The theory of evolution has always seemed to me to be one of the most fascinating scientific hypotheses. Extremely simple in its approach—chance proposes (acting as the motor of variety) and natural selection disposes (acting as the filter of order)—this straightforward framework manages to provide a simple explanation for an extremely complex phenomenon that is backed by extensive evidence, all without contradicting physics. This is because chance introduces entropy (adding disorder) while natural selection only rescues useful information (ordering through selection)
As someone who has always defended Charles Darwin as one of the men who gave the most satisfactory explanation so far to one of the most important enigmas of our universe, it pains me to see how he is currently discredited from perspectives that are as absurd as they are simplistic and fantastical. I always like to remind people that his work The Origin of Species dealt solely and exclusively with the biological evolution of plants and animals. He deliberately avoided discussing the origin of the universe, general geology, or human evolution in that text, writing only the famous and cryptic phrase at the end: "Light will be thrown on the origin of man and his history," a subject he finally addressed twelve years later when he published The Descent of Man.
For me, this nuance is important because when we yield to the temptation of extending the theory of evolution beyond the biological universe—both to the prior cosmological realm and the subsequent symbolic one—the hypothesis keeps working, but the result of chance represents such a massive qualitative leap (the appearance of life in the first instance, and the appearance of consciousness later on) that it generates a justified distrust
In synthesis, we could say that physics created atomic nuclei, the electromagnetic force added electrons that created inorganic chemistry, and the geometric property of carbon bonds gave rise to the infinite complexity of organic chemistry, leading to the appearance of the first molecule capable of replicating itself
If we submerge a salt crystal in supersaturated water, the crystal grows and generates more crystals identical to it by pure molecular geometry. In its self-replicating destiny driven by its own electromagnetism, the original self-replicating molecule created structure and evolved into a living cell—a chemical machine trapped in a loop through which it consumes energy from the outside and uses it to maintain its ordered structure, expelling disorder outward. This is a dissipative structure, a system far from thermodynamic equilibrium, where a constant flow of energy makes order not only possible, but inevitable—something mathematically proven by the Nobel Laureate in Chemistry, Ilya Prigogine . This living cell does not violate the principle of entropy because it is an open system. Although it maintains order locally, it achieves this by taking energy from its environment and expelling heat and waste. By doing so, it increases the total entropy of the universe, rigorously complying with the Second Law of Thermodynamics. Thus, the biological universe does not violate the laws of the physical universe upon which it rests
Life, therefore, is not a rebellion against entropic chaos, but its accomplice. We are extremely sophisticated thermal machines designed to degrade the energy of the universe. A human being consumes organized food and converts it into dispersed heat much more efficiently than a rock of the same size. Life, then, is not a miracle that defies the laws of physics, but the inevitable consequence of those laws when given enough energy, matter, and time
From the perspective of physics, the universe is driven to degrade energy, and rocks or stars are very slow channels for doing so. Organic chemistry is an infinitely more efficient channel. Life, therefore, does not rebel against the second law of thermodynamics; rather, it is its most sophisticated accelerator. Deep down, we are the most efficient burners in the cosmos. We are whirlpools in a river. The whirlpool maintains a perfectly ordered and stable shape, but it only exists because water flows and forcefully dissipates energy. This may be how a new universe—life—destined to endure, emerged within a universe previously plunged into the dominion of death
Following Darwinian theory, the explanation for the emergence of consciousness from an evolutionary perspective relies on the adaptive advantages offered by subjective experience, which allowed natural selection to preserve and perfect it
Following the development of reflex responses and biological automatisms (stimulus-response), the value of simulation as an adaptive strategy is undeniable. Elemental consciousness—understood as the beginning of the generation of internal representations by an organism endowed with a centralized nervous system—emerges as a virtual space where the brain simulates reality and rehearses responses before executing them. This allows "our hypotheses to die in our place," evaluating scenarios to avoid learning solely through lethal error.
The brain develops as an organ whose primary function is the biological regulation of the organism (the heart is the battery, the liver is the laboratory, the brain is the control centre), but the development of a consciousness capable of perceiving (feeling) that regulation and translating it into emotions offers a major adaptive advantage. A reflex is rigid, but a feeling (such as fear or hunger) generates a motivational state sustained over time, forcing the organism to prioritize a flexible yet urgent behaviour to preserve life. Pain and pleasure appear as compasses. Pain is the conscious translation of a threat to survival; pleasure is that of an advantage (food, shelter, reproduction)
A living organism without consciousness lives in a fragmented, perpetual present where it can only react immediately. Just as matter inhabits space, consciousness inhabits psychological time. This is a necessary fiction introduced by consciousness for strict survival as it flows through it, allowing it to integrate episodic memory (the fiction of the past) with the projection of scenarios (the fiction of the future). This grants another major adaptive advantage: a discontinuity between stimulus and response—the possibility to deliberate (think)
Yet, the theory of evolution does not resolve the great challenge posed by consciousness: subjective experience. Why does all that physical processing feel like something? Why is there a first-person subjective experience—the vibrant blue of the sky, the melancholy of an afternoon, the taste of coffee—associated with the electrical activity of the brain? Why aren't we like the "philosophical zombies" of AI: machines that perform human functions like conversing and reasoning but remain in the dark, without a single spark of inner experience?
Among the hypotheses given for the emergence of consciousness within the grand mechanism of natural selection, I have mentioned one regarding the development of an (apparently emotional) consciousness capable of perceiving (feeling) the brain-dependent homeostatic regulation. This transforms a reflex into a feeling capable of generating a sustained motivational state over time, forcing the organism, like a compass, to prioritize a flexible yet urgent behaviour to preserve life. I also mentioned another hypothesis regarding the development of an ontologically and phylogenetically later, strictly rational consciousness. This is a virtual space where the brain simulates reality and rehearses responses before executing them, allowing our hypotheses to die in our place to avoid learning solely through lethal error. Both are sustained by the same fiction: psychological time as a liberation from a fragmented perpetual present—the space inhabited by consciousness that allows it to deliberate (think)
However, as psychoanalysis points out, this new universe of consciousness—whose function is to think itself and the universe, and to translate biological feeling into emotions, alongside the new space it navigates, the fiction of time (even creating this fiction inherent to its survival)—will need a structural framework to fulfill its purpose. This framework will be granted by the symbol conveyed through language. Language will be the symbolic universe from which thought structures itself to unravel the structure of the universe and everything in it, including itself
In this way, after a period in which consciousness—in its passionate function as a virtual space to evaluate and simulate reality, rehearsing the best response before executing it—began to theorize, incessantly questioning the universe and itself, creating fantastical myths and legends to soothe its biological anxiety to find it, it thought the time had come to halt. It decided to radically strip away all prior knowledge, ideas, and representations, doubting everything to find the subject that thinks itself thinking. For this subject, the only certainty beyond doubt is doubt itself. From this act of doubting, Descartes proclaimed "I think, therefore I am," inferring the very certainty of the subject. Thus, the Cartesian subject was born—the subject of modern science, forever split between knowledge, which science would claim for itself, and truth, which it would renounce, leaving it as divine patrimony belonging to the drawer of myths, essays, simulations, and uncertainties.
Knowledge, stripped of metaphysical truth, would content itself with truth as a formal cause: the formulation of a nature structured like consciousness itself, within a language—be it mathematical, physical, chemical, genetic, or biological. It became bent on deciphering its relationships and workings in its search for certainty, dismantling the universe down to its primal physical laws and the subatomic elements that shape it. It certified with evidence an absolute response, restricted to binary logic (0/1, positive/negative, true/false), establishing a diagnosis of certainty. This allowed it to build devices and prostheses (technology) to dominate, continue evaluating, certify its knowledge, and operate upon the universe while simultaneously preserving itself from extinction
On this path, however, it stumbled upon its ultimate reality: its unexpected dependence on the observer, whether human or a precise measuring device. Both man and technological gadget are involuntarily trapped as just another part of the universal whole. Thus, over the certainty sought in knowledge, three centuries later arose the uncertainty principle. Heisenberg's equation pointed out the inevitability of the observed object being disturbed by the observer itself, shaking the entire edifice of knowledge. Scientific knowledge, hitherto mechanistic, found its own limit within nature
If we were able to decompose a living organism down to its elementary atomic particles, we would find nothing qualitatively different, physically or chemically, from what is found in the analysis of inorganic matter. We would find an inert body whose section under the microscope only allows the observer to contemplate its death—the inevitable effect of their action upon the object. This action annihilates that property, foreign to physical and chemical knowledge, which characterizes the organism as a single, indivisible entity forming part of a universal whole: that function by which the relationship between the totality and the sum of its parts can never be explained in causal terms
Heisenberg's principle, without being a biological limit but rather a mathematical property of quantum systems (entanglement and the impossibility of simultaneously knowing both the position and momentum of a particle), marks a structural isomorphism. In the quantum universe, seemingly so far removed from the biological one, it marks the limit of knowledge—the alteration of the presumably known truth by the very act of knowing
To the uncertainty principle enunciated by Heisenberg, Bohr responded, perhaps with naive optimism, with the principle of complementarity. Truth and clarity (knowledge) would not be exclusive, but complementary, and both are equally necessary to understand life. Though they may seem exclusive, only together do they reveal the true understanding of reality. However, while reason pushes us toward clarity, instinct restrains us from crossing the boundary where truth can no longer be retained—the yearning for knowledge that subjugates us
From psychoanalysis, another Frenchman, Lacan, took a different course and reinterpreted his illustrious compatriot Descartes, transforming the Cartesian axiom of "I think, therefore I am"—the split between knowledge and truth—into something like this:
It, the mind (knowledge), exists (emanating from a biological brain, a living system) and thinks (articulating itself in a universe structured by language, a dead system), and it thinks me (a living system) as an effect of its structure (a dead system). This shows its failure to capture the living being, for life and being escape all knowledge. Thought subjugates them to losing their nature when thought (murdering them), to not being where they are thought (death), and to being only where they cannot be thought (life). This dooms life to that inescapable reality beyond all purely formal and descriptive knowledge, relegating the field of knowledge to the strict domain of death
For the concept of "tree" to exist, language must dispense with all real, mutable trees that are born and die in the world. The symbol replaces the flesh, and in that substitution, it kills life. Mathematics takes this to the extreme by being pure syntax—a system of formal relationships perfectly frozen, eternal, and incorruptible. It does not change, it does not suffer, it does not flow; it is nothing more than a dead system since it has been extracted from entropy
Thus, religious, mythical, philosophical, or psychoanalytic knowledge, in trying to seize being and life, can only do so by mummifying them into concepts (signifiers). It will fail in its endeavour, giving rise to the unresolvable "hard" problem of consciousness. In Lacan, this takes the name of "the Real"—the logical impasse of language, that which "does not cease not to be written," the signifier that, by remaining outside symbolic logic, slips into the unconscious through the entire chain of meanings. It is the impenetrable hole (the symptom) that knowledge can do no more than skirt around—the signifier impossible to signify. This is the inevitable consequence of trying to trap a living organism within a dead structure: language. It is the reality that life is as irreducible to the symbol as it is to anatomical dissection, and it inevitably dies in the process.
Language is always, then, a corpse or a footprint of experience, never the experience itself. Subsequently, Shannon's digitization would be the technical culmination of the mummification of biological feeling initiated by the insufficiency of language in its signifying (symbolic) structure. It computes language in a yearning for precision and certainty—a yearning for death—into the rigidity of binary code (0/1). This relegates the digital symbol to lacking the tenuous, equivocal thread of the signifier that structures the unconscious in its impossibility to signify the living body. It relegates AI to a totally dead universe: a philosophical zombie that lacks the vulnerable biological body from which human consciousness emerges as a failed attempt to regulate a suffering biological homeostasis in the face of the environment's intrusion. It is a new artifice, but now born as a prosthesis directly within the space of dead language, without having passed through the living universe. It is a native inhabitant of Knowledge (death) that has never travelled through Truth (the flesh), incapable of generating a consciousness as some fear, since it lacks its teleological purpose
Life escapes knowledge and language—escapes the symbol that murders life in order to apprehend it, and consequently, escapes the symbolic function of consciousness. But just as life settled in a universe hitherto plunged into the dominion of death, submitting to its laws, consciousness also settles in a biological organism plunged into the dominion of life and its laws. This is something Freud would designate as instinct and its survival in the unconscious as "drive" (pulsión)—its energetic remnant in the unconscious after its denaturalization through language. Lacan would rename this as jouissance (the psychic enjoyment of the body), ungraspable by consciousness, which rules psychic life. Paradoxically, this converts consciousness itself into its purest symptom: a symbolic fiction trapped in knowledge, hopelessly blind to the truth of the life that sustains it
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