The four fundamental laws of nature define our understanding of the world in terms of its physical properties: gravity, electromagnetism and the weak and strong nuclear forces. These forces do not explain everything, and many physics theorists believe this is because the forces are still incompletely understood, or that the properties of the universe are more subtle. This leads many physicists to believe that there is a coming breakthrough in understanding the physical properties of the universe, that will more accurately describe the universe and predict its behavior.
There are however many properties of nature that are not accommodated within the physical laws of nature, and there is no reason to expect that they ever will be. The properties of biological and ecological systems, for example, are often cited by creationists as such examples. They claim that evolution is only an theory or idea and is simply a convenient categorization of the historical properties of the world (the historical phyla of species reflects a change in species over time, but the innovation of new morphology in nature is not accommodated, for example).
| Physical Materialists |
—Physical World— | Creationists / Intelligent Design |
I would like to propose an alternative viewpoint to this dichotomy of explaining the world. Beyond the physical and religious worlds, there is also an informational world. This is more than saying that there is a Platonic or mathematical region of consciousness that can be explored. This is saying that there is a fundamental principle of information that expresses itself in the world just as one of the physical forces of nature. This force could be called ‘informational selection’ and it has an extremely broad application and visibility in our world. Of course, the most well known manifestation is biological natural selection where we see a diversity of species driven to evolve by informational selection. Other examples, include extremely mundane behaviors such as the sort of pebbles by size when agitated in a container, or the emergence of efficient computer-based programs that solve problems more efficiently because they are evolved within an information selection process.
Just as the other four forces of nature are extremely robust mental and mathematical models which explain and predict properties of the universe, informational selection has widespread application to predict and explain features of the world around us. At its heart, IS has been well studied and described by scientists for generations. Just as electrical current manifests under particular physical conditions, informational selection is known to manifest under specific conditions relating to information:
1) Local information is bounded and finite
2) Some information is preserved over time
3) Some information is diminished over time based on internal properties or “fitness”
Darwin’s famous principle of evolution follows from these generalizations, as do many other fundamental principles of nature and information. There are four physical laws to the universe and I’m suggesting that there is potentially a fifth law of the universe which relates to how information behaves under certain circumstances. And this property should have measurable and predictable impacts on the other four laws.