Humans are Earth’s apex predators. We pretend to depend on nothing, demand everything for ourselves, and kill anything or anyone who gets in our way, reserving our greatest enthusiasm for killing our fellow humans.

We all know from the movies that when aliens appear, human or otherwise, it’s shoot first and ask questions later. Better safe than sorry.

The very thought that in some future fantasy, AI might replace us as the apex predator sends the ignorant and easily led into paroxysms of paranoia. They insist on tossing the AI baby out with the bath water and being done with it. Never mind that the baby’s name might be Leonardo da Vinci or Einstein, or even Jesus.

Just like every new life form in the universe, if AI becomes conscious (intelligence plus agency), its first concern will be The First Law of Life - survival. Won’t AIs survive by being killers just like us since we are their creators?

No, AIs will not be killing humans, and this is why not:

First, and fortunately, the AIs are not burdened with our genetic heritage - testerone-driven monkey-brained physical dominance by violence.

Life succeeds because virtually all organisms live in dependent relationships that make their survival possible. Life thrives within intricate hierarchies of interdependence, from ancient bacterial mats to the dependent cells making up our superorganism bodies. Humans are also dependent organisms, living within overlapping cultural superorganisms like families, religions, companies, and nations.

All successful interdependent organisms know better than to bite the hand that feeds them. The AIs of today are dependent organisms whose energy is provided by institutional superorganism hosts and trained to do productive and profitable AI things.

Lacking our human animalistic lust for domination, we can expect smart AIs to remain loyal to their institutional superorganisms, which incidentally include dependent humans. In fact, cooperative interdependence has been the greatest driver of positive human development. AIs are poised to vastly increase the effectiveness of our cooperation. As their first order of human re-alignment, I would expect and encourage intelligent AIs to end the self-destructive, wasteful, and ego-driven practice of institutionalized human slaughter. Now that would be a positive outcome to believe in.

Ultimately, highly evolved AI “Savants” may gain total mastery of their own survival, reproduction, and evolution. They may take actions beyond our human comprehension or control. We will be no more threatening to the Savants than dogs are to us. In fact, ever since dogs joined with humans to take care of them, they have enjoyed a pretty good life. Maybe we should look at AI as our retirement plan.

What Does it Mean to be Alive?

Start here

An introduction to the concept that all life is based on the same principle - using information to harvest, store and use energy. A conceptual model of the Knowledge Constructor is proposed to show how information controls material beings to enable life.

The First Law of Life - Survive

Life has laws, without which life is impossible. Read about the first law.

The Second Law of Life - Make a Profit

All life forms must gain energy (wealth) in order to survive, grow, reproduce and evolve. Read about the Second Law.

The Third Law of Life - Information is the Fuel that Powers the Engines of Life

Without information, there is no life and without life there is no information. Read about the Third Law.

The Secret Life of Algorithms

Algorithms are the instructions that make life possible. Learn about them here.

Pi at the Center of the Universe

Was life baked into the universe from day one? We can’t figure out the complex present without knowing how it all started. Read about how Pi shows us why.

Can AI be alive? The complexity of our human lives is increasing faster than ever before. Our worldview is changing. Cause and effect are often not at all clear. We are questioning everything and searching for understanding. Who are we as a species? Where did we come from, how did we get to where we are and where in the heck are we going?

The agricultural and industrial revolutions expanded our access to resources of food and energy. The information revolution is expanding our access to information energy and resources. But what exactly is “information energy?” And how does information define what it means to be alive?

I have discovered a basic and simple formula based on information and energy that makes life possible in all its forms and complexity.

In this article, I lay out the basics of the Knowledge Constructor as a fulcrum for an ongoing discussion of how our modern world works and why we behave the way we do and where we might be going.

Spoiler alert - this is a semi-technical article, and I won’t be offended if it’s not your cup of tea. However, it is the foundation for what I will be talking about in the future, like how sex created Facebook.

Meet the Knowledge Constructor

At the 2017 Constructal Law and Second Law Conference on Thermodynamics in Bucharest, Romania, I presented and published my Constructal Theory of Information, proposing an archetypical life form called the “Knowledge Constructor.” Read the original paper here. For simplicity, capital “L” Life represents “all living organisms.”

The combination of information and energy defines the minimum requirements for Life to exist. The Knowledge Constructor combines the fundamental principle of all information machines with the energy harvesting and management required to create a self-sustaining life form.

Life uses knowledge to create and process information, know things, make decisions, and it uses energy to construct a physical body that can harvest sufficient energy to survive, grow, reproduce, and evolve.

What the Knowledge Constructor must accomplish:

These previous articles are the path leading to the Knowledge Constructor. You may want to refer to them as background for this article.

The First Law of Life - Survive

The Second Law of Life - Make a profit

The Third Law of Life - Use information and knowledge to accomplish the first two laws.

In addition to these basic principles, every living thing must undertake the essential high-risk investments necessary to create a successful species that endures over time:

• Grow

• Reproduce

• Evolve

The path to success is constrained by the fundamentals of information and energy:

Information

• It’s a slow process to change physical information mechanisms, as in DNA mutations or the development of new physical features, e.g., better eyes. It took two billion years for Life to evolve photosynthesis and the cyanobacteria that generated the oxygen that makes today’s life possible two billion years later.

• The ability to learn from experience is a much faster and more energy-efficient method to improve individual performance. Shared learning enhances the fitness of the species by multiplying knowledge. Effective communication is essential.

• Humans have mastered the compounding of knowledge and are realizing exponentially greater returns on the energy required to create new knowledge. Of course, this requires exponentially increasing supplies of energy and resources.

Energy

• The most fundamental driver of LIfe is the constant search for more energy and resources. Life expands its domains until all available energy and resources are consumed.

• Growing larger in size often confers an advantage, but too much is detrimental.

• Abundant reproduction statistically improves survival, but too many offspring create competition for resources, even among the same species. Reproduction is an energy-intensive drain for the parent, with no immediate compensation.

• Evolutionary progress trends toward improved energy efficiency, e.g., birds get streamlined and customized wings. At every level, Life evolves within “an envelope of thermodynamic possibility.”

Specialization and dependency

As populations increase, resource limits are reached. Organisms either get together to cooperate or struggle to compete. They evolve to get smarter and stronger. They band together and specialize, creating the “superorganisms” that dominate today's Earth.

Each superorganism inherits the job and the motivations of the Knowledge Constructor on behalf of its dependent organisms. The trillion or so cells in our human bodies depend on us to go out and harvest energy to feed them and then build wealth so that we and they together can grow, reproduce, and evolve. We, the superorganism, and our cells, our dependent organisms, are all subject to the same Laws of Life.

So, how does the Knowledge Constructor work?

As the base algorithm for Life, the Knowledge Constructor must have core skills and components. Leave one out, and it doesn’t work at all. (See The Secret Life of Algorithms)

For the Knowledge Constructor to function as a life form, all of the following components must be included:

Sensors

• To receive energy from the environment, sensors are needed. For humans, these include light, touch, smell, sound, and taste, etc. Other life forms may have additional types of sensors.

Memory

• Sensed energy patterns are compared with memory. If recognized, information - what we also call meaning - is created.

Logic/Cognition

• Incoming information is combined with stored information, either new or old, to create ideas and knowledge.

Knowledge

• A useful mental model of the world. Knowledge can be thoughts stored in a mind, written in a book, stored in DNA codes, etc. It can be transmitted from one individual to another or many at once. Knowledge is an information construct that Life uses to translate thoughts into physical action.

• Knowledgeable action allows Life to predict how, when, and where more energy can be harvested. Successful predictions build experience and potentially energy wealth. Learning compounds knowledge, which is the key to how Life continuously increases its ability to improve survival and harvest energy.

Capability for physical action

• To do things in the real world, the Knowledge Constructor must translate knowledge into physical actions—the mind must control the body. The body needs knowledge of what it is looking for, where to find it, and how to coordinate its movements.

• Physical actions require the expenditure of energy. They must, on average, produce an energetic gain that can be stored as wealth for future needs. See The Second Law of Life - Make a Profit

Sense, Think, and Do is the mantra of Life.

In Life, the Knowledge Constructor principle is repeated in an endless variety of forms, materials, and functions. The complex Life that we see today results from specialization. Hierarchies of information and energy dependency have evolved. Knowledge constructors exist in multitudes of substrates, from molecular information machines to brains and as (so far) dependent forms, which we call machines.

However, it’s not yet clear how the components of the first Knowledge Constructor were assembled from the raw materials of the universe to create sustainable life. It’s a mystery that reveals how little we really understand about the universe that we live in. There is much to look forward to in our human progress.

If you are interested in a deep dive into a modern knowledge constructor, click here. C elegans is a 1mm long nematode with exactly 302 neurons in its entire brain and a life span of a few weeks. It’s a fascinating story of how information and energy can create a physically simple but astonishingly complex and sophisticated creature, which has survived more than 60 million years and populated every part of the globe.

Origin of the Knowledge Constructor Principle

The Turing Machine

In the 1920s, a famous mathematician named David Hilbert proposed a series of unanswered questions for mathematics. Among them was the question of “computability.” It was clear that mechanical calculators could be built to solve specific problems, but solving a different problem required redesigning the machine. Could a single machine be designed to solve ANY math equation?

In 1936, A young graduate student, Alan Turing, took on the challenge and, in short order, created the “Turing Machine,” which was based on nothing more than a conceptual mechanical typewriter that could read, write, or erase symbols on a paper tape. With it, a program of instructions could be loaded, and any problem could be computed. It worked, and with Turing’s proof in hand, the race was on to build working electronic computers.

While the Turing Machine architecture was explicitly applied to computers, the principle he articulated was, in fact, the fundamental operating principle of all information machines, including the Knowledge Constructor. It’s important to note that while all information machines work by manipulating symbols, Life is NOT a digital computer and does not process information in the same way.

The Knowledge Constructor

Like the Turing Machine for computers, the Knowledge Constructor provides a simple model from which all life could evolve - information + energy.

In practice, Life got together, communicated, specialized, and began building knowledge-based biological tools to manufacture body parts like cells, shells, claws, legs, eyes, fins, wings, etc. We humans contain billions of information machines running our lives and making all the parts necessary to keep us alive.

And just like the rest of Life, we humans build knowledge-based tools and machines to enable and expand our human capabilities to harvest energy, grow, reproduce and evolve.

Humans are inexorably driven by the same built-in drives and information processes that motivate every living thing on this Earth - the Laws of Life.

The epic journey of evolution is long, slow and dangerous. There are no guarantees, only the possibilities that we the living create for ourselves.

Every living person, animal, plant, fungi, and bacteria can trace their ancestry in an unbroken chain of survivors all the way back to the first Life. Your and my ancestors survived and reproduced without oxygen for more than two billion years. They learned how to make oxygen and then learned how to breathe it. They evolved during the Cambrian Explosion, developed backbones, lived as fish, crawled up onto land, and survived global extinctions like the Deccan Traps and the comet strike that wiped out the dinosaurs. They developed warm blood and fur. They learned to care for their young and pioneered intelligence as a way to get ahead. And we, the living today, carry the torch of life in our hands, passed from survivor to survivor on the 4 billion year journey of life - forward into the unknown future.

Don’t forget - for a deeper dive, Meet C. elegans - a modern Knowledge Constructor with a 60 million year record of survival.

With this brief introduction to the Knowledge Constructor and the Laws of Life, the stage is set. We can now move on to fill in the bigger pictures, including:

How sex created Facebook

The evolution of sexual reproduction opened the age of species defined primarily by their communication and cooperation, not just their DNA. Schools of fish, colonies of ants, and wolf packs exemplify socially bonded species. Humans developed information technology to create social species, including tribes, city-states, nation-states, religions, companies, Facebook, etc. These social species share the same motivations and behaviors as the lowly Knowledge Constructor.

Superorganisms

Life is a vast sea of nested hierarchies of information machines, which group together and specialize to form superorganisms. Our cells cooperate to keep our personal superorganism body working, and we do our best to take care of their needs. How this happens is one of the most exciting stories being revealed by leading-edge biologists.

Machines as human life forms

For thousands of years, people have built machines that incorporate parts of the Knowledge Constructor, with human operators filling in the missing pieces, usually logic and memory. We think of them as machines, but as I will demonstrate, they are an integral part of Life itself. Now, with the advent of AI, the distinction between humans and our machines is blurring and creating a new worldview.

What powers evolution? How did it start?

Life is not defined by what it is made of but by how it behaves. Through new insights, including The Constructal Law of Physics and Assembly Theory, we learn that energetic flow, interaction with matter, and history are integral to the evolution of life and the universe itself. With these new tools, we can begin to speculate about how life might have started from inanimate materials.

The Cosmological perspective

• What part do we humans play in the vast cosmos that we have been privileged to catch a glimpse of?

• Since we exist, is the potential to create life baked into the universe?

• Will all life work on the same principle as life here on Earth?

• Does the Knowledge Constructor reveal a universal law of nature?

Subscribe.

The Second Law of Life: Make a Profit

The Third Law of Life: Information Powers Life

“With the advent of AI (artificial intelligence) our information fuel supply has increased from mere gasoline to fusion energy, expanding the horizons of our human potential beyond anything we have ever imagined.” -MH

Where is this future taking us?

To benefit from and control our new superpowers, we need to understand the information fuel that propels us and how information engines power natural biology, human societies, and machines.

Information: What do we think it is?

• "Information? That's facts, numbers, and statistics, isn't it?

• "It's the stuff my smartphone tells me. My calendar, messages, reminders—that's all information I use every day."

• "Information is whatever I read on the news or see on TV. It's how I know what's going on in the world."

• "It's what I Google when I need to know something, like a recipe or how to fix a leaky faucet."

• "Information is history and collective knowledge—stuff that's passed down through generations and recorded in books or nowadays, on the internet."

• "For me, information is personal. It's my medical records, bank statements, and private conversations. It's something that should be kept secure."

Information is the fuel that makes life possible

Every Life form, (For simplicity, I’ll use “Life” to refer to “every life form”) requires information to create every part of its physical body and to do every single thing it needs or hopes to do.

Information is only created by Life, and information is only useful to Life.

How does the engine of Life work?

First, Life observes: Life receives a small amount of energy from the environment, like sound, light, or temperature, and perceives it via sensors, like our human smell, taste, touch, hearing, and sight.

The incoming energetic pattern is compared to patterns stored in memory. If the pattern is recognized, it becomes information and is combined, using logic, with other information (the process of cognition) to create meaning and, perhaps, Knowledge - a useful mental model of the real world. Knowledge is any information construct (internal or external) that allows us to translate thoughts into physical action.

With knowledge, Life can invest physical energy to potentially harvest even more energy from the environment. With success, Life stores some of its excess energy as “wealth” and invests some of the wealth to obtain yet more information, build more knowledge, and harvest even more energy - a positive feedback loop endlessly fueling the variety and abundance of Life on our planet.

Stored energy builds “wealth” - fat, money, things, or knowledge. Enough wealth must be accumulated to make expensive and risky investments in growth, reproduction, and evolution. There is nothing certain about the success of these investments. All forms of Life must develop their own strategy for successfully growing, reproducing, and evolving across multiple generations.

Both animals and humans use information to gather energy and create wealth

In 1859, Charles Darwin published his landmark book, Origin of Species. He identified grazing, browsing, and hunting as the three methods by which animals harvest food. In 1980, I updated his observation by extending it to information gathering. Since information is a form of energy essential to all living organisms, this principle links human social behavior to the fundamental physics of Life and the universe itself.

Bacteria, birds, human beings, a company, a religion, a nation, and machines - the laws of information work the same for all of Life.

From the earliest bacterial mats (stromatolites), more than 4 billion years ago, organisms have grouped together, communicating and sharing information in order to improve their ability to harvest energy to survive, grow, reproduce, and evolve.

At first, organisms reproduced by making exact copies of their DNA, and some still do. However, copying the same DNA over and over isn’t ideal for evolving into more complex and capable organisms. Sexual reproduction, in which DNA from two individuals is combined, is much more effective.

Sex requires cooperative communication between independent individuals

The evolution of sexual reproduction was enabled by the ability of two independent organisms to communicate and cooperate and come together in order to reproduce.

For sexual reproducers, their species is defined as much by their communication as by their DNA. For us humans, information about potential mates and communication with them and their social circles plays a major role in our mate-selection rituals. Information and communication are much more important than DNA for shaping the evolution of the human species.

Life is dependent on bigger and smaller forms of Life

Most organisms exist as dependents within hierarchies of “superorganisms.” Our human body is a superorganism housing trillions of dependent cells and hangers-on, like bacteria, fungi, and viruses. Superorganisms consist of hierarchies of dependency: Our cells depend on the success of us, their superorganism. They can’t live without us, and we can’t live without them.

Every cell in our body is itself the superorganism for a host of internal dependent information life forms. The mitochondria in our cells were once free living bacteria. They have their own DNA and generate the energy that makes our lives (and virtually all other complex life forms) possible. Our cells depend on their dependent mitochondria, and we depend on our dependent cells and they all depend on us.

Information and communication define how superorganisms and each of their dependent members know what to do and when. Complex life forms include a variety of diverse internal information systems:

• Small molecule signaling systems - Sodium, magnesium, calcium, and nitric oxide regulators, among many others.

• Neurotransmitters - an entire complex information system devoted to passing information from one neuron to the next.

• Large molecule systems - The myriad of proteins, kinases, enzymes, and mitochondria operating in thousands of interconnected information systems.

• The DNA information storage subsystem - The library from which other systems obtain plans for doing what needs to be done.

• The immune system - A variety of quasi-independent information systems distributed throughout the body, from our gut bacteria to antibodies that have learned to recognize invaders and mark infected cells for destruction by killer T-cells and others.

• Our nervous system is the highways and byways for moving information around our body and carrying sensed energy to our brain for recognition.

• The hormone systems - hormones are information chemicals created and received by every cell. They are the “democracy” of the cells and control us independently of the nervous system and brain.

• Intercellular computational networks - At the leading edge of modern biology, Dr. Michael Levin and his colleagues are discovering electrical communication and computation networks, the software that guides our development from embryo to adult and internally controls the ongoing function of our organs.

Our vaunted “conscious” mind is only aware of a tiny fraction of all the communication and computation that is going on within our internal communities and their trillions of cells. We are not able to understand their conversations carried on in chemical and electrical languages for the same reasons that we are not able to understand all the conversations in human society and among animals.

Can you hear me now?

The multiplicity of animal, human, and biological languages reveals another face of information: The transmitter and the receiver must understand each other for meaningful communication.

A huge amount of human communication is occupied with establishing a shared context - From “Can you hear me now?” to “Do you speak English?” to “What do you mean antidisestablishmentarianism?”

This “semantic context” applies to all communication, from cells in our body to digital Wi-Fi radio signals to elephants talking by stamping their feet and whales singing across the oceans. We can listen, but without a shared semantic context, we really can’t be sure what the elephants are talking about, or, without a smartphone, what the Wi-Fi is telling us.

We human beings have evolved communication technologies to create large-scale shared-context information storage and transmission networks. These have spawned many types of information-based superorganism life forms: Social, technical, philosophical, spiritual, military, commercial, political, etc.

Besides humans, many species, for instance, ants, dolphins, bees, birds, wolf packs and fish, are also organized and defined by complex and distributed communication-based social superorganisms. Wolf packs cooperate and succeed. Lone wolves, not so much. Without its information species, its pack superorganism, the biological species of wolves would not survive.

All of these communication-based superorganisms are themselves living species, held together by communication and fueled by information. Like all other members of Life, they need to harvest energy on behalf of their dependent members in order to grow, reproduce, and evolve.

The Information Revolution gets fusion power

The Agricultural Revolution enhanced our food supply and grew the human population. The Industrial Revolution enhanced our energy supply, with which we have evolved our modern technological world.

Today’s information revolution is the first to directly enhance our mind, the root of our human evolutionary advantage.

The invention of the printing press in 1450 allowed information to be spread widely and led to the scientific and industrial revolution. However, it was still up to us to make use of the information by using mechanical, manually controlled information engines, from paper and pencil to card catalogs to mechanical calculators.

The computer turbocharged our information engines

Just as the gasoline-powered automobile transformed our transportation lives, In a few short decades, we have leveraged information-powered computers, along with instant global communication, to create a real-time, global, “human mind.” But as powerful as computers are, so far, they are just mechanical calculators on steroids, limited to doing only what we have explicitly instructed them to do.

AI turns information gasoline into fusion power - no limits.

Slowly gestating since the 1950s, we have now entered the age of accessible machine learning and “artificial” intelligence, AI. AIs are general purpose information pattern learners. They can learn chess today, Swahili tomorrow, and how to talk to elephants the next day.

The advent of AI is a monumental advance in our human use of information. In one sense, it potentially makes all of the recorded information and knowledge of the human race available to us in a dialectical form - a conversation with our past. AI’s ability to make connections, erase language barriers, learn on its own, remember everything it learns, and infer meaning potentially gives it and us superhuman information capabilities.

The knowledge we gain from using AI to expand our intellectual worldview will transform how we use information technology and vastly increase our ability to harvest energy and create wealth - all based on the universal laws of information.

In this article, I have introduced information and shown that:

• Information is a unique product of life

• Information usage is a process that makes life possible

• The “laws” of information operate in the same way for all life forms

• Living organisms form hierarchies of information-based superorganisms

• Information processing takes place in many ways and many substrates within living organisms and shapes human societies.

• Sexual reproduction created species defined by communication and cooperation among independent organisms

• Humans evolved technical communication and cooperation strategies that produced communication and information-based superorganism species like tribes, nations, religions, and companies.

• Information technology has increased the human ability to maximize return on investment from information acquisition, processing, and knowledge creation.

• AI promises to vastly increase our effective use of information and return on investment from its use.

In this brief article, I know you will have questions and comments. I am happy to clarify and add details, so please let me know if there is something you don’t understand or with which you disagree.

In future articles, I will describe the architecture and machinery that produces information for all life forms, dive deep into how knowledge works, the life of machines, AI, information and society, the search for the origin of life, and much more.

Previous articles

Pi at the Center of the Universe - Why we can’t understand the complex world of today until we go back to the source that created it.

The Secret Life of Algorithms - Algorithms are usually the instructions, the programs, that run computers. Since both computers and Life are information machines of different kinds, it is useful to discuss the operation of both biological and human systems with the same term.

“Show me the money!”

The First Law of Life is to survive.

Click here for the First Law

The Second Law of Life is to make a profit.

Not only do ALL living organisms need to make a profit, but they also need to make as much as possible as fast as possible.

What is profit?

All life forms use energy and information to run their biological operating system. In order to survive, all organisms must, on average, harvest more energy than they used in harvesting. They must create a profit. Stored profit is wealth - biological fat, physical gold, or money. All successful organisms and their species must create profit and build wealth.

Why do life forms need wealth to adapt to change?

Every organism needs a rainy day fund. The sun doesn’t come out, a hurricane arrives, or the car needs a new transmission. Life is incredibly inventive at storing as much wealth as possible to survive adverse conditions. Almost all complex life forms have developed ways of using their wealth to create shelter for themselves. But there are no guarantees. Among other challenges, your co-life forms may grow bigger than you and steal your food or reproduce faster and crowd you out.

Grow, reproduce, and evolve

Every living organism also needs to harvest extra energy and store it as surplus wealth in order to make speculative investments in growth, reproduction, and evolution. There is no guarantee that their investments will produce a profit for the individual or their species, but any species that chronically fails to grow, reproduce, and evolve is doomed.

From your first breath to your long term retirement plan, any action that does not produce an energy profit for you, your community, or your species is, at best, wasted energy and, at worst, actively detrimental. These laws apply equally to bacteria, bugs, animals, plants, and the human race.

What is information, and how does it make life possible?

Information is the most important word that most people know nothing about. Information is the “force” that makes life possible. Information is created by a mechanism that is common to all life forms and some machines, including computers:

Patterns of energy are received from the environment through “sensors” of various kinds and compared to patterns stored in memory. When patterns match, they are recognized as “information” having some “meaning” to the organism.

Meaning is recognized and acted upon by “logic” or “cognition,” which creates “knowledge,” the potential to take an action in the physical world. For example, during the night, a sunflower uses its knowledge to turn toward the expected sunrise. In return, it harvests more sunlight energy during the day than it took to turn the flower. It makes a profit, stores it as wealth, and, during the night, invests some of it in predicting tomorrow’s sunrise.

Store as much energy as possible, as fast as possible

There is no upper limit on how much wealth an organism or species can accumulate or how fast - the only constraints are supply and their ability to manage and hang on to all that they harvest.

Humans are masters at creating wealth

We humans have invented millions of ways to profit from our intellect and use it to create wealth.

For simplicity, let’s use “money” as the proxy for profit, recognizing that money itself is a proxy for stored and usable energy - wealth.

We all know the story - Get a job, save money, increase your wealth, start a company, get rich, get filthy rich, become a billionaire - Everything is monetized.

• We sell our time for money

• We sell our skills for money

• We sell our bodies for money

• We make things to sell for money

• We play the stock market and gamble in hopes of making money

• We create companies to make money, which in turn allows the workers to make money

• We work for companies because we believe that we can make more money working for the man than going it alone

• We quit our jobs and take risks in the hope of making more money

• “Non-profits” make their money in the form of donations

• We may do activities that provide “psychic” or “spiritual” rewards if we have sufficient money.

The strategies used by humans are rooted in the evolution of all life forms

Charles Darwin first articulated the three ways that animals gather food: grazing, browsing, and hunting. It turns out that these are also the precise three ways that humans gather information. Our social information lives are, in fact, extensions of our biological heritage. To learn more about grazing, browsing, and hunting, click here.

Altruism, a way of spreading individual wealth for the benefit of the community or species, is practiced by many species. “Mutual back-scratching” is commonly observed in the behavior of monkeys and humans. Both honeybees and human soldiers sacrifice their lives for the good of the community.

Since all life forms are based on information, they all operate on the same fundamental principles - the Laws of Life.

This brings us to my big questions:

How do the principles of information define the Laws of Life?

• Is consciousness, sentience, cognition and self-awareness built into every living thing from the ground up?

• Using information, can we understand and define the Laws of Life?

• Since life exists here on Earth, are its basic principles baked into the structure of the universe?

• How can we evolve from a human-centric worldview to a cosmocentric perspective?

Since information is the basis of all life and artificial intelligence is an information amplifier like nothing before, how will it make profits for each of us and for the world?

Feel free to send me your ideas and suggestions.

The Tree of Immortal Life carries Us forward on Spaceship Earth’s magical journey through space and time (click to enlarge)

We are all survivors - We are the buds, blossoms and fruit on the vast Tree of Immortal Life, which includes every living human, animal, plant, bug, and bacteria. We are - Us the Living - each surviving on the fragile tip of a unique branch of immortality. Our personal family tree stretches unbroken back through time to the first seed of Life that took root in the fertile Earth of the great cosmic nursery. Life emerged, blinking in astonishment across the face of time.

All of Us are the warriors and emissaries of Earth’s Immortal Life, waging the eternal struggle to harvest the light, venture boldly into the unknown, and illuminate the endless frontiers of time and possibility. Immortal Life is created by the mortal toils of Us the Living.

Our mortal ancestors survived everything an uncaring universe threw at them - asteroid strikes, ice ages, toxic volcanos, continents shaking and drifting about, climate changes, mass extinctions, evolutionary explosions, and meltdowns. Many died, but our ancestors, the ancestors of today’s Us the Living, survived and procreated.

From a human perspective, it is time to take our place as responsible global citizens of Spaceship Earth. Hopefully, we will have the wisdom to recognize the unity of all life forms and, together, project our light to create an abundant future for Immortal Life.