Before we start, let's review some basic concepts first. In my blog post DEISM I: WHAT IS DEISM? I defined God as: (1) That great and glorious Being who is the beneficent author of all the good that was, that is, or that will be; (2) as that than which none greater can be conceived, which is (3) the sum total of all that exists with absolute awareness of all its parts. And, in DEISM II: METAPHYSICAL MODEL, I concluded that (1) within "the sum total of all that exists" there are two absolute worlds or levels of awareness: the first is Primal-Heaven, wherein there is primal spirit and absolute awareness, and the second is Primal-Earth, wherein there is primal matter and absolute non-awareness; (2) that there were five worlds in-between those absolutes in descending order: Higher-Heaven, the Otherworld (a world wherein there exists a balance between spirit and matter, selflessness and selfishness, forces of expansion and contraction, and awareness and non-awareness), Middle-Earth (the world of human beings), and Lower-Earth (the world of the other organic life forms, such as microbes, plants, insects and animals); (3) awareness grows at the level of Primal-Earth and through reincarnation souls spiral upward through all the levels until they achieve oneness at the level of Primal-Heaven.
Simply put, at the level of Primal-Earth awareness begins to grow and crosses the boundary into Lower-Earth, where organic life emerges from primal matter and grows in complexity through the process of evolution. The emergence of awareness into Lower-Earth is probably synchronous with the formation of viruses.
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| Konrad Lorenz (1977). |
The most amazing function of the life process, and also the one that is in need of explanation, is that, in apparent contradiction to the laws of probability, it seems to develop from the simple to the complex, from the more probable to the less probable, from systems of a lower order to systems of higher order. However, none of the laws of physics, even the second law of thermodynamics, is broken by this. All life processes are sustained by the flow of energy being ‘dissipated’—as physicist say—in the universe. Or, as a Viennese friend of mine once put it, ‘Life feeds on negative entropy.’
Entropy is the amount of randomness and disorder in a system, therefore 'negative entropy' is its opposite, which means it is the amount of orderliness in a system. The evolution of organic life "from the simple to the complex, from the more probable to the less probable, from systems of a lower order to systems of higher order" occurs in this way because awareness is growing and expanding.
The fundamental aspect of Lower-Earth in its span of organic life from single-celled organisms to highly complex lifeforms is growth in awareness up to the point for which Dasein is possible. Dasein is an individuated entity "distinguished by the fact that, in its very Being, that Being is an issue for it."
I wrote in DEISM II: METAPHYSICAL MODEL:
The fundamental aspect of Lower-Earth in its span of organic life from single-celled organisms to highly complex lifeforms is growth in awareness up to the point for which Dasein is possible. Dasein is an individuated entity "distinguished by the fact that, in its very Being, that Being is an issue for it."
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| Martin Heidegger (1955). |
I wrote in DEISM II: METAPHYSICAL MODEL:
In Being and Time, Heidegger inquires into Being by asking about the being for whom Being is an issue. He then terms this being, Dasein (literally means being-there), which is, "this entity which each of us is himself;" and "is an entity ... [that is] distinguished by the fact that, in its very Being, that Being is an issue for it." For Heidegger, Dasein is the human being, as that which is neither a subject nor the objective world alone, but rather a logically consistent Being-in-the-world; a projection of being into a personal world that engages with it in a never-ending process of involvement.
"Dasein," wrote Heidegger, "always understands itself in terms of its existence—in terms of a possibility of itself: to be itself or not itself. Dasein has either chosen these possibilities itself, or got itself into them, or grown up in them already. Only the particular Dasein decides its existence, whether it does so by taking hold or by neglecting. The question of existence never gets straightened out except through existing itself."Since Lower-Earth entities lack the awareness of Dasein, their souls must be some form of an unindividuated collective that projects itself into physical lifeforms whose experiences add to the collective awareness. In this way, each physical projection of these souls within Lower-Earth, from its boundary with Primal-Earth all the way to its boundary with Middle-Earth, must have only the possibility of obtaining something close to an individuated awareness, but nevertheless, will be unable to pass its threshold. And upon the death of the physical bodies, these projections must in some way dissolve back into the collective form. Accordingly, this process would continue until one such projection has accumulated a quantity of awareness that would allow it to cross the twilight threshold and enter the dawn of individuated awareness, after which it would thus be unable to dissolve again into its collective form. This projection would have then penetrated the boundary of Middle-Earth and entered the realm of Cartesian thought, "I think, therefore I am." It would have gained the possibility of becoming an entity "distinguished by the fact that, in its very Being, that Being is an issue for it."
However, none of this is to suggest that souls are born. Souls are fragments of Absolute Awareness expanding and contracting according to the rhythm and cycles of existence. To keep balance, as awareness is gained in a portion of existence then awareness must be lost in another portion. This means that as souls can ascend, they can also descend. The collective form of souls on Lower-Earth are growing their awareness from Absolute Non-Awareness to Awareness of Individuation.
Behind the Mirror:
All living systems are constructed in such a way as to be able to acquire and store energy. Otto Rössler drew an attractive analogy between life sustained by the dissipation of energy in the world and a sandbank formed across a river sideways on to the current: the more sand has piled up, the more the sandbank is able to collect. The more energy living systems have absorbed, the more they will be able to absorb: when a living organism flourishes, it grows and propagates. A large number of big animals will eat more than a small number of little ones. Organisms are thus systems which derive their energy in this cycle of so-called ‘positive feedback’.
One finds similar systems in the organic world. The term 'snowballing' denotes the same process: an avalanche gets larger and larger; the bigger a fire, the more rapidly it spreads, and so on. The flame occurs often in poetry and in proverbs as a symbol of life and growth.
The acquisition and storage of energy of organic life are synchronous with the acquisition and storage of awareness of the soul. And likewise, so too is the development "from the simple to the complex, from the more probable to the less probable, from systems of a lower order to systems of higher order."
The acquisition and storage of relevant information is as basic a function of all living organisms as is the absorption and storing of energy. Both are as old as life itself. Otto Rössler, I believe, was the first biologist to point out that not only do the energy-absorbing processes form a positive feedback cycle in themselves but they also have a positive feedback relationship to the information-acquiring processes.
When, through mutation of a new combination of genetic factors, the probability of absorbing energy increases to the point where natural selection favours the development of the new, improved organism, the number of its descendants also increases. At the same time it also becomes more probable that it will be these descendants who will win the next big prize in the mutation stakes.
This dual feedback cycle characterizes all life, including that of viruses, which, in Weidel’s striking phrase, have only ‘a borrowed life’. It is undeniably true, yet at the same time misleading, to say that living organisms are at the mercy of purely random changes and that evolution only takes place through the elimination of the unfit.
A closer approximation to what really happens in organic nature would be to describe it as follows: life is an eminently active enterprise aimed at acquiring both a fund of energy and a stock of knowledge, the possession of one being instrumental to the acquisition of the other. The immense effectiveness of these two feedback cycles, coupled in multiplying interaction, is the precondition, indeed the explanation, for the fact that life has the power to assert itself against the superior strength of the pitiless inorganic world, and also for the fact that it tends at times to an excessive expansion. The process whereby a large modern industrial company, such as a chemical firm, invests a considerable part of its profits in its laboratories in order to promote new discoveries and thus new sources of profit is not so much a model as a specific case of the process that is going on in all living systems.
It was an important discovery on the part of Otto Rössler that the phylogeny of the organic world does not depend on ‘chance’ or ‘luck’ but that organisms instantly seize on any favourable circumstances that come their way, thereby encouraging the incidence of further such circumstances. If we understand this, we shall come closer to a solution of two great mysteries.
The first is that of the speed of evolution. If this depended simply on the random elimination of the unfit, and if there were no feedback processes, then the period of a few thousand million years which has been calculated by physicists, on the basis of the rate of decay of radioactive substances, to be the age of our planet would hardly be long enough for man to have evolved from the most primitive organisms.
The second question is that of the direction of evolution. Life is both acquisition of information, i.e. a cognitive process, and economic enterprise (one is almost tempted to call it commercial). An increase in knowledge about the outside world produces economic advantages; these then exert the selection pressure which causes the mechanisms that acquire and store information to develop further.
When scientists for whom the acquisition of knowledge has become an end in itself, together with philosophers and the homo ethicus of civilized society in general, are confronted with the sum of potential energy on one side and the accumulated wealth of knowledge on the other, they cannot help rating the latter far higher than the former. Nor will this assessment be affected by our knowledge that the selection pressure which has created that wealth of knowledge has been economic in nature. Indeed, so universal is the pressure towards increasing the stock of information relevant to survival, that it could very well suffice in itself to explain the general direction of evolution from ‘lower’ to ‘higher’ states. I do not maintain that all other facts, some of them possibly unknown, are to be excluded, but as our present knowledge stands, there is no necessity to postulate non-natural forces like J. G. Bennett's ‘Demiurgic Intelligence’ in order to explain the general direction of evolution. When we use the terms ‘higher’ and ‘lower’ of living creatures and cultures alike, our evaluation refers directly to the amount of knowledge, conscious or unconscious, inherent in these living systems, irrespective of whether it has been acquired by natural selection, learning or exploratory investigation, and whether it is preserved in the genome, in the individual's memory, or in the traditions of a culture.


