The Science of Destiny

Until recently, individual lives were said to be the end product of a series of chemical accidents, the current culmination by happenstance of a long chain of random mechanistic, chemical events. Life was held to have begun as an extremely unlikely statistical fluke—a vanishingly unlikely event brought about by the random coming together of chemicals forming the first chemical building blocks of life, which then started catalyzing themselves into ongoing replication. Every one of us—and indeed the whole biosphere—were held to be, millions of years on, the current outcome of this process. But this erstwhile reductionist view has evolved, broadly leaving us with two new alternative views of who we are. A first view is that we are the Universe’s apex dissipative structures, brought forth by a meaningless Universe blindly beholden to the laws of mathematics, tasked with helping the Universe best conform to these laws. But life is information, and the new physics shows that there is much more to information than was once thought. Life may thus be richer than mere dissipative structures, and therefrom the destiny of sentient beings more complex than that of mere temporary structures. Tentatively exploring further down that road, we encounter many of the questions that were raised before. Do such questions make sense in the light of current science? Should the universe not be entirely meaningless and blind, what does it say about destiny? And why are so many destinies so tragic?