(And check our interview with Perry Marshall on Evolution 2.0, which this article addresses aplenty)
Any discussion about Darwin’s Theory of Evolution and its mechanics necessarily involves or devolves into speculative arguments about our roots.
It’s all about exploring where we came from, presumably based on our best understanding of where we’re at, although our viewing lenses tend to differ.
The discussions tend to become emotionally charged, precisely because there’s so much at stake. It’s no accident that science, religion, philosophy, political theory, and more are concerned with the story of our genesis.
As with any works of fiction, depending on which account you ascribe to, the narrative that drives the beginning of each party’s story tends to dictate its outcome, and more importantly, the storyteller’s fate in the present time.
Ergo, hopes, dreams, jobs, reputations, and big dollars are on the line.
Such is the nature of the beast.
Prisoners of the Present
Given that the nature of the human condition is such that it basically makes us prisoners of time (at least until we invent time travel), the best we can do for now is more or less use the present time as a rearview mirror to look back into the past and thereby get a glimpse of our human origins, even if our highly speculative lenses are distorted by our limitations.
Of course, science famously uses microscopes and what we might call “mathoscopes” to examine the properties of life-as-we-know it to project backwards into time to discover life as it originally was, and thereby draw its own conclusions about what it sees.
In truth, maybe these aren’t so much “discovered” as “imagined.”
Meanwhile, Gnostics use what we might call “mythoscopes” to examine the properties of experience to do the same. Others claim to use more direct means, such as divine revelation, i.e., “God told me this is what happened,” while for most people, this pipeline is more indirect, i.e., “the people in my holy book told me that God told them how everything started.”
As you might expect, the average citizen in the 21st Century, having been raised to believe in the primacy of science and its priestly cast of academic experts, tends to reflexively accept that any scientific explanation must be superior to all others. I’d like to believe this ‘reflexive’ bias is more of 20th Century mindset, but that remains to be seen. The early returns aren’t promising.
At any rate, no doubt, science uses some powerful instruments to make some robust predictions, but it also features some severe limitations (in fact, it even relies on them), beyond which, it still can’t offer us anything more than conjectures based on what it sees, which effectively amounts to a modern form of myth, albeit supported and informed by its findings, which are bound by a relatively narrow scope owing to the nature of legitimate scientific inquiry.
That is, as we all know, “good” science is based upon the experimental method, which itself presumes controlled conditions, the problem being that it’s difficult to control the conditions in a laboratory, much less once you leave the lab. For instance, presuming to “experiment” on the whole cosmos and its past.
It’s a big world out there. Maybe infinite. Even science itself admits that it only knows about 3% of reality, namely, the “baryonic” stuff of ordinary matter that makes up 3% of life-as-we-know-it, while the rest of everything is either dark matter or dark energy. Or at least that’s the best guess of science.
Hmm… funny how scientific guesses are labeled as “hypotheses” as opposed to being labeled “myths,” i.e., the old synonym for a blatant falsehood, even though the very nature of ancient myths was to reveal truths about the nature of Mother Nature in what could be seen as an early species of science fiction.
In any case, science is far more successful at making observations on a microscopic level than a macroscopic one, and yet, the findings of the former are used to extrapolate grand conclusions about the latter. In other words, upon closer examination, science is ultimately based upon a consideration of experience, just like Gnostic insights.
It simply goes about it in a different way.
A highly programmatic and limited way, perhaps even counterintuitive, since microscopic lenses would seem to be rather ill-fitting instruments for presuming to discover the basis for, oh, everything.
Nonetheless, this ostensibly rigorous, disciplined approach is the biggest strength and greatest weakness of science, including when it comes to making assertions about evolution, which heretofore have seen science embracing Darwin’s Theory with religious fervor as an inviolate sacrosanct law.
The trouble is that the world of science can sometimes be so myopic that its most ardent disciples tend to ignore its own latest findings, some of which we’ll discuss here, and which seem to support the bold assertions of Perry Marshall, a recent guest on Miguel Conner’s Aeon Byte podcast, who claims to have settled the argument about evolution.
Marshall’s book, Evolution 2.0, Breaking the Deadlock Between Darwin and Design, presents a simple yet daunting argument to challenge mainstream scientific dogma regarding Natural Selection, one that, so far, hasn’t been challenged, and until such time it is, Marshall can rightly proclaim a victory.
Simply put, Darwin’s Theory has lost. It’s an officially incorrect and debunked theory. Be sure to tell your friends, family, and local schoolmarms.
Here’s why:
The God Code: Reality Doesn’t Write Itself.
(Because It Can’t. Or Else… Prove It!)
Without getting too far into the weeds of the science behind Evolution 2.0 and Marshall’s vivisection of the assumption that evolution is a gradual process of random mutations, we’ll do a shorthand version of the gist of his argument here.
Marshall begins with Information Theory, which is where we’ll begin. That is, Marshall, who himself is an engineer by trade, agrees with innumerable scientists and an increasing body of evidence (why, some might even say, a new scientific dogma) that sees the fundamental basis of reality as being information.
All is data, and data is all.
Sure, this thinking sounds suspiciously like an artifact of the “Information Age,” but then, maybe the Information Age is a by-product of this truth?
In any case, information is a product of the code that created it, all of which presumes a creator of the code. After all, information can’t just write itself, can it?
Therefore, there must be a writer of the original code for the original information from whence everything followed, and whomever or whatever this original engineer might be, said being is the Creator of all.
In other words, this originating Source was a first cause for everything as opposed to the cosmos being a rather mysterious, spontaneous eruption of life in some sort of ill-described random event, whose products subsequently survive if—and only if—they are fit to withstand the fallout from this initial explosion.
Small surprise that the “Nuclear Age” would produce a kind of nuclear reaction, or, if you will, a Nuclear God, to launch reality. But alas, as mentioned, it appears we’ve moved on to the Information Age and so we now have a new explanation per Perry’s Code-Creating God.
Interesting theory, you might agree, but where’s the proof?
Marshall effectively argues that we should take this concept as an a priori assumption, precisely because
1) we know that information exists, and…
2) this data of existence and experience proceeds in accordance with natural laws or codes (science presumes the same), and, furthermore…
3) if anybody wants to dispute this fact, then the burden should be on them to prove that something—anything (bearing in mind that all things are information on a fundamental level)—can be written without the benefit of a code.
The logic that follows is that if nothing can be discovered which does NOT have some sort of code driving it, then everything has a code-making creator behind it. More simply put, unless you can establish the existence of some sort of information that wrote its own being into existence, Darwin loses.
Now, you might object that this is all merely catch-22 solipsism (i.e., you first have to exist to create yourself, but then how could you create yourself if you didn’t exist, in which case, you’d first have to exist, so… you get the picture).
However, solipsism or not, that doesn’t mean it’s not a fact.
If you don’t like it, prove it’s not true.
Provide evidence that something created itself.
To put this affair in Gnostic terms, Marshall’s argument stands until some scientist, or anybody else, can find a thing or being capable of writing its own gospels and living its own myths—sans any contribution from any prior source.
Nobody has.
Marshall is still waiting.
Sure, You Can’t Prove a Negative, But…
It’s worth noting that it’s impossible to prove a negative, so while Marshall successfully disproves Darwinian theory, case closed (until further notice), it doesn’t quite mean that he’s “materially” proven that an original Creator exists.
It certainly stands as logical proof, which is no small thing, since it dismantles Darwinism, per se, but let’s not forget that we are material beings, and in the world of matter, matter matters. And so, even if matter is ultimately a rather ethereal, Platonic-like soup of information vs. being the touchy-feely, solid stuff we all know and love and hate, science will understandably demand its pound of godly flesh as proof that a God-like Code Creator exists.
This being the case, for now, the situation is kinda like having an imaginary coin whereby you can see only one side of it. Let’s say it’s ”heads,” but the nature of the coin is such that we can never look at the flip side of the coin.
Logically, we know the tail side must be there, because, look—there’s the heads side! So the backside must be tails, right?
However, if you could never flip the coin to the other side, you could never ‘absolutely,’ prove it. That is, you could never materially prove it by providing material evidence.
Who knows, maybe there’s a stargate on the other side of the coin, and if you ever flipped it, you’d eventually wind up in a sitting room having to spend eternity with one of the high priests of evolution, Daniel Dennett, lecturing you forever.
Or forcing you to shave his ghastly beard.
Not that science always requires material proof. After all, Dennett never offers any, and there are all sorts of examples where science accepts something as “fact” without the existence of a substance to prove it.
Gravity is a perfect example. We all know and believe and accept that it exists (well, except for emerging theories that see gravity as a by-product of electromagnetism—damn these nonstop exceptions!), but ask someone to provide you with an ounce of gravity that you can hold in your hands.
Tell ‘em to scoop up the gravity with a spoon and then eat it.
They can’t. Because that’s just not how it works. It’s one of these invisible arrays of force that science call “fields.”
So it is with the information field of Creation. Don’t expect anybody to provide you with an ounce of the ‘Code Creator’s’ flesh anytime soon. In the mean time, we’re stuck in the present moment staring at one side of Marshall’s coin.
Gotta love his logic. Still wish I could see the backside of that reality, even if Marshall’s conclusion might be logically and holographically resident in everything we see.
But then, don’t expect Richard Dawkins or Daniel Dennett or any other hucksters of Darwinian hokum to provide you with videotape that replays the magical moment when some random event supposedly created life.
The point is, after hearing Marshall’s case, only a closed mind wouldn’t open to questioning Darwin’s theory—not that Darwinians themselves are open to questions or scientific inquiry anymore. However, some are, because…
Evolution Theory Has Been Evolving Anyway
While Marshall’s central argument doesn’t necessarily equate to proving that God or the existence of an original Cause or Creator exists, at the very least it points to the need for integrating a quasi-LaMarckian version of evolution to some extent, if not some form of Intelligent Design, or, God forbid, Creationism (or should I say, “Nonexistent-Atheist-God forbid?”)
For those unfamiliar, Jean-Baptiste LaMarck was a French scientist circa the early 1800s, predating Darwin, who posed one of the first theories of evolution. At the risk of oversimplifying his thought, by LaMarck’s reckoning, the things we do contribute to forming who we are, and then the characteristics that we acquire and manifest are passed down to our progeny.
To put it another way, to a limited extent, we are the creators of ourselves, and as such, we can write our own gospels and live our myths, or even write our own DNA, albeit within the confines of our condition per the environment we inhabit. Of course, LaMarck came up with his ideas before we knew that genes even existed, as did Darwin, who later posed that our behavior has nothing to do with our evolution: We (and our genes) either survive our environment, or we don’t.
I’ll throw out a Devil’s Advocate twist on Marshall’s ‘self-creating code’ argument to end these comments, but for now…
As a Gnostic echo of what Marshall has proposed, scientifically speaking (as opposed to mythologically speaking), you might say that a creative spirit or divine spark within us has already been demonstrated in bona fide, real-world lab-tests that prove the inheritance of newly acquired characteristics that are NOT formed by natural selection, but rather, they’re formed by what we might informally call subjective selection, and then these traits are passed onto the next generation.
Examples include the formation of germ cells from somatic cells; the proven ability of flatworms to behave in a way that develops immunity to certain viruses and thereafter the worms pass down those traits to future generations; the inherited effects of radiation; and so on, all of which suggest the ability for life to create or to recreate its own codes of being and future development as opposed to waiting on the environment to weed out specimens over prolonged periods.
I could go on and on. For one, I could talk about the complete lack of evidence for intermediate species to prove the assumption of mutations over time. Darwin said that we should discover an “inconceivably” large number of these mutations, but, to date, science hasn’t found a single example. However, this examination is more concerned with the quality of essential arguments vs. the quantity.
So then, back to those worms. I don’t know about you, but I say, “Anything worms can do, I can do better. I can do anything better than worms!”
And the band plays on.
Changing Times And Changing Timelines:
Time To Change The Whole Darn Theory?
Speaking of those prolonged periods of environmental selection and the survival of the fittest concept, Stephen Jay Gould of Columbia University, now diseased, introduced his “Punctuated Equilibrium” concept decades ago, where he demonstrated beyond anybody’s shadow of a doubt that Darwinian theory has had some major problems regarding its timelines, whereby natural selection doesn’t play out over millions upon millions of years as Darwin proposed.
Now, Gould didn’t set out to disprove Darwinian theory, which he embraced, but his research showed that through the evolution of a wide variety of domestic breeds of dogs over ten thousand years or so (going back to an original breed of dog in Egypt), evolution doesn’t have to take millions of years.
Gould’s work is largely accepted by the mainstream scientific community, and so, suddenly the timelines for evolution collapsed overnight by an order of magnitude. I might add, per the flatworm experiment referenced above, the timelines seem to have shrunk still further, all the way down to that golden moment of truth when we worm-like creatures decide to go this way or that.
Or, looking at this problem from a quantum physics perspective per the famous Observer Effect (where the observer of photons changes their course merely by looking at them), perhaps we might say that our reality, including Darwinian Theory, collapses to go with the flow of our perception.
I’m not sure why this finding among others from quantum physics are conveniently overlooked when it comes to evolution, but they are.
Geez, just imagine if time travel ever becomes a reality, and we not only could go back and kill Hitler or our grandparents, but we could go back to the beginning of time and kill the Father of all, our Code Creator… or maybe just Darwin?
Hah! What would the Darwinians say then?
Oh, I guess they’d say probably as much as they do now when it comes to encountering inconvenient developments in science.
In this case, I suppose part of the discomfort with quantum physics is because it explores super small levels of existence where exotic laws of nature play out. Apparently, biologists and chemists like their microscopes to be powerful, but not too powerful (my apologies to Rupert Sheldrake, who is a rare exception).
Plus, it’s all non-carbon-based terrain, not to mention just plain weird. But then, evolution now generally presupposes that reality started when non-biological forms of being exploded into existence with a big bang, so… isn’t the contemplation of ghostly events that happened eons ago that are now entirely invisible to us, well, kinda weird?
So what gives?
In any case, if you want physical evidence of Gould’s theory, you can go to your local pet shop and see everything from big breeds of Great Danes to small breeds of furry, little lapdogs. Or, if you insist on seeing how lapdogs function in an entirely different environment, you might try your local corporate research lab.
Again, Gould’s work doesn’t disprove Darwinian theory, but it does start to beg the question of if—and to what extent—do individuals have the power to change themselves and determine their own being?
Mind you, we’re not only talking about changing our own environment, but even our own genetic make-up–as opposed to merely surviving it all… or not…depending on how we happen to fit in with their environments, the latter of which is obviously an exceptionally passive view of our interaction with reality.
As if we aren’t overwhelmed by our manu-fractured environments enough, Darwinians would have us believe that we basically have no impact at all, or more accurately, we have no real agency. No divine spark.
(It’s rather odd that these folks tend to believe in golden warming, isn’t it?)
In fact, hmm… maybe Darwinians are the ultimate sect of Sethians, or you might say, “The Sethians Above Sethians,” that is, because they’re so down on ALL of reality that there’s no hope whatsoever, whether in this world or any other.
There simply is, always has been, and always will be Darwinian darkness and nothing else. However, let not forget…
Ignorance Theory: X In = X Out.
Junk Science = Junk Results.
Beyond the aforementioned developments in germ theory and acquired characteristics, Darwinian Theory doesn’t seem to jibe with some of the things we’re now learning about genetics.
Such as, did you know that scientists recently discovered that there’s a third helix that they had previously overlooked or simply couldn’t see?
Who knew?
And who knows what we might discover in the future. Personally, I wouldn’t even rule out that Natural Selection might make a comeback. (True, it’s still taught in children’s textbooks, but we also tell kids there’s a Santa, so… shhh!)
For now, we still have the tortured and failed attempt by mainstream science to redefine RNA as the self-starting creative spark for DNA, whereby RNA ‘somehow’ becomes the de facto God of Richard Dawkins and company.
Per this popular myth, lightning somehow strikes out of nowhere and thereby charges a bunch of random atoms so as to see them suddenly coming alive like some sort of a quantum, primordial Frankenstein, which begs the question as to where those atoms came from, and why aren’t they seen as Our Father, THE Source of intelligent life, in which case, who made them?
As far as I can tell, they’re fairly self-organizing, and, by the way, so are crystals, and that’s at an above-molecular level! That’s not supposed to be!
Egads! Maybe they even write their own code!
Meanwhile, what about all that lightning?
Where did that come from?
Jupiter? Zeus?
And by the way, how isn’t any of that a myth?
Plus, if that isn’t a shaky story, there’s the stuff that science formerly called “junk DNA,” which is the amorphous, non-double helix stuff of our genetic material, which science heretofore has had no clue as to what purpose it serves or how it all works, ergo… they ignored it… they dismissed it as mere junk.
That said, per mounting research, it increasingly looks like this “stuff” might be a significant factor in the expression of genes, perhaps even acting as some sort of antennae (although, again, this begs the question of who’s the broadcaster, and then, who made the original broadcast?)
Science really doesn’t know, but at least they’re not calling it junk anymore.
Meanwhile, science has discovered that genes can “switch on” or “switch off” for reasons that aren’t precisely understood, and which, for all we know, very well may have to do with our decisions and behaviors in life, which would obviously align with the aforementioned flatworms and more of a LaMarkian view of evolution vs. a rigid or strictly Darwinian perspective.
Stepping back for a moment, it’s worth noting that all of this really amounts to a reconsideration of the old battle between Free Will vs. Fate, that is, how much can we shape what happens in our lives vs. how much of it has been pre-determined?
For Gnostics, it’s a bit of both (along a spectrum) within a construct that might be understood mythologcally, but which has been experienced daily. For aeons.
Speaking of Forces That Might
Determine Our Fate…
As a side note, Big Pharma companies like Monsanto would love nothing more than to pre-determine our genes by taking ownership of them via patents, whereby they then can claim to legally own and control the human genome.
Yes, Monsanto has been patenting genes for quite a while now. Their greed has moved far beyond your pockets to the very code that runs your personal biome. No doubt, they’d store it on the ole “block-chain” at the first available opportunity, and then sell it back to you with a proprietary crypto-currency.
The Supreme Court has limited this push for now, but should they re-open the floodgates, people might find themselves paying for the use and expression of their very own genes, since, thanks to intellectual property law, Monsanto would own our genes, and thus, by extension, Monsanto would own… you.
As an added note should that ever happen, I guess eventually we’ll have to throw out the theories of both LaMarck and Darwin and simply adopt “Monsanto Theory.” For that matter, Monsanto might force us to believe all of their theories and take all of their drugs lest they threaten to switch off a few of our genes.
I’m sure mainstream science would have no problem with any of this, since I’ve noticed that they seem to have taken the idea of objective research and thrown it out the window in favor of “letting the market decide.”
Of course, that’s just another way of saying, “whomever pays us the most, that’s what we’ll discover! And by God, er, by Monsanto and his Prophet Darwin (blessed be his name and praise be upon him), that’s what we’ll believe!”
Never mind that companies like Monsanto never have to worry about “letting the markets decide” because they have the power to control the markets, not to mention the governments that ostensibly regulate them.
Then There’s the Elephant in the Room:
Genetic Engineering
Besides Marshall’s argument, there’s another elephant in the drawing room of evolutionary theory, and it’s currently stomping all over Darwin’s grave. It’s an argument that seems to be staring everybody in the face, and yet, somehow it remains hidden in plain site. It’s the simple fact of genetic engineering.
Not only can today’s scientists edit genetic code at will via the latest CRISPR technology, science has actually created entirely new organisms that never before existed—in this case, unprecedented bacteria with their very own genetic code… and all of them created from scratch.
How is that not playing God?
Or, shall we say, sharing in God’s creative power to some extent?
It sure sounds like some sort of divine spark of creativity at work to me, although I have to concede that a devilish spark can’t be ruled out.
But more to the point, how, pray tell, can we say with straight faces that genetically-engineered creations were the production of the environment and a related survival of the fittest vs. being created by we, the people, or we, the corporations, playing would-be gods, if not playing with God or the Devil?
By the way, nobody is asserting the principle of “creatio ex nihilo” here, that is, creating something from nothing, since, for starters, one presumes that the scientists who created said bacteria aren’t a bunch of nobodies.
Meanwhile, with a nod to Marshall, it’s also well worth mentioning that this isn’t a case of a code creating itself, either. In fact, to echo Marshall’s argument, this couldn’t be a case of Darwinian evolution, unless you repackage Darwin’s Theory as, “The Survival of the Fittest Creators,” the latter being an apparently supreme species that recreates a new evolutionary process in its own image.
A rose or a god by any other name, right?
Except this divine rose would kinda un-do the prevailing Darwinian Theory.
Actually, to my way of thinking, this would count as a major improvement on mainstream evolution theory (BTW, let’s start calling it a “defunct” or “debunked” theory, shall we?), and it would certainly move scientifically-outdated evolutionists far closer to common sense.
What Does This Have To
Do with Gnosticism?
For starters, we all know that Gnostics have been fairly obsessed with the nature of creation since, geez, probably creation itself. Their writings are rife with it at every twist and turn, and written with just about very twist know unto man.
But why?
Returning back to the beginning of this article, as well as the beginning of time, it’s because the implications are infinite.
For Gnostics, this stuff means everything.
In accordance with the Gnostic mindset and mythos, it is through 1) the act of creation, as well as 2) its downfall, and then most importantly, 3) its subsequent redemption and salvation through which everything thereby has meaning.
As for the second part of that equation, Gnostics are in agreement with Richard Dawkins far more than the average person might imagine, insomuch as Dawkins and most Gnostics describe the cosmos as a cold, ugly, and effectively inanimate or dead place bereft of any apparent meaning.
Worse still, this realm is presided over—if not intentionally lorded over—by a might-makes-right host of parasitic selfish genes, er, selfish beings who, oddly enough, aren’t really all that excited or animated by their own adverse or perverse actions, except to keep the whole damned machinery running then ruling the roost as long as they can, because, apparently, they like to be kings.
Or pretend to be. At least in the mean time. (And it’s a looong mean time.)
Call it a survival of the un-fittest Creators.
It’s simply the nature of such a dastardly Nature to see life evolve into… well… death.
End of story.
Or is it?
While Gnostics and Dawkins might share roughly the same mythos per the dark nature of our cosmos, Gnostics see salvation in the spark of creation, and therefore, they hold that imagination and knowledge are the means to a glorious reclamation of our true divine roots—heck, it’s even something we can do while we’re alive as an expression of our divine sparks, whereas Dawkins offers us naught but… More of the same ugliness.
Forever and ever.
Incredibly, Dawkins even claims to like–or he pretends to like—the reality that he describes. From a Gnostic perspective, at best, that makes him one of the most naive, masochistic, or sadistic fellows in history.
At worst, he’s an agent of the Archons, who, according to Gnostic myth (duly note: it’s myth, so please don’t take this literally, which isn’t to say you should ignore the actualization of the energies it describes) are the engineers of the fall of creation. As we can see, their reality isn’t all that.
However, for Gnostics, it is we who breathe meaning and true life into what otherwise is a rather prosaic, meaningless existence.
Of course, science can blow off Gnostic hopes of salvation as being merely “unscientific” (which is kinda like me blowing off you because, well, you’re just not enough of me for my taste), to which the Gnostic is only too happy to agree.
Thing is, science isn’t allowed to go beyond the scope of science, while “gnosis,” and the intuitive knowledge it describes, knows no such limits.
But an Eternal Creator Needs No Creation!
Per most traditional conceptions, God is eternal. The rest of us aren’t so lucky.
To the credit of science, or at least its cutting edge, this discipline finally came to grips with its own limitations and mortality nearly a century ago, such as we saw with Heisenberg’s “Uncertainty Theory” from quantum physics.
Not that most scientists have caught up to this fact, much less apply it on a daily basis as they espouse their various theories, or otherwise ever confess their uncertainty to much of anything.
Nonetheless, in that same spirit, I’d hesitate to say that any argument is irrefutable, even if Marshall’s argument is, by all appearances, fairly airtight.
And if it isn’t irrefutable, well then, will someone please step up to refute it?
But nobody has.
However, to play the Devil’s Advocate here, or, if you will, a Dawkins advocate, one could argue that an informational or coded reality needn’t be proven for things to come into existence, because existence simply is what it is, as well as what always has been.
In essence, you could say this is an eternal or eternity-based argument.
Actually, it’s not an argument against Marshal so much as an alternative beginning, that is, minus any actual beginning. Literally.
In other words, someone could propose that if the nature of reality is “informational,” a word that itself can be taken as a necessary counterpart, if not a virtual synonym for “code” (i.e., even if information is the product of codes, well, codes are a product of information, too, because, after all, you couldn’t have a code without information, and you can’t have information without a code).
That is, everything exists either as—or else is founded upon—a base form of energy that expresses itself in arranged and relative patterns, whatever their form and complexity, to which we affix the labels “data” or “information” or “code,” and this is tantamount to saying:
“Well, it’s just the way it is—we don’t know why it is that information is all that there is, and we don’t know how it is that informational being came into existence in the first place (if there ever WAS a first place—I mean, who says there needs to be, and more than that, who could prove it, anyway?), but, hey, code is reality and reality is code, and that makes up the whole of existence, and so, how else would existence express itself other than being what it is?”
In short, per the old chicken-and-egg dilemma, one could argue that we don’t have to debate or choose between believing in some sort of “divine chicken code” that produced “an egg of informational reality” just as we don’t need to believe in the existence of a “divine egg code” that somehow produced a “chicken of informational reality.”
The chickens and the eggs simply always have been and always will be… as far as we know. In fact, to be intellectually honest, the present argument from Informational theory is really a re-statement of ancient Greek philosophical arguments about the existence of an “Uncreated Creator,” but that’s a different story, but I digress.
Frankly, no matter how you scramble the chicken-and-egg combo of information-and-code (or vice versa), they’re both conjoined in a singular entity, namely, consciousness, which is capable of being or producing both (as Vance Socci is quick to point out, ontology requires both).
Meanwhile, if the Creator is consciousness, we might ask what is its original nature?
To that end, a simultaneous advantage yet challenge to Marshall’s theory is that if he’s right, then the original Code-Creating Consciousness that created us can’t have been a mathematical entity, because we’d repeat the chicken-and-egg/infinite regression problem per numbers creating themselves, which wouldn’t be possible without numbers existing in the first place that precede the ensuing numbers, of which, still more numbers must exist prior to that, ad infinitum.
So, while the existence of a non-mathematical Creator not only confirms the Platonic limitations of the primary instrument of modern empiricism sine qua non per its attempt to describe our origins via numbers-based calculations, it also appears to undermine Information Theory, because the Creator might not be a data-based entity, as impossible as this might seem.
To prove my point, I wish I could provide a pound of the Creator’s non-mathematical consciousness, but the above proposition makes sense if the Creator is, indeed, a continuum of everything, which his to say, a kind of eternal animating principle and related force of emanation, simply because ‘everything’ can never be enumerated. It can never be this or that, because… it’s everything!
This insight dovetails with Godel’s Thoerem, which, as any math or physics whiz could tell you, logically proved that no mathematical system can exist without unanswerable questions, and it always takes a bigger system to encompass and expand upon the original.
And, ya’ know, everything is pretty big.
To put it in simpler terms, if God is everything, it can’t be reduced to this or that numbered item (in this sense, you might even say its essence is actually opposed to information or math), save only to the extent that Everything chooses to manifest as a subset of its own panentheistic Self.
In short, God might have created math, but math didn’t create God.
Sorry Artificial Intelligence. The ultimate singularity just ain’t gonna happen.
Demonic Chickens and Deviled Eggs?
Now, should someone balk at this suggestion, our sinister Devil’s Advocate might ignore the above argument and ask, “where and when did you see anything that ISN’T information?”
That is, when have you seen or experienced anything that can be interpreted as being “non-coded,” or else “non informational” or even “anti-informational?”
Even entropy can be seen as a kind of deformational code—which is just a fancy way of saying it’s information in a decayed state of being—and as such, it’s merely one form of energy among an infinite number of other forms of energy.
By the same token, one might ask, why wouldn’t God be seen as an informational code or coded information, too?
And if that’s the case, we really haven’t gotten rid of the chicken-and-egg question as it pertains to this theory, namely, if God is the original and ultimate “code creator” then who created his, her or its code?
From there we’re forced to contemplate an infinite regression that ultimately dispenses with the need for any “ultimate” God and simply asserts that there is information, was information, and as far as we know, there always will be information, amen, as well as its necessary counterpart, namely, code.
But, who knows—maybe I see it that way because I live in the Information Age and I’m just doing my best to survive in this environment.
Of course, along those same lines, one might protest that people see God, entropy, humanity, our precious theories and the rest of reality as being naught but information precisely because we are naught but information ourselves, and so, we’re just staring into our navels.
As such, the famous ‘forbidden’ bias of the “anthropic principle” might be seen as a kind of Cartesian genie of delusion here, in what amounts to an extension of an even deeper “information bias,” the problem being, how might we ever get outside of ourselves to discover anything else?
How on Earth, or how off Earth, do we go about discovering a non-informational reality, and then, what the Heck would that look like?
How would we even begin to process such a reality?
Why, it’s positively irrational (and maybe that’s a clue to said processing, as well as certain divine and magical states of being, but I digress again).
The above should provide cautionary food for thought to all parties to the evolution debate, since there’s an inherent problem with using life-as-we-know-it as a rearview mirror and basis for discovering life-as-it-originally-was, namely, what if the latter is, and was, nothing like the former?
What if on a fundamental level our reality is qualitatively different from whatever reality kick-started us into existence, and since that time, the veil has been rent between us?
Turning Over the Chess Board
Now, I’m not claiming that the above is a particularly satisfying argument, and it might even be dismissed as simply turning over the chessboard, so to speak—not so much winning an argument but bringing it all to a false end. And here I say ‘false’, because the defender of the above argument might object:
“Turn over the chess board all you like, but it’s merely an empty—and brief—metaphorical victory, because reality is nothing but a chess board of information (which even you admit). For that matter, the same can be said about metaphors and language itself, which is a code, so you’re going to be forced to play chess anyway, because… that’s life, pal. Nothing else exists other than chess.”
In other words, perhaps reality is nothing but informational pieces moving on the chessboard of life. Beh-dee-beh-dee-beh-dee… That’s all folks!
If so, turning over the chessboard would be one of an infinite number of ways to play chess—one of an infinite number of ways for information to express itself or relate to other data, because that’s what information is and that’s what it does.
But if that’s just the way it is, and that’s all there is, then aren’t we talking about this informational state of being as a kind of double for the environment? Thus, if the informational environment is what it is and does what it does, and thereby selects its winners and losers as it might, aren’t we back to Natural Selection?
Ahh, but then there’s a fly in this environmental ointment!
Let the Prison Riots Begin!
See, as for how this objection relates to evolution, now we have to presume that information has some inherent bias towards neg-entropy—that is, it has a bias towards organizing itself into ever more complex and higher orders of informational being.
As such, a big problem here is teleology, and perhaps even an end game, since the argument seems to presume that information has an agenda, or dare I say, a higher purpose, and then we have to ask, where did this bias towards “evolution” and a higher state of being come from?
Moreover, how do we reconcile this with the apparent royal reign of entropy in the reality that we now know and currently occupy, which suggests that things are inclined to decay to a ground state of being?
You know, the “scientific fact” that milk never un-spills in our reality; eggs never un-crack; and the arrow of time always points in one direction—forward.
And if that’s the case, where did that Big Bang of a neg-entropic agenda for the existence of complex life come from?
It sure smells like there’s some sort of Creator or Grand Designer in the middle of all of this, or should I say, at the beginning of all this (and maybe a few Archontic devils, too), who, for whatever reason—boredom, an inherently creative divine nature, you name it—wants to see things change and/or rise and fall, and vice versa, whereas, why wouldn’t information be content to stay satisfied with remaining in a ground state of being forever and always?
Again, one can say, “well, that’s just the way it is.”
Maybe.
I can’t say. I’m certainly not equipped with a perfect lens on the past, present or future, and I certainly won’t claim to have all the answers.
But I do have a gnostic code, one that reflects a bias toward something better.
Meanwhile, whenever you have a problem and all someone can do to address it is say, “hey, it is what it is—just accept it!” you start to sound suspiciously like a bad parent who refuses to explain things to your curious toddlers.
Small wonder that when they grow up, they’ll eventually make up their own gods (otherwise, someone please explain the worship of these entities called Kardashians?), that is, if you refuse to even discuss the possibility of god-like forces at work in their reality.
Therefore, based on the essential reasons and data offered here, as well as a decidedly gnostic intuition, I, for one, lean strongly in the direction of Perry Marshall and his case for Evolution 2.0.
By no means is that understanding a panacea for all that ails us. Far from it.
For Gnostics, there’s the thorny problem of evil and the ever-vexing question per why and how a good God would let such an ugly evolution take place? How did the original divine spark allow our reality to degrade into a prison planet? Why does the Code seem so defective on our plane of reality?
And why would the Code Creator ever hand over the Keys to his Kingdom to someone like Charles Darwin?
Again, I can’t say that I have the answers. But I do have the aforementioned Gnostic code, and as long as we have a divine spark within us, which implies an ability to collaborate in re-writing the code of our reality, I say…
Let the Prison Riots Begin!
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