So let's talk about what life is.
Buckminster Fuller said life is anti-entropic.
In the universe, you have the second law of thermodynamics.
You have entropy everywhere.
Entropy is breaking everything into its simpler constituents.
Entropy is the playing out of process, breaking things down.
But then you have this thing called life.
In this Goldilocks zone, this phenomenon of life, life
emerges.
It self-organizes.
It's almost like life resides in a part of the universe that
is self-organizing towards complexity.
Its complexity bootstraps on its own complexity.
Single-celled organisms emerge in the biochemistry
of a planet like the Earth.
It lives in the Goldilocks zone.
These single-celled organisms clump together
into multicellular organisms.
These multi-celled organisms eventually become primates.
These primates then get caught in self-awareness.
They start to self-perceive.
Then these primates start to imagine future possibilities.
They start planning.
A mind emerges.
A feral minds turns into a tool, as Kevin Kelly says.
They can then think with purpose and deliberation.
Then we spill over the creations of our minds into the tools.
And then we engage in feedback loops with those tools
to further extend our creative possibilities.
It's fascinating because it seems
there's a process of sort of a self-organization of emergence
that's happening here.
It's like these things are coming together,
and they're creating transcendent effects.
They're exhibiting transcendent effects.
Minds, brains-- these things seem
to be greater than the sum of their parts.
It's when you have higher level order from lower level
organization, this emergence.
When birds enter swarms, there's no leader,
there's nobody telling all the other birds
how to get into these formations.
But it seems to be self-organizing.
And we know that we are made of atoms.
Those atoms clump together into cells.
The cells clump together into organs.
Those organs are clumped together into us.
And we create tools, and we wire each other mind
to mind communication.
We create a gaia global brain.
There's a global brain itself, part
of the biological global grid, nervous system of nature.
And those two things breathing, thinking,
the think stratum of the universe.
The universe wakes up.