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“Can the genome of an individual cell profit by experience?â€�17 just as Lamarck had proposed. They hinted that the answer might be yes, and that they were dealing with a case of mutations ‘​“directedâ€� toward a useful goalâ€�.”
― Paul C.W. Davies, The Demon in the Machine: How Hidden Webs of Information Are Solving the Mystery of Life

“What is the minimum level of complexity needed to attain the twin features of non-trivial replication and open-ended evolvability? If the complexity threshold is quite low, we might expect life to arise easily and be widespread in the cosmos. If it is very high, then life on Earth may be an exception, a freak product of a series of highly improbable events.”
― Paul Davies, The Demon in the Machine: How Hidden Webs of Information Are Solving the Mystery of Life

“The best way to express inheritance is to say that information about earlier generations is passed along to the next â€� the information needed to build a new organism in the likeness of the old. This information is encoded in the organism’s genes, which are replicated as part of the reproductive process. The essence of biological reproduction, then, is the replication of heritable information.”
― Paul Davies, The Demon in the Machine: How Hidden Webs of Information Are Solving the Mystery of Life

“Network theory confirms the view that information can take on 'a life of its own'. In the yeast network my colleagues found that 40 per cent of node pairs that are correlated via information transfer are not in fact physically connected; there is no direct chemical interaction. Conversely, about 35 per cent of node pairs transfer no information between them even though they are causally connected via a 'chemical wire' (edge). Patterns of information traversing the system may appear to be flowing down the 'wires' (along the edges of the graph) even when they are not. For some reason, 'correlation without causation' seems to be amplified in the biological case relative to random networks.”
― Paul Davies, The Demon in the Machine: How Hidden Webs of Information Are Solving the Mystery of Life

“More radically, how can we be sure that the source of consciousness lies within our bodies at all? You might think that because a blow to the head renders one unconscious, the ‘seat of consciousnessâ€� must lie within the skull. But there is no logical reason to conclude that. An enraged blow to my TV set during an unsettling news programme may render the screen blank, but that doesn’t mean the news reader is situated inside the television. A television is just a receiver: the real action is miles away in a studio. Could the brain be merely a receiver of ‘consciousness signalsâ€� created somewhere else? In Antarctica, perhaps? (This isn’t a serious suggestion â€� I’m just trying to make a point.) In fact, the notion that somebody or something ‘out thereâ€� may ‘put thoughts in our headsâ€� is a pervasive one; Descartes himself raised this possibility by envisaging a mischievous demon messing with our minds. Today, many people believe in telepathy. So the basic idea that minds are delocalized is actually not so far-fetched. In fact, some distinguished scientists have flirted with the idea that not all that pops up in our minds originates in our heads. A popular, if rather mystical, idea is that flashes of mathematical inspiration can occur by the mathematician’s mind somehow ‘breaking throughâ€� into a Platonic realm of mathematical forms and relationships that not only lies beyond the brain but beyond space and time altogether. The cosmologist Fred Hoyle once entertained an even bolder hypothesis: that quantum effects in the brain leave open the possibility of external input into our thought processes and thus guide us towards useful scientific concepts. He proposed that this ‘external guideâ€� might be a superintelligence in the far cosmic future using a subtle but well-known backwards-in-time property of quantum mechanics in order to steer scientific progress.”
― Paul C.W. Davies, The Demon in the Machine: How Hidden Webs of Information Are Solving the Mystery of Life

“To conclude: time doesn’t pass. (I hope the reader is now convinced!)

Well, what does pass, then? I shall argue that it is the conscious awareness of the fleeting self that changes from moment to moment. The misconception that time flows or passes can be traced back to the tacit assumption of a conserved self. It is natural for people to think that ‘they� endure from moment to moment while the world changes because ‘time flows�. But as Alice remarked in Lewis Carroll’s story, ‘It’s no use going back to yesterday, because I was a different person then.� Alice was right: ‘you� are not the same today as you were yesterday. To be sure, there is a very strong correlation � a lot of mutual information, to get technical about it � between today’s you and yesterday’s you � a thread of information made up of memories and beliefs and desires and attitudes and other things that usually change only slowly, creating an impression of continuity. But continuity is not conservation. There are future yous correlated with (that is, observing) future states of the world, and past yous correlated with (observing) past states of the world. At each moment, the you appropriate to that world-state interprets the correlation with that state as ‘now�. It is indeed ‘now� for ‘that you� at ‘that time�. That’s all!

The flow-of-time phenomenon reveals ‘the selfâ€� as a slowly evolving complex pattern of stored information that can be accessed at later times and provide an informational template against which fresh perceptions can be matched. The illusion of temporal flow stems from the inevitable slight mismatches.”
― Paul C.W. Davies, The Demon in the Machine: How Hidden Webs of Information Are Solving the Mystery of Life

“More radically, how can we be sure that the source of consciousness lies within our bodies at all? You might think that because a blow to the head renders one unconscious, the ‘seat of consciousnessâ€� must lie within the skull. But there is no logical reason to conclude that. An enraged blow to my TV set during an unsettling news programme may render the screen blank, but that doesn’t mean the news reader is situated inside the television. A television is just a receiver: the real action is miles away in a studio. Could the brain be merely a receiver of ‘consciousness signalsâ€� created somewhere else? In Antarctica, perhaps? (This isn’t a serious suggestion â€� I’m just trying to make a point.) In fact, the notion that somebody or something ‘out thereâ€� may ‘put thoughts in our headsâ€� is a pervasive one; Descartes himself raised this possibility by envisaging a mischievous demon messing with our minds. Today, many people believe in telepathy. So the basic idea that minds are delocalized is actually not so far-fetched. In fact, some distinguished scientists have flirted with the idea that not all that pops up in our minds originates in our heads. A popular, if rather mystical, idea is that flashes of mathematical inspiration can occur by the mathematician’s mind somehow ‘breaking throughâ€� into a Platonic realm of mathematical forms and relationships that not only lies beyond the brain but beyond space and time altogether. The cosmologist Fred Hoyle once entertained an even bolder hypothesis: that quantum effects in the brain leave open the possibility of external input into our thought processes and thus guide us towards useful scientific concepts. He proposed that this ‘external guideâ€� might be a superintelligence in the far cosmic future using a subtle but well-known backwards-in-time property of quantum mechanics in order to steer scientific progress.”
― Paul Davies, The Demon in the Machine: How Hidden Webs of Information Are Finally Solving the Mystery of Life

“Control kernels seem to be a general feature of biological networks. So in spite of the great complexity of behaviour, a network’s dynamics can often be understood by looking at a relatively small subset of nodes.”
― Paul Davies, The Demon in the Machine: How Hidden Webs of Information Are Solving the Mystery of Life