Monday, February 21, 2011

The consequences of my most distinguishing experience.

Some doubt is in my mind about me starting a new species.

The event which most distinguishes me from others is my passing through an s in time. This is not an event of biological making, but of physical. Other instances may have occurred in the universe and may have happened to other chemical species than DNA. In fact, the event that occurred to me may have resided in some partial component of my molecules, hosted by the complete DNA as a platform within the universal environment, of the surface of the earth, the earth itself, the solar system, the galaxy, etc.. An s in time is a matter of all branches of the state variable of the universe following from one point in time. It occurs, I might venture, when some single particle of matter gets backed into a corner of mixed improbabilities. The circumstances around such an event must express these improbabilities in a continuous way, from the immediate vicinity of the particle into the space around it. The balance of all possible outcomes is so managed in the physical foundation of the particle that the sum of all these minor improbabilities gets converted into the single improbability of an s in time, as a solution to all the many minor improbabilities at once. Evidently such a situation is not favored by any particular density of matter, and can occur with equal probability in empty space or space containing aggregations of matter into stars and planets.

The outcome is a change in the effects of accumulation of matter. These effects are apparently not felt much by life, which is occupied with business in all its myriad physical contexts for their impact on biological drives. The physical effects are however deeply felt by all matter, in all physical states, these being the solid, liquid, gaseous, and plasma. Life has its characteristic rate of discovery of physical processes and this rate is not changed by an s in time which occurs in one place. So the result of the s in time is highly discriminative between its host molecule and the rest of the DNA population, which must wait for the result to spread into effects that can be detected by biological molecules.

The origin of life 3.5 billion years ago was a rare event. An s in time is comparably rare. Life seems to have no signature in astronomically observable effects. Its rarity is of questionable value to anything other than life itself. An s in time is quite different.