Cosmic Creation Process

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What is Being Created?

Information philosophy answers the most fundamental question in ontology - what exists and how did it come into existence? We don't answer Gottfried Leibniz's deep question of how matter came into existence from nothing at all, but we have a suggestion about that.

From the beginning of time the most general possible description of what is created is new information. in particular it is abstract and immaterial information that is embodied in material "information structures." The information is the arrangement of the smaller material components that make up the structure.

Neither new matter nor new energy is being created - actually the total of matter and energy is a constant. Matter is simply being rearranged, producing order out of chaos.

From the formation of atoms to the planets, stars, and galaxies, the forces creating all information structures do not themselves involve information. Formation is passive, under the control of the four fundamental forces, electromagnetism, the weak and strong nuclear interactions, and gravitation.

Quantum cooperative phenomena indirectly influence these forces, setting limits on the allowed positions of the elementary particles. And the indeterminism of quantum physics introduces the ontological chance behind the emergence of novelty in the universe.

Our story of the evolution of information starts with photons, plus quarks and gluons forming elementary particles like protons and neutrons in the first few minutes of cosmic evolution.

Around 380,000 years later, the temperature fell enough for protons and neutrons to form stable hydrogen atoms and the universe became transparent to the ionizing radiation that had been keeping them mostly separated. After this time high temperature radiation (5000K) from the original plasma gas "fireball" could traverse the universe to show up on Earth as the cosmic microwave background radiation, now redshifted and cooled to a mere 2.7K. This is called the era of "recombination," though strictly it was the first stable and lasting combination of more elementary particles into atoms.

Between then and a few hundred million years after the "big bang," the sky darkened from intensely bright 5000K in all directions to a deep black, even darker than our night sky. With the radiation pressure greatly reduced (radiation energy was converted into the binding energy of the atoms) density fluctuations in the hydrogen gas began condensing into clouds. The relatively weak, but very long-range, force of gravity overcame the reduced radiation pressure, and gas clouds collapsed, leading to proto-galaxies, some of which formed "little bangs" that collapsed all the way to black holes. This was the beginning of galactic evolution.

Some of the hydrogen clouds paused when their centers heated up to temperatures high enough for thermonuclear fusion, with internal radiation pressure now increasing again and balancing the force of gravity to form stars, some with very long lifetimes - billions of years. This is the beginning of stellar evolution, in which the stars convert primordial hydrogen to helium in their interiors. Some stars also create some of the lighter elements - carbon, nitrogen and oxygen, for example. This was the beginning of nucleosynthesis, which ultimately creates all the chemical elements in our periodic table.

The deep black sky of this dark age of cosmic evolution was now punctuated with bright spots of light, many so bright and hot that they created spheres of ionized gas (and some dust) around them. This is called the era of deionization.

Many large stars end their lives with catastrophic explosions (supernovae), which reach temperatures and pressures that create the heaviest elements. The explosions distributed all those elements into interstellar space. Some of these wound up in dust clouds that condensed again to form "second-generation" stars like our Sun as well as the cooler planets like our Earth.

The Earth is composed of all these elements and complex molecules and macromolecules. Chemical evolution leads to the emergence of life. Dust clouds in between the stars in our Milky Way also contain a surprising number of these complex molecules found in all living things.

There came a time when some information structures on Earth (macromolecules) duplicated themselves. Random errors in replication create "species" of molecules with different reproduction rates, a primitive form of evolution. The information in the original structure is the template for the information in the duplicate, but the information itself in no way manages the duplication..

There comes a still later time when information structures communicate with one another, allowing the information to actively control the process of its replication. This is the case for all living things.

Creation of Information Always Involves Quantum Mechanics and Thermodynamics.

From the moment two or more particles aggregate to form a larger structure (quarks to form protons and neutrons in the first few minutes, baryons and electrons to form atoms a few hundred thousand years later, or atoms to form molecules), their combination is a quantum-cooperative phenomenon. It is statistical, a matter of ontological chance whether they succeed in forming a lasting "information structure."

We can say that the components have (at least two) "alternative possibilities," to form or not to form an information structure. They do not choose between these possibilities. The choice is randomly determined by what Paul Dirac called "Nature's choice."

An emergent information structure adds new information to the universe. This new information will not be stable and the structure will not be permanent, unless the reduction in the local entropy (information is negative entropy) is compensated by an increase in the positive global entropy, to satisfy the second law of thermodynamics. Part of this global entropy is the heat (of binding energy) radiated away in an exothermic reaction.

An information structure is distinguished from its components distributed at random. Atoms in molecules have fixed spatial relationships. In the hydrogen molecule the H atoms' distance to O is 0.95 angstrom and the angle between them is 104.5°.

This is the only possibility for the molecule in its ground state - every hydrogen molecule contains exactly the same internal information as every other hydrogen molecule. By contrast, living biological molecules have large numbers of alternative possibilities.

When molecules are disassociated into their component atoms, the number of possible distributions W is enormous for disconnected components (high entropy S) compared to those in fixed molecular relationships (low entropy).

It is an error to assume that any particular distribution of N atoms has the same intrinsic information and probability as any other distribution.

Local entropy reduction (information structure creation) is only possible because the universe expansion is providing an energy sink in the form of more coordinate-space cells per particle. Momentum-space cells are in principle infinite but their population diminishes as e ^-kTwith increasing temperature, as James Clerk Maxwell and Ludwig Boltzmann showed in the 1860's.

Boltzmann defined entropy S as the logarithm of the number W of possible distributions of particles among the cells in phase space, S = k lnW, where k is Boltzmann's constant.

The expansion of the universe increases the number of cells in phase space (primarily in coordinate space, momentum space decreases with temperature) along with the maximum possible entropy, and much faster than the actual entropy can catch up. Think of perfume escaping from a bottle into a room and the room expanding faster than the perfume molecules can fill the room evenly.

The universe began in a state of equilibrium some 13.75 billion years ago. It was at a maximum of possible entropy at that time, but far lower entropy than exists today

In thermodynamic equilibrium, there is only motion of the microscopic constituent particles ("the motion we call heat"). The existence of macroscopic structures, such as the stars and planets, and their motions, is a departure from thermodynamic equilibrium. And that departure we call "negative entropy."

The second law of thermodynamics says that the entropy (or disorder) of a closed physical system increases until it reaches a maximum, the state of thermodynamic equilibrium. It requires that the entropy of the universe is now and has always been increasing.

This established fact of increasing entropy led many scientists and philosophers to assume that the universe we have is "running down" to a "heat death." They think that means the universe began in a very high state of information, since the second law requires that any organization or order is susceptible to decay. The information that remains today, in their view, has always been here. There is nothing new under the sun.

But the universe is not a closed system. It is in a dynamic state of expansion that is moving away from thermodynamic equilibrium faster than entropic processes can keep up, as suggested in 1935 by Arthur Stanley Eddington. The maximum possible entropy is increasing much faster than the actual increase in entropy. The difference between the maximum possible entropy and the actual entropy is potential information, as shown graphically in the 1970's by David Layzer.

Creation of information structures means that in parts of the universe the local entropy is actually going down. Creation of a low entropy system is always accompanied by radiation of entropy away from the local structures to distant parts of the universe, into the night sky for example. The total global entropy always increases, satisfying the second law, even if it never reaches the maximum possible entropy.

A few hundred million years after the formation of atoms, gravitational forces pulled together clouds of those atoms and molecules to form the planets, stars, and galaxies. Gravitational attraction involves little chance. Any randomness is averaged out by the immensely large number of particles. This is why the classical mechanics of large objects is "adequately determined."

The creation of astrophysical objects like the planets, stars, and galaxies creates new information, but information itself is not involved in their creation, as it will be for living things. Particles in these objects are passive, acted upon, not themselves "acting."

Around nine billion years later, on planet Earth, some very complex macromolecules began to replicate themselves. They had encoded the information needed to clone themselves. All earlier information structures were formed passively, under the influence of purely physical forces. The information in these macromolecules was actively involved in their own creation.

The creation of living things is a transition from passive participants to active agents.

A steady flow of energy with low entropy is needed to support life, as Erwin Schrödinger made famous in his 1944 essay, "What Is Life? He wrote that life feeds on low entropy and the Sun is the source of that negative entropy and order.

At some time, active information structures began to notice their neighbors, probably by chemical secretions into the environment. This was the first communication between information structures.

Eventually, the information communicated between some living entities consisted of pure abstract ideas, from one thinking being to another. This information is neither matter nor energy, though it needs matter to be embodied and energy to be communicated. It is the basis for all human knowledge. Information goes "beyond logic and language" in its ability to represent nature.

All along in the history of the cosmic creation process, information can be altered by accidental errors in the stored data or noise in the communicated signals. Sometimes the noise causes a variation or mutation in the genetic structure. Very rarely, the mutation is an improvement that gives the organism greater reproductive success. This of course explains Darwinian evolution of the species.

To summarize, we can divide the creation and evolution of information structures into four cosmic epochs:

1. From the origin to the formation of atoms (~380,000 years).

2. The formation of planets, stars, and galaxies, even supernovae and black holes (~400 million years).

3. The creation and evolution of life on Earth (~9 billion years).

4. The evolution of the human mind and the creation of abstract information stored outside living beings..

Information philosophy (actually information physics and biology) has identified the two steps in the process needed to create any new information structure.

1. The Quantum Step. Whenever matter is rearranged to create a new information structure, the quantum binding forces involve a collapse of the wave function that introduces an element of chance. Without alternative possibilities, no new information is possible. With those possibilities, things could have been otherwise.

2) The Thermodynamic Step. The new information structure reduces the local entropy. It cannot be stable unless it transfers away enough positive entropy to satisfy the second law of thermodynamics, which says that the total entropy (disorder) must always increase. The increase in global entropy is the result of the increase in phase-space cells because the universe is expanding. According to Boltzmann's Principle, the entropy S = k lnW. The increasing volume of space means there are many more possible arrangements W of the finite number of particles in the observable universe. All possibilities are the result of the cosmic expansion.

Epoch 1 begins with extraordinarily high temperature and density. The temperature is falling and density is decreasing because the universe is expanding. Quarks are packed tightly as independent particles in pre-hadronic matter until the temperature is low enough for them to be frozen out, bound into hadrons (protons, neutrons). These are the first assembled structures. During much of this epoch the global entropy is near its maximum (disorder, chaos), but is very low compared to what it will become. And the combination of quarks into baryons is the first formation of relatively negative entropy objects.

The next such phase is when the high-entropy free electron gas starts to bind with protons into the earliest atoms. The free-electron gas was optically thick to the photon gas at temperatures above several thousand degrees, with an extremely short mean free path between scatterings.

There was no observer to see it, but the "sky" at that time was hotter than the surface of today's sun in all directions. Material structures would be instantly melted, vaporized, or ionized. The universe was filled with a "plasma" of ionized hydrogen and a small amount of helium.

The first neutral atoms did not become stable entities until at least 380,000 years after the origin of the universe when the temperature was about 5000K.

In the first few hundred thousand years of the early universe, when matter was a very hot ionized plasma gas, occasional electrons combined with protons to form a hydrogen atom. In a quantum transition from an unbound quantum state to a bound electronic state, the new atom radiated away the binding energy as a photon, - the electron's wave function collapsed into one of the possible bound states.

But immediately, a photon in the hot radiation field re-ionized the new atom. The information in that new atomic structure could not last until the universe cooled down enough to become transparent to radiation. Once the universe became transparent, the radiation could carry away the positive entropy needed to satisfy the second law of thermodynamics globally and new atomic structures left behind were pockets of local negative entropy.

We see those escaping photons, coming today in all directions through the now transparent universe from the cosmic microwave background radiation, the remains of the "Big Bang" nearly 14 billion light years away. Those primordial photons have cooled from 5000K to less than a few degrees Kelvin today. .

Epoch 2. A similar two-step process is needed to form the galaxies, stars, and planets, which were starting to form about 400 million years after the origin. When gravitational forces attract huge volumes of matter, the matter heats up as it collapses. If a gravitating object could not radiate away that heat, it could not become a new information structure like a star or galaxy.

The space between the forming galaxies, into which positive entropy can be radiated, is provided by the expansion of the universe. Without the expansion, no new information would be possible in the universe.

To be sure, quantum chance plays little or no role in gravitational structures. The force of gravity is overwhelmingly adequately deterministic. The same is true of fundamental particles like protons, neutrons, atoms, and purely chemical molecules. Biological (living) molecules are a completely different story, as we shall see. Some use their internal information, along with environmental information, to decide what to become.

All these purely physical, cosmic information structures are informationally passive. Their interactions follow simple laws of "bottom-up reductionist physics.

But the biological structures of life on Earth are far from passive. They have the extraordinary active and emergent, "top-down" capability of replicating and processing information, then communicating vital information among their parts. Immaterial information is a causal force managing the matter and energy in a living information structure.

Living organisms exhibit purposeful behavior called teleonomy or entelechy, not the teleology many philosophers and theologians think must pre-exist their existence. Living things, you and I, are dynamic growing information structures, forms through which matter and energy continuously flow. And it is information processing that controls those flows!

Information is the modern spirit, the ghost in the machine, the mind in the body. It is the soul, and when we die, it is our information that perishes. The matter remains.

No doubt some of our human purposes are simply inherited, "built-in," as Immanuel Kant thought. They are "teleological" in the sense that their "telos" pre-existed the individual's existence. But not all of our ancestors had those purposes. At some time, some ancestors acquired new purposes. "What is a priori in an individual was a posteriori in his/her ancestral lineage."

Finally, the same two steps, first random alternative possibilities, then adequately determined outcomes, are involved in our minds when we create a new idea! Most of our ideas are simply inherited as the traditional knowledge of our culture, but some new thoughts are the work of our creative individuals. Albert Einstein called them "free creations of the human mind." In that sense, we are all co-creators of the universe.

Information philosophy tells a story of cosmic and biological evolution that is one creation process all the way from the original cosmic material to the immaterial minds that have now discovered the creation process itself!

Sadly, cosmic creation is horrendously wasteful. In the existential balance between the forces of destruction and the forces of creation, there is no contest. The dark side is overwhelming. By quantitative physical measures of matter and energy content, there is far more chaos than cosmos in our universe. But it is the cosmos that we prize, the information that we value.

Information philosophy focuses on the qualitatively valuable information structures in the universe. The destructive forces are entropic, they increase entropy and disorder. Creative forces are anti-entropic. They increase the order and information. We call them ergodic.

By information we mean a quantity that can be understood mathematically and physically. It corresponds to the common-sense meaning of information, in the sense of communicating or informing. It also corresponds to the information stored in books and computers. But it also measures the information in any physical object, like a stone or a snowflake, in a production process like a recipe or formula, and the information in biological systems, including cell and organ structures and the genetic code.

Information is mathematically related to the measure of disorder known as the thermodynamic quantity called "entropy." Ludwig Boltzmann derived a famous formula S = k log W, where S is the entropy and W is the probability - the number of ways that the internal components (the matter and energy particles of the system) can be rearranged and still be the same system. Thus information is related to probability and possibilities for different arrangements of matter.

The information we mean is closely related to "negative entropy," the departure of a physical system from pure chaos, from "thermodynamic equilibrium."

"Negative entropy" is simply the difference between the maximum possible entropy (where all the particles in a physical system are in a maximum state of disorder, there is no visible structure) and the actual entropy.

In a state of thermodynamic equilibrium, there is only motion of the microscopic constituent particles ("the motion we call heat"). The existence of macroscopic structures, such as the stars and planets, and their motions, is a departure from thermodynamic equilibrium. And that departure we call the "negative entropy."

This established fact of increasing entropy led many scientists and philosophers to assume that the universe we have is "running down" to a "heat death." They thought that meant the universe must have begun in a very high state of information, since the second law requires that any organization or order is susceptible to decay. The information that remains today, in their view, has always been here. There is nothing new under the sun.

But the universe is not a closed system. It is in a dynamic state of expansion that is moving away from thermodynamic equilibrium faster than entropic processes can keep up. The maximum possible entropy is increasing much faster than the actual increase in entropy. The difference between the maximum possible entropy and the actual entropy is potential information, as shown by David Layzer.

As the universe expands (see the figure), both positive and negative entropy are generated. The normal thermodynamic entropy, known as the Boltzmann Entropy, is the large black arrow. The negative entropy, often called the Shannon Entropy, is a measure of the information content in the evolving universe.

Entropy and information can thus increase at the same time in the expanding universe. There are generally two entropy/information flows. In any process, the positive entropy increase is always at least equal to, and generally orders of magnitude larger than, the negative entropy in any created information structures. Positive entropy must exceed negative, to satisfy the second law of thermodynamics, which says that overall entropy always increases.

Material particles are the first information structures to form in the universe.. They are quarks, baryons, and atomic nuclei, which will combine with electrons to form atoms and eventually molecules, when the temperature is low enough. These material particles are attracted together by the force of universal gravitation to form the gigantic information structures of the galaxies, stars, and planets.

Microscopic quantum mechanical particles and huge self-gravitating systems are both stable and have extremely long lifetimes.

When stars form, they become another source of radiation after the original Big Bang cosmic source, which has cooled down to 3 degrees Kelvin (3K) and shines as the cosmic microwave background radiation.

Our solar radiation has a high color temperature (5780K) but a low energy-content temperature (273K). It is out of equilibrium and it is the source of all the information-generating negative entropy that drives biological evolution on the Earth.

Note that the fraction of the Sun's light falling on Earth is less than a billionth of that which passes by and is lost in space.

A tiny fraction of the solar energy falling on the earth gets converted into the information structures of plants and animals. Most of it gets converted to heat and is radiated away as waste energy to the night sky.

The Evolution of Life

Every biological structure is a quantum-mechanical information structure. DNA has maintained its stable information structure (again, thanks to the extraordinary stability of quantum structures) over billions of years in the constant presence of chaos and noise.

With the emergence of teleonomic (purposive) information in self-replicating systems, the same core process underlies all biological creation. But now some random changes in information structures are rejected by natural selection, while others reproduce successfully.

The stable information content of a human being survives many changes in the material content of the body during a person’s lifetime. Only with death does the mental information (spirit, soul) dissipate - unless it is saved somewhere.

Information increases and we are co-creators of the universe

Creation of information structures means that today there is more information in the universe than at any earlier time. This fact of increasing information fits well with an undetermined universe that is still creating itself. In this universe, stars are still forming, biological systems are creating new species, and intelligent human beings are co-creators of the world we live in.

Darwin's evolutionary theory requires random variations followed by natural selection. Once DNA was understood to be carrying the information in the genetic code, it was argued that random point-mutations were the source of the variations needed for new species development. But the enormous information content of DNA, even the gene sequences of the DNA that code for specific proteins, were seen to be too large for random point-mutations to have enough time to produce the known differences in species DNA.

Critics of the modern synthesis said "chance" could not possible explain evolution and looked to other more deterministic mechanisms.

But in recent years we have learned that large meaningful sequences of DNA can randomly "jump" from one place in the chromosomal DNA to another, moving a functional element to another place in the developing organism. James A. Shapiro calls these mobile genetic elements "natural genetic engineering." They are based on Barbara McClintock's discovery of "jumping genes" in the 1960's.

We now know that evolutionary change is still driven by "chance," probably still quantum chance, but now instead of two bits of new information (one letter of the genetic code A,G,C,T is about two bits), random variations can now add many thousands of bits of new information, greatly reducing the time needed to produce meaningful genetic changes in the evolution of life.

The Evolution of Mind

The total mental information in a living human is orders of magnitude less than the information content and information processing rate of the body. But the information structures created by humans outside the body, in the form of external knowledge (we call them the Sum), including the enormous collection of human artifacts, rival the total biological information content.

Information philosophy views the mind as the immaterial information in the brain, which is seen as a biological information processor. Mind is software in the brain's hardware.
The "stuff" of mind is pure information. Information is neither matter nor energy, though it needs matter for its embodiment and energy for its communication.

In ancient philosophy, mind and body formed one of the classic dualisms, like idealism versus materialism, the problem of the one (monism) or the many (pluralism), the distinction between essence and existence, between universals and particulars, between the eternal and the ephemeral.

When mind and body are viewed today as a dualism, the emphasis is on the mind, that is to say the information, being fundamentally different from the material brain. Since the universe is continuously creating new information, by rearranging existing matter, this is an important and understandable difference. Matter (and energy) is conserved, a constant of the universe. Information is not conserved, it is the source of genuine novelty, including new thoughts in the mind leading to new things in the human world.

Mental processes are also the result of the two-step core process that creates all information. It is a combination of two distinct physical processes, one quantum mechanical, the other thermodynamic. Understanding this core creative process is as close as we are likely to come to understanding the idea of an anthropomorphic creator of the universe, a still-present divine providence, the cosmic source of everything good and evil.

As we have seen, everything created since the origin of the universe over thirteen billion years ago has involved just two fundamental physical processes that combine to form the core of all creative processes. These two steps occur whenever even a single bit of new information is created and comes into the universe. In the mind we describe a two-stage model of creativity and free will.

Given the "laws of nature" and the "fixed past" just before a decision, philosophers wonder how a free agent can have any possible alternatives. This is partly because they imagine a timeline for the decision that shrinks the decision process to a single moment.

Collapsing the decision to a single moment between the closed fixed past and the open ambiguous future makes it difficult to see the free thoughts of the mind followed by the willed and adequately determined action of the body.

But the two-stage Mind Model is not limited to a single step of generating alternative possibilities followed by a single step of determination by the will. It is better understood as a continuous process of possibilities generation by the Micro Mind (parts of the brain that leave themselves open to noise) and adequately determined choices made from time to time by the Macro Mind (the same brain parts, perhaps, but now averaging over and filtering out the noisiness that might otherwise make the determination random).

In particular, note that a special kind of decision might occur when the Macro Mind finds that none of the current options are good enough for the agent's character and values to approve. The Macro Mind then might figuratively say to the Micro Mind, "Think again!"

Many philosophers have puzzled how an agent could do otherwise in exactly the same circumstances. Since humans are intelligent organisms, and given the myriad of possible circumstances, it is impossible that an agent is ever in exactly the same circumstances. The agent's memory (stored information) of earlier similar circumstances guarantees that.

This view still makes an artificial separation between Micro Mind creative randomness and Macro Mind deliberative evaluation. These two capabilities of the mind can be going on at the same time. That can be visualized by the occasional decision to go back and think again, when the available alternatives are not good enough to satisfy the demands of the agent's character and values, or by noticing that the subconscious Micro Mind might be still generating possibilities while the Macro Mind is in the middle of its evaluations.

Finally, not all decisions in the two-stage model end with an adequately determined "de-liberation" or perhaps better we can call it simply self-determination. Many times the evaluation of the possibilities produces two or more alternatives that seem more or less of equal value.

In this case, the agent may choose randomly among those alternatives, yet have very good reasons to take responsibility for whichever one is chosen. This is related to the ancient liberty of indifference.

I like to call such a decision an undetermined liberty, because it remains undetermined at the moment of the decision. It has not been determined by the deliberations, although we can say that the agent “deliberately” chooses at random.

Finally, with the emergence of self-aware organisms and the creation of extra-biological information stored in the environment, the same information-generating core process underlies communication, consciousness, free will, and creativity.

Many philosophers have looked at the Newtonian mechanical view of the universe and concluded it is indifferent to humanity. The nineteenth-century view of an ultimate heat death for the universe led to a distinctly pessimistic view.

Information philosophy offers a much more optimistic view, one that supports the view of a providential universe. Our "ergodic" information-creating processes are the source of everything of value in the universe.

Something from Nothing

The simplest possible explanation of a universe that was preceded by nothing might be to assume that what came into existence was two things that are exactly opposite to one another, such that should they recombine we would be back to nothing. Zero = +1 and -1.

Matter and anti-matter are not good enough, because when they recombine they become pure energy.

Cosmogenesis

Cosmogenesis was chosen by David Layzer as the title of his most important book, Cosmogenesis: The Growth of Order in the Universe.

It is almost certain that Layzer knew the origin of this fruitful term, though he did not mention it in his book. Cosmogenesis was coined by the great French priest and scientist Pierre Teilhard de Chardin in his most famous book, The Phenomenon of Man.

Teilhard's cosmogenesis

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