "parameters" of 4D space/time as we normally perceive it. So your hypothesis regarding an additional time dimension has great merit in my view, FWIW).

Thank you so much xzins for your excellent, thought-provoking post/essay!

Evolution proceeds hierarchically: once something has been arrived at and works [at any level - be it 21 aminoacids in proteins, cholineesterase cycle in nerve transmission, or external forms like teeth or skeletal plan of mammals] - it is carried on in the subsequent forms essentially as a large unitary building block with only minimal changes. And the natural selection takes good care that dysfunctional changes [i.e. most of them] in such a building block are terminated immediately, thus preserving the block unitary character. That's why the same anticholineesteratics work both on cockroaches and on humans [as pesticides and nerve gases], and why many drugs work across species.
To illustrate the hierarchical principle from a completely different field: not every letter combination is a word, and sentences could be much faster - combinatorially - made from words than from letters [fewer combinations to try]. Just substitute "making sense" in language by "natural selection by survivability " in biology.

Thank you so much for your reply!

Indeed, we know that rocks and rabbits are made of the same elementary particles and fields - and yet as we break down the rock and the rabbit we arrive at some point where the rabbit is no longer life but rather death or non-life. Darwin never asked or answered the question, what is life?.

And I strongly agree with you that the answer to such questions may rest in the geometry – in particular, extra dimensionality - whether temporal or spatial.

We know that space/time and energy/matter are related. For instance, with gravity it is appropriate to view high gravity as indentations of space/time as well as gravitons. Lisa Randall and others propose that gravity is inter-dimensional and Einstein’s dream was to transmute the “base wood” of matter to the pure marble of geometry.

It is quite possible that information (successful communication) in biological life - the property which distinguishes between life and non-life/death in nature - is carried in an interdimensional field.