7. Evolution

According to the current theory of evolution, the founder of which is considered to be Charles Darwin, organisms change by chance, pass these changes on to their offspring and a blind selection process ensures that only those life forms best adapted to their environment reproduce. Adapting to the environment also means asserting oneself against competitors, i.e. overcoming "weaker" structures, mastering them. The losers in this game are eliminated. This theory has been of great help to scientists in understanding the origin of species, the development of living structures and functions. It provides many answers but leaves important questions unanswered. The theory of evolution begins with life. The first traces of life that have been found so far are about 3.8 billion years old. But by then the universe was already a good 10 billion years old. Why was life created? Why did something emerge that had to adapt to an environment? Didn't anything have to adjust to anything before that? Since in evolution everything is based on chance, without any plan, there is neither a sense nor a goal to which it leads. Nature is just teeming chaos of molecules and chance decides if, when and where physical and chemical reactions take place. However, every conscious being who walks through nature with open eyes must have doubts about this interpretation.

Life is not separated from the environment, life is a part of the environment. Evolution adapts nothing to the environment, evolution shapes the environment. It's not being against each other, it's being with each other. Evolution is not an adaptation, not a struggle of a selfish gene against the rest of the world. Evolution is optimization, is teamwork. Life was not created by competition, life was created by symbiosis. Symbiogenesis unites small, diverse lumps of molecules into large, complex structures. Living beings tend to connect and to form a new, larger whole on a higher level of organization. Nothing is really ever extinct. Forms have disappeared and have changed into new forms. The Information has passed from one form to another.

The term evolution comes from the Latin evolvere
and means "to roll out", "to develop". Today, this is primarily understood to mean biological evolution. But this development has not just begun with life. The starting point, the seed, was the Big Bang, the beginning of our universe. This was the first IPO and the evolution is the development of consciousness, the constant expansion, and improvement of consciousness processes. Everything has arisen from consciousness. Everything's IPO.

The entire development from the Big Bang to the first living beings was anything but self-evident. Everything depended on a fine-tuning of all natural constants which determine the interaction of the elementary forces. Even the slightest deviations from this would have prevented the formation of stars, the formation of heavy elements such as carbon and thus the formation of planets and life. This fine-tuning of natural constants is one of the greatest mysteries of the natural sciences. The physicists assume that the values of these natural constants resulted completely by chance at the Big Bang. However, the probability of such an exact match was extremely low. Just as the seed of a tree already contains all the information about the structure and shape of the future, a fully grown tree, the Big Bang already contained all the information about the future universe. It is not by chance that an oak tree seed becomes an oak tree, only the shape, the growth is random, depending on the environment surrounding it. Living structures that are capable of learning and experiencing did not come about by chance. Their development was planned from the beginning. There are no structures that are separate from the environment and have to stand their ground in it. Everything is a single process, everything belongs to the environment, everything follows a common path, everything is connected. Through IPO, the "in-form" has evolved to generate even more information, knowledge, and insight. These are the stages of evolution, the levels of consciousness. Each of these new levels is characterized by more information, more knowledge, more insight. Evolution is shaping "stupid" matter and processes into increasingly intelligent information processing structures. Evolution is an increase in information.

Life always comes from within and cannot be brought into something from the outside. It was not dead matter that accidentally created life and consciousness, but the consciousness process has worked towards the creation of life from the beginning, i.e. with the Big Bang, by gradually creating the conditions for it. Life is a step on the path of consciousness. Not matter is the primary, but consciousness. It is the consciousness that creates matter and tells it what to do, not the other way around.

When we are born, our freedom of choice is very limited. As we develop, we gain information, knowledge, and insight. We become members of communities that share information. This makes us smarter and more intelligent. The more we have knowledge and insight, the greater our possibilities, our potential and thus our freedom of decision. The aim of consciousness is to increase the available potential by increasing information, knowledge and insight in order to finally reach omniscience, unlimited freedom of decision and thus to return to the starting point, the source. The way to get there is constant development, is evolution.

There are a goal and a plan, but the way to get there is undefined. This leaves room for mutations and a selection process. Evolution is the feedback/feedforward process between the potential and the classical world, the virtuality and the reality. Evolution is neither deterministic nor pure coincidence. It is the indeterminacy of quantum physics.