Constant Flux to Extinction

Part 2

In the beginning, all a living cell can do was imprinted in the memory it possessed. Therefore, the ones that do not carry the right information got extinct.

However, at some point, one of these cells carried enough information to build a circuit that can respond to more than one environmental condition. Therefore, when the environment changed, these cells adapted with less information to carry. Stability has thus evolved from fixed memory to computational circuitry.

The information carried were then in the form of "if this happens, do this", which prevented the combination from getting extinct. Plenty of these circuitry has evolved, but only the most efficient and flexible ones managed to survive.

Later on, stability needed to evolve under the most variable environmental conditions. There were simply too many possibilities to deal with a limited size of memory. Some interactions were needed to respond to certain types of signals but not to others. So, all the memory needed to store were the units of interacting molecules, and a way of "learning" to combine them according to extracellular disturbances. Primitive types of "molecular intelligence" have thus evolved.

Intelligence evolved in many forms later on. Organisms learned to change the environment and adapt to the changes in the environment, which in turn increased their probability of survival. A new era has begun.

Part 3

The information carried were still in the form of "if"s and "then"s. They were just coupled with feedback that thought them "which" and "when".

As the complexity of the learning process increased, forms of feedback changed from simple signals to causalities where spatial and temporal interactions among many variables could be learned. Organisms started to "understand" their environment.

Understanding is a complex process comprising of many questions like "what", "when", "where", "how". The amount of information to be learned therefore increased dramatically. However, there is a single question that largely circumvent the necessity for learning all these details, and that is "why".

If an organism is capable of asking the reason for a certain thing to happen, it can learn to manipulate the reason for the favour of its own survival. Everything is for its own survival, to defy the constant flux to extinction.

It is therefore inevitable in the course of evolution to come up with an organism to question the reason for the existence of its own self. For once, it can choose the purpose of its own life, whether to survive no matter what or live in harmony.