To rephrase the question more broadly: How did there get to be so much meaningful information in the world? There are three distinct dimensions of meaning in everything we experience – human, biological and physical. Each can be seen as a recursive system that repeatedly generates contexts in which things and events can make a meaningful difference, by contributing to new situations where further possibilities can arise. Currently only one of these three natural technologies is well understood – since Darwin, we’ve had deep insight into the world of living things and how they evolve, though we still struggle with exactly what it means to be “alive”. But we have no such clarity about the underlying structure of the physical world, or about the functioning of our own conscious minds. My effort here is to address this lack by emphasizing the recursive functionality of meaning as the common element in human communication, biological reproduction and quantum measurement. Though these processes operate in very different ways with very different results, they’re all able to develop finely-tuned complexity for the same reason – through natural selection, they generate meaningful information by accident.
Conrad Dale Johnson