Free The Ravenous Brain: How the New Science of Consciousness Explains Our Insatiable Search for Meaning by Daniel Bor Page B

evolution, and probably helped create genes, DNA, and even life.

BREEDING CHEMICAL COMPLEXITY AND REBELLIOUS OFFSPRING
     
    Although there is a paucity of evidence to support the specific details of the origins of life, broad general comments can still be usefully made. In whatever location gave birth to life, there would have been a rich chemical soup of molecules. A small subset of these might have been capable of making copies of themselves from simple chemical reactions. (A surprising range of self-assembling non-life molecules have in fact been discovered and even technologically exploited.)
    Multiply this tapestry of chemical activity by hundreds of millions of years of random interactions, and there will inevitably be a large variability in the qualities of all these different types of self-replicating micro-objects. Some molecules will require less energy and resources to generate copies, and these copies will be more faithful versions of the original, and more robust to potentially dramatic environmental changes.
    One or two chemical forms may by chance be stupendously, ruthlessly good at making faithful replicas. In a sense, this is the first purchase point for evolution, even though there are as yet no life-forms.
    Now, rapidly, there will be a thinning out of possibilities—all inefficient non-life replicators will lose the race to the resources and disappear, and the superior chemical copiers will dominate. The new battle is between these thoroughbred survivors. The active fight for energy and chemicals, even at this early pre-life stage, is an evolutionary process, because the main ingredients are already present: a vibrant competition for limited resources, on a superficial level, between different forms of chemical objects—and, more essentially, between different “ideas” about how to maintain one’s shape and make copies—which the chemical details of these proto-creatures encapsulate.
    For instance, it’s a “bad idea” to be a great replicator dependent on potassium abundance when there’s usually none of it nearby. There’s no point requiring sunlight to maintain your shape when your habitat is normally in pitch darkness. There’s also, more generally, no point having a chemical makeup that requires huge quantities of energy to replicate when energy is sparse, especially if rivals are around. Success as measured by a burgeoning population in the primordial soup is predicated on maintaining a chemical composition that reflects or tracks the environment most closely—what resources are readily available, what’s the best way to extract energy from the local world, what environmental changes are likely to occur that may threaten many chemical reactions and that one may need to be protected against, and so on.
    (At this stage, I should stress, I’m not assuming any consciousness whatsoever in any organism except for humans—terms like “beliefs” and “ideas” are meant as a kind of shorthand to describe creatures that internally represent a certain informational perspective about the world, but without any requirements for awareness of those representations.)
    In this pre-life arms race, these close analogies to micro-beliefs about the environment, as stored in the shape of a chemical self-replicating object, are critical for survival. So it’s natural to assume that those objects that somehow represent the world more accurately, with greater detail, will carry an advantage. Indeed, the key reason that life might have evolved from simpler non-life equivalents is that non-life could not have developed the complexity of physical structure, or, very closely related to this, the extent of information storage, that organic life as we know it easily can.
    Let me illustrate with a schematic example. Imagine there are three primordial copying objects, Alice, Beth, and Claire, all close to an active volcanic vent. Alice has stored the information that this precise location equals resources ad