Tegmark’s Life 3.0 & Extended Phenotype-Epigenetic Dynamic

True, vast majority of Tegmark’s book is not only speculative but excessively so. Nonetheless, the core idea captured in the book’s title is a great lens for looking at macroevolution.

Paraphrasing, Life 1.0 was biology controlling the design of both the hardware and software of life. Life 2.0 with humans had culture increasingly designing the software with memetic learning and a little tweaking of the hardware. Now we are embarking on Life 3.0 where both the hardware and software are consciously designed. He make the case that, as information processing interpretation of evolution, this sequence should be universal (excluding events that abort it, of course).

The point of interest is that there is no escaping the difference between Life 1.0 and 2.0. Somehow blind evolution evolved in a manner that is seeking ways to be less blind. It would seem that, at root, there must be a correlation between the extended phenotype and epigenetics to produce the Life 2.0 outcome (e.g., integration of sensory systems and or as Kahneman has described).

There also is little doubt life 3.0 is coming fast. Thus, the entire sequence exhibits some form of teleological trajectory or directionality of forces (e.g., entropy, negentropy and or complexity) extruding biological evolution. So the issue is how Life 1.0 evolved memetic Life 2.0 evolution. Depending on the scale employed to view this evolution, there is a Darwinian or nonlinear evolution taking place. So, again, from a Darwinian perspective, this seems to reflect some extended phenotype-epigenetic dynamic.

That is what I meant by pulling forward

Thoughts?

Doc Huston