The theory (I’ll use the older term, ‘law’) of evolution by natural selection is different from other scientific laws, in that it describes a mechanism for the emergence of order in living things, without a designer, i.e. without a particular rule, but a mechanism to self-select rules. If the idea of evolution by natural selection is extended rigorously (not merely by analogy) to all interacting systems not just living systems, then we would have a law that explains how other laws emerge, a law of laws.
The law of evolution by natural selection is such a fundamental idea that it would be surprising and unusual if it applied only to living things. Perhaps it could even be generalized to explain the emergence of all things, including the physical laws that make them. Given that human beings are part of the universe that we attempt to understand, the idea that there might be a law that itself governs the laws of the world we live and which resides within the universe itself, rather than needing an external force such as a designer, would be the only possible scientific way of describing the world meta-physically. In other words we can’t describe the box we are in any more than we can imagine what is beyond the universe, unless the design of the box is within it..
There are two things required for evolution by natural selection, amongst living things: imperfect inheritance and a constrained environment.
Both the organism and the environment are systems, one happens to be nested within the other, and the organism is by definition an open system. This nesting can be recursive, so the environment can also be an open system (e.g mitocondria within the environment of a cell, within the environment of a brain, within the environment of a human, etc.).
Inheritance implies reproduction of an organism from one generation to the next. In terms of information flow this is a high level effect. What if there were a general law that applied to any information flow. i.e. laws would emerge via information flow with: imperfect fidelity (noise) and imperfect storage (an open system).
Now we have a model consisting of interconnected systems with variable isolation and noise.
It is possible to imagine that the variables for noise and isolation are related. For example, consider a particular open system as having an imperfect membrane, rather than a direct input channel. It is possible that this membrane could have its permeability adjusted such that it both allowed information to flow in and out, but altered the information in unpredictable ways as it passed into the membrane. Normally we would consider the mechanism within the membrane to be performing a different, predictable manipulation of the input, however the model can be further simplified so that there is only one type of component, ‘information processing tubes’, wired up to create an information processing entity.
To summarize: Randomly created, interconnected systems with membranes between which have variable parameters for the quantity and quality of information flow between them will eventually lead to persistent structures (heredity) which obeyed evolution by natural selection.
These variably permeable ‘membranes’ systems can be shown to be the result of any non-deterministic cellular automaton capable of operating under a particular set of rules which allow it to represent a Universal Turing Machine (the non-determinism allows for the cycling through all possible rules).
Any information flow between two systems where there is noise, will produce random effects making it non-deterministic. Since it can be shown that there is noise between all sub-systems that interact within the same enclosing system (e.g. the universe), the necessary uncertainty and probabilistic nature of information exchange at the quantum level means that these ‘variably permeable’ membranes are a property of all information flow.
Evolution by natural selection is a high level manifestation of the mechanism which governs all information flow and all interaction in the universe. This mechanism is a property of mathematics, rather than an empirically observed phenomenon.
Candidate laws:
Where information can be exchanged it will tend to be exchanged.
(Note, this cannot be phrased as ‘will be exchanged’, since if the universe is non-deterministic, then one message from the range of candidates, will be exchanged at a time).
Time is neither continuous, nor absolute, it is a measure of the rate of change of state between systems. Without message exchanges between systems there is no flow of time.
Information is relative:
A bit can comprise multiple bits when viewed by another system.
A bit is a measure of the relative similarity between two systems.
This way of looking at things removes the paradox where a system of maximal disorder is said to contain the most information.
For example a universe whose state is represented by: 1111….1 is very highly ordered but contains no information, whereas a universe with maximal entropy,perhaps represented by a single prime: 101110….1 could not be determined to be prime and therefore could not have any accurate information abut it, extracted.
At the universal level, a state of maximal disorder could not be ‘understood’ by any other subsystem (since there would be only one system, containing all the bits). For most cases, messages with very high information content are indistinguishable from noise.
(music, taste etc.)