[Dr Jude Currivan]

Dear forum members,

I posted this reply in early January but due to website problems it was duplicated and then completely removed – hey ho. So I'm posting again in hope that this time all is OK with the site admin.

It seems to me that the schism is between Duane's paradigm of the Living Universe and one which refutes it, lies at least in a significant degree between a definition of ‘living’ as essentially the entirety of a conscious Cosmos and a definition of ‘living’ in solely biological terms; with the Universe thus non-living in its entirety.

Duane uses the term living in an all-encompassing way. His fundamental premise, which I agree with, is that our Universe is essentially conscious and evolves as a unified and coherent whole.

We both describe consciousness in the widest sense whilst acknowledging that progressively self-reflective levels of it are embodied through evolutionary processes in increasing complexities; including but not limited to, biological forms.

A developing paradigm of leading edge science across many fields of research and progressively supported by numerous discoveries and experimental results, may, I feel, offer a way of reconciling the two view-points of a ‘living’ versus a ‘non-living’ Universe. Its basic premise is that:
 * Not only is information more fundamental than energy-matter and space-time but indeed all physical reality is informational; expressing itself energetically and entropically. Our universe is literally in-formed.
 * In-formation expressed as energy-matter is universally conserved; in-formation expressed as space-time is entropic.
 * All the in-formation embodied by our Universe is embedded on the holographic boundary of space-time with one bit encoded in each Planck scale area.
 * From the minute Planck scale and extremely ordered beginning of space-time, the entropic process that is the life-cycle of our Universe thus requires that space must expand as ever more in-formation is expressed through its evolution.
 * Not only is the ‘arrow’ of time an entropic imperative from the Big Bang (due to its initial ordered state), but time itself is the entropic accumulation of in-formation throughout our Universal life-cycle.
 * Whilst within space-time, the maximum light-speed of information transfer ensures the preservation of causality our Universe is also innately and nonlocally interconnected, evolving as a coherent, integral and essentially intelligent entity.
 * It is finite in both space and time – yet its finite life-cycle is played out within an infinite and eternal multi-versal cosmic plenum.
 * Our Universe was also incredibly fine-tuned from its beginning of space-time, informationally embodying the ‘instructions’ ‘recipe’ and ‘ingredients’ to evolve progressively complex structures and eventual biological and increasingly self-aware life-forms.
 * Physical reality is played out holographically at all scales of existence; not only throughout the ‘natural’ world but also collective biological and human behaviours.

I would suggest that this emerging perspective of an informationally all-pervasive and holographically expressed Universe may, as it continues to develop, offer a resolution between the two world-views.

Such a Universe, that is innately in-formed and essentially evolving as an integral entity, surely calls us to expand the definition of ‘living’ way beyond its hitherto limited biological expression to encompass the entire nature of physical reality.

With warmest regards and all best wishes,

Jude
Dr Jude Currivan
http://www.judecurrivan.com

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