Sublime

We must become a spiritual partner of science, using our vast experience—millennia of philosophy, personal inquiry, meditation, soul-searching—to help humanity build a moral framework and ensure that the coming technologies will unify, illuminate, and raise us up…rather than destroy us.”

complexity, increasing differentiation/integration, increasing organization/structuration, increasing relative autonomy, increasing telos.

this large bulk of work demonstrates that indeed our proteins could have been made with a lower number of different amino acids,

Darwinian evolution uniquely solves the problem of life’s statistical improbability, because it works cumulatively and gradually. It really does broker a legitimate traverse from primordial simplicity to eventual complexity – and it is the only known theory capable of doing so. Human engineers can make complex things by design, but the whole point

there is no need to go outside the universe and identify a supernatural agent to account for our appearance in it, since there are good, entirely natural explanations available.

What if the emergence of life was the inevitable result of a universe that naturally and ceaselessly generates complexity and information? If that were the case, it would be more accurate to describe life as a regularity rather than an anomaly—not a fluke but an imperative.

Complex products are not just arrangements of atoms that perform functions; rather, they are ordered arrangements of atoms that originated as imagination.

In other words, a natural pressure to minimize free energy and produce entropy spontaneously creates an ordered structure with an objective function.

may be useful to divide the “road map” to the minimal cell into different milestones of increasing complexity.