Information and emergent properties

Information and emergent properties (October 2025)

The concept of change and that of emergent properties

For a better understanding of what I have already explained on the Origin of Life page regarding the importance of information in biology and in the evolution of life, I'll try to develop a clearer picture of what is meant by change and what a new emergent property consists of. We speak of change whenever, within a pre-established portion of space (which we can define as environment or field), if we are able to know the conditions present at a time A and those present at a time B subsequent to A, we find differences. These differences can be quantitative, in the sense that, if they refer to material elements, the number of those present in the environment increases or decreases, and if referred to forms of dynamic, electromagnetic or other energy, their values within the field increase or decrease. It may also happen that at time B there are within the environment some new forms of matter or energy that were not present at time A, whose properties and effects turn out to be qualitatively different from those observed at time A. In this case, we can hypothesize that the new forms entered the environment from the outside, that is, from another region of space where they were already present. However, if we consider some of the qualitative changes we find over certain periods of time, there are cases where we cannot identify any portion of space in which the new forms were already present. So, if we imagine that our environment encompasses an increasingly larger portion of space, we must recognize that in the time interval between A and B a particular phenomenon occurred within it that we can interpret as creative, and the new properties through which that phenomenon manifests itself in the environment are defined as emergent properties.

For a deeper understanding of emergent properties and an interesting description of how they have gradually manifested themselves in the history of our universe, I invite you to read the book by Harold J. Morowitz (1927-2016) The Emergence of Everything (published in 2002 and downloadable from the Library). The author was an American biophysicist who studied the application of thermodynamics to living systems. He published many books and articles, technical monographs and essays, and the origin of life was his main research interest for more than fifty years. Before addressing the topic of emergent properties and their importance for evaluating the evolution of our universe, let's examine what tools are needed to establish what changes have occurred over a given time interval. The most immediate tool consists of the sensory resources and intellectual faculties of the human organism, whenever we can, for example, see and count the number of elements present in an environment, or perceive (even if approximately) the intensity and frequency of a sound, or the temperature of a solid object, a liquid or a gas. We can therefore say that through our senses the conditions present in the examined environment are reflected in the state of our organism, which in turn constitutes a predefined environment, and that the changes that occur in the examined environment also determine changes in our organism and in the cognitive functions that record them through conscious mental activity. If we then want to obtain quantitatively precise and reliable measurements of the particular conditions that occur in the environment being examined, even in relation to those phenomena that are not directly perceived by our senses, we design and build technological tools that can provide us with the required information. In any case, the human mind reads and interprets the data provided by the instruments, most likely in relation to brain activity, that is, to the changes that those data produce in neural network activity.

The changes that occur over time therefore concern both physical phenomena and our knowledge of them, that is, the ways in which we can observe, describe and interpret them, in an attempt to discover in a sufficiently precise and reliable way the laws that determine such changes. This process entails the involvement of the conscious Ego in those particular attunements of the human psyche that manifest themselves as a desire to know and to understand. It is certainly a conscious activity that requires commitment, dedication, attention, intuition and the ability to concentrate on the intellectual and creative faculties with which the Ego of a minority of human beings is endowed. However, the close connection between the evolution of physical phenomena – first inorganic and then organic – that occurred on our planet, and the consequent emergent creation of a cerebral instrument capable of enabling the mental processes that underlie our conscious cognitive activity, leads us to believe that both the observed phenomenon and the observing subject are nothing but two sides of the same coin. It should be kept in mind, however, that a substantial obstacle to understanding phenomena is time: if the phenomenon and its observation, direct or instrumental, by the observer, are not contemporaneous, it is difficult to see how the changes that occurred within the phenomenon in the past can exert an immediate effect on the mind of the observer now. Obviously, if a trace, a document or an effect of those phenomena has reached us, our mind is able to react to such findings, to evaluate them and to interpret them, but otherwise we cannot know anything: for this reason, some people are constantly searching for traces of past events.

In some cases, the knowledge already acquired allows the mind of the human observer to interact directly with events that occurred in the past: for example, if we observe directly or with a telescope the light from a star or a galaxy a certain number of light years away from us, we know that the events we are observing occurred as many years in the past as the the light took to reach our instrument. This information is not given by what is immediately evident, which would lead us to believe that everything we observe is occurring at the present moment, but by the interpretive knowledge of other phenomena, which has led the human mind to evaluate the distance of celestial bodies with sufficient reliability and precision, and to establish that light propagates in cosmic space at a fixed speed that cannot be exceeded. In the case of past events relating to the evolution of life on our planet, their reconstruction is based on the fossil remains discovered so far, in light of the knowledge acquired through observation of everything that is currently occurring and the documentation of what has been investigated in recent times. These are therefore highly complex mental processes, through which hypotheses and theories are formulated,whose success depends on how they are evaluated and received by the scientific community, and are then disseminated to the general public, who accept them as true based on the trust they place in the authority of science. This process gives rise to the great cultural changes that characterize the eras of human history, and in particular the one in which we are currently living.

Time, consciousness and human knowledge

We have seen how these complex cognitive processes relating to events that we cannot directly observe because they occurred in remote times, well before human consciousness emerged and human intelligence could operate, substantially modify both the cultural interpretation of the world and of life that shapes the minds of the members of a complex society, and human activity itself, which modifies the environment of our world. However, although we are well aware of the involvement of our mind in these cognitive processes, we have no idea either of how these processes occur or of their purposes. All we can say is that the involvement of the conscious Egos of a certain number of human beings in such processes entails particular evaluations, including ethical ones, which are generally determined by the human psyche and which can therefore differ from one individual to another. In participating in the creative process to the extent that the mental resources (intellectual and intentional) at its disposal allow it, the conscious Ego should almost always ask itself questions regarding the objectives it pursues through its activity and the consequences deriving from the changes introduced into the system in which it operates. This, at least, seems to be the aim of the conscious process of guiding evolution on our planet, insofar as it shifts from the creative activity we call natural to the human mental activity in which the conscious Ego is directly involved. In fact, in recognizing the evident and indisputable natural creative process that led to the appearance and evolution of life on Earth even before any glimmer of human consciousness developed, the conscious Ego feels the need to ask itself whether this creative process is endowed with its own consciousness, intent, and purpose, or not.

In this respect the condition of the conscious Ego is truly strange, in some ways confusing and almost unbearable: indeed, it cannot deny that the organism through which it lives in this physical world, with its nervous system and its brain whose functioning underlies the sensory, perceptual, and interpretive faculties of the very reality in which it is immersed, is a product of that natural creative process which progressively reveals itself to the conscious Ego and whose characteristics it seeks to understand. But if it acknowledges only the creative power of the process, which it cannot doubt, while denying it consciousness, intention, and purpose, it must then question its own nature and origin, given that for the Ego, consciousness, intention, purpose, and meaning turn out to be fundamental and indispensable needs, to the point of often leading it to actively intervene to modify the very natural processes from which it believes it originated. On the other hand, if the Ego recognizes the creative process as having consciousness, intention, and purpose, it is then forced to acknowledge that it cannot have direct, reliable, and objectively defensible knowledge of these faculties, since their very interpretation depends on particular attunements of the psyche, which vary according to the time and place in which the conscious Ego is destined to live, also in relation to the prevailing cultural orientations. From the point of view of the conscious Ego, in light of the sensitivity with which it is endowed, the process may appear to be only a partially successful attempt to bring order out of chaos in a creative but unconscious way and, above all, unreasonable when judged by the standards of human reason, at least with regard to what has happened and is happening in our world. For this reason some people believe that, in giving rise to human consciousness, intelligence, and reason, the process seeks in some way to know, experience, and interpret itself, in order to understand how to purposefully direct its creative power.

From the perspective of human sensibility, time, as we perceive it, plays a fundamental role in the unfolding of this process, since – in its unidirectional flow from the past to the future – it allows the development of an information order of progressively higher quality that can be perceived by the conscious Ego as progress. In the current phase of the process, it is evident that the dynamics of the human psyche, which, through the involvement of the conscious Ego, determine the behavior of individual human beings and the affirmation of the dominant socio-cultural programs, are still largely determined by organic and mental functioning that escape the control of reason and the discernment of intelligence, and show no regard for the deep and most authentic sensitivity that determines the true needs of the Ego. From this state of affairs arise all the hopes that humankind places in the future. But if this were actually the teleological intent of the process, we should deduce that the emergence of human consciousness, of the intelligence and sensitivity of the conscious Ego, represent an attempt that emerged later in time to intervene in the freedom inherent in creative power, manifested in its fullness in an earlier era, in a more responsible way, so to speak, precisely in light of the new needs of which humanity as a whole seems to be the bearer and interpreter. Consequently, the very fact that the conscious Ego of even a limited number of human beings feels the need to know and interpret the creative process, intervening in its dynamics to modify them responsibly in the light of human reason, would mean that the process itself is endowed with an intent, a purpose, and an evolutionary aspiration that manifests itself by unfolding its effects over time. Obviously, this is all we can hypothesize about what has happened and is happening on our world – just one among the multitude of worlds existing in the universe – given that we humans have no information, at least until now, on the evolutionary dynamics that may have developed on other worlds.

Still referring to the hypothesis that the creative process is evolving over time as a result of the rise of human consciousness and sensitivity as emergent properties with respect to the creative power of nature, we must recognize that we are still in a very primitive phase of this evolution, as the needs determined by organic life (regulated by natural laws), stimulated by the fragmentation of consciousness in a plurality of organisms, still predominate by far. Therefore, the creative process becoming aware of itself does not yet manifest as a harmonious and progressive phenomenon, at least in relation to what is perceived by the conscious Ego of many human beings, but rather as a tension between different dynamics, sometimes antagonistic and not infrequently conflicting, which together find expression in the bipolar complexity of the human psyche. For this reason, it can also be reasonably hypothesized that the deep aspirations(such as harmony, peace, collaboration, solidarity, beauty, joy, love, etc.) of which the conscious Ego of many human beings feels it is the custodian and interpreter, also under the influence of the positive polarity of the psyche, originate from an energy different from that which gives rise to the natural laws that have shaped our world and the dynamics between living organisms. Since in the course of human life we are not able to know directly and satisfactorily how things are in this regard, we generally rely on the psyche (in the sense that every conscious ego relies on the attunements of its own psyche) to obtain some information on how to interpret this complex picture of life and some guidelines on how to behave and act in the most appropriate way: given the bipolar nature of the human psyche, the consequences of this (naive) attitude of the Ego are there for all to see.

The existence and role of the conscious Ego

Whatever the future evolution of the creative process or the result of the interaction between the dynamics that regulate organic life and the mental promptings determined by energies of another nature that are reflected in the human psyche, it is right to recognize the conscious Ego's fundamental role both in the development of humankind itself (the so-called progress) and in relation to environmental changes and their effects on the natural system of planet Earth. It is evident that the quality and level of evolution of the conscious Ego are very different from one person to another, and therefore the social and cultural influence of some human beings on the orientations and dynamics of humanity's development processes is far greater than that of the average individual: this is the power to organize, direct and guide the masses, for better or for worse, with which some people are particularly gifted. At the same time, every conscious Ego makes its contribution, however small or seemingly irrelevant, to the history of humankind, and taken together the energies that can be brought into play by large numbers of individually irrelevant people can have a notable impact on human affairs: it can be a violent, devastating and destructive action (tending to chaos), in the case that these forces are not organised, or a constructive process of socio-cultural renewal if some individuals are endowed with sufficient charisma and organisational skills to direct the action of a mass of people. Human history, even recent history, offers various examples of both cases. However, regardless of the power that each single conscious Ego can have in influencing human events and the course of history (which, as we have seen, coincides with the very evolution of the creative process in our world), it is certain that each conscious Ego can intervene directly in the dynamics of humankind for a limited period of time, that is, as long as the organism to which it is linked remains alive.

The conscious Ego, accustomed to sensing and interpreting the passage of time as it experiences it during organic life, knows what happens to an organism after the event called biological death, but is often uncertain about its fate once its organism is dead, and does not know what experiences it may have to face. As for the organism, it is subject to a progressive process of decomposition and dissolution of tissues that requires a certain amount of time, even years, to complete, unless it is accelerated by the event itself that causes death or by subsequent artificial practices, such as cremation. If the conscious Ego identifies its existence with that of the organism to which it feels bound during human life, and in particular with the functioning of the brain, it will be led to believe that with the dissolution of the brain its own existence will cease, however strange, incongruous and even painful the thought of such annihilation may seem to it. As has been pointed out several times on this site, the possible information we can obtain on the possible existence of the conscious Ego after death comes from the testimonies of those who have experienced an NDE or from communications and phenomena associated with mediumship. However, all NDEs about which we can obtain information have occurred during a state of clinical death from which the experiencer was brought back to life, without the brain tissue having undergone irreversible progressive decomposition. Instead, in the case of mediumistic phenomena, although we are dealing with surprising phenomena whose interpretation remains enigmatic, which most likely involve entities alien to the dimension in which our organic life takes place, we must recognize that both the medium and the sitters are involved in the phenomena as living and healthy organisms, even if the medium's possible trance may exhibit anomalous and indecipherable features.

The truly interesting aspect of NDEs is not the involvement or otherwise of certain brain functions in their processing, but their experiential quality, completely different from any other experience in human life, and the effect they have on the conscious Ego of the experiencers. I have already discussed this topic several times on some pages of the blog, among which I would like to mention the page entitled The Border of Death of July 2023. It happens rather often that during these experiences the conscious Ego becomes perfectly aware of existing, of having already existed in a form which constitutes its authentic essence and in a (spiritual) dimension which represents its true home, and of having intentionally decided to forget its existential state in order to experience a certain aspect of human life as a conscious Ego dependent on the formation and development of a particular organism to which it remains bound. Thus the human conscious Ego, whose existence is determined by the particular organism to which it feels bound, and the spiritual conscious Ego, which manifests itself when the human one is freed from the bonds of organic life, would be nothing other than two aspects of the same entity: the first, subject to the unidirectional flow of time that goes from the birth to the death of the organism, transforms, or rather, flows into the second, which exists in an eternal dimension, so to speak, in which time is not experienced in a continuous and unidirectional way, and consequently terms such as beginning and end lose their meaning, to be replaced by a continuum of experiences. In some human beings, however, the influence of the spiritual Ego is somehow perceived by the conscious Ego in a more or less intense way already during organic life, even if filtered and to some extent distorted by the attunements of the human psyche (be they positive or negative).

Obviously, the question arises as to the reason for this strange state of affairs. Why should the conscious Ego of a human being form and develop within organic life while remaining completely unaware of its connection with its spiritual counterpart, only to then obtain – not without difficulty – some indirect and uncertain information about it? The attempts made by the human psyche to justify the removal of the spiritual Ego from the memory of the conscious Ego can be more or less convincing depending on the orientation of the latter: according to some it would be a need imposed by the impossibility of facing the difficulties and tribulations of organic life by an entity mindful of the state of bliss proper to the spiritual condition, according to others, it would be a test that the spiritual Ego would have to pass to demonstrate that it is able to remember its own existence despite the obscuring effect caused by organic life. Many NDEs, as well as some mediumistic phenomena, show us traces or clues that seem to have the purpose of favoring the evolution of the conscious Ego toward the recognition of the existence of its spiritual counterpart: however, they present such contingent and uncertain conditions that we cannot consider them objective, wholly convincing, and irrefutable evidence of the survival of the conscious Ego after the death of the organism and its fusion with the spiritual Ego. At the same time, it is undeniable that many NDEs have an extremely strong persuasive power on the experiencer's conscious Ego, which, even after returning to organic life, maintains the unshakeable conviction of the existence of the Spirit dimension and of the conscious Ego's return to spiritual existence at the end of the parenthesis that is human life.

Just as in the course of organic life the attunements of the psyche that involve the conscious Ego can be highly subjective, determining substantial differences and even incompatibilities between people's behaviors, NDEs also present some elements that they have in common and others that distinguish them, across a spectrum ranging, so to speak, from the heavenly to the hellish. I have already explained on the 2023 blog page (August) on The Fate of the Conscious Ego After the Death of Its Organism the reasons why I think that positive and heavenly experiences are due to the transfer of the conscious Ego into the dimension of the Spirit, while distressing or hellish ones depend on the inability of the Ego to free itself from the constraints of the negative polarity of the human psyche: a condition that can also be determined by a kind of sclerotic rigidity in the beliefs of the conscious Ego (that is, by its complete identification with certain attunements of the psyche from which it cannot escape) during organic life. There is, however, a marked difference between the conscious Ego which seeks to understand how it can actively and intelligently participate in the evolution of its own destiny, even once organic life has definitively ended, and the Ego that passively submits to the will of presumed entities believed to possess the power to determine its destiny, not to mention the Ego of those who supinely accept the idea of its annihilation upon the death of its organism, as if it were the most natural and indisputable thing in the world. Yet we find that the power of conditioning and persuasion exercised by the attunements of the human psyche to which the conscious Ego submits and with which it identifies, without using its own consciousness and intelligence to gain a deeper understanding of its own essence beyond the roles imposed on it by organic life, is such that it succeeds in keeping most people in the state of human automatons.

The conscious Ego as an emergent property

The condition of the conscious Ego, as we experience it in the various phases of our organic life, is therefore complex, multifaceted, and often contradictory, not only with regard to the differences that undoubtedly exist between the Ego of one human being and that of another, but also in relation to the changes that an individual's Ego experiences when it reconstructs from memory the internal dynamics of the various periods of its life. The very formation of the conscious Ego during childhood and its subsequent development, largely shaped by the programs and conditioning received from the sociocultural environment in which its organism is raised, are phenomena that manifest great variability, and whose effects influence the dynamics of the psyche in which the Ego remains involved throughout the individual's life. If we then consider the Ego as an emergent property deriving from the functioning of the brain of the organism to which it is linked, then we should also take into account the genetic variables that influence the development and functions of each individual brain. In light of the most currently accepted theories on the evolution of life on our planet, we can undoubtedly identify a position on the time scale (for example, 5 million years ago) before which we are practically certain that no form of conscious Ego endowed with even a glimmer of human consciousness was present. Consequently, the hypothesis of considering the conscious Ego as an emergent property of the development of organic life has a sound basis. On the page on The Evolution of Life I also mentioned the bewilderment that the conscious Ego can feel when referring to a condition of existence devoid of any consciousness capable of evaluating, interpreting, or even knowing it, such as that hypothesized by reductionist theories for the eras prior to the appearance of human consciousness.

Once consciousness had become firmly established in the dynamics of our world, it connected the particular sensitivity of the Ego (which varies from individual to individual) with the entire range of possible attunements of the human psyche, thus giving rise to the multitude of variations in personal destinies whose effects each of us can observe every day. The behavior of others, what they communicate publicly with words, through what they write, with their gestures and facial expressions, what they communicate directly to our own Ego, are all effects of the involvement of their conscious Egos in the dynamics of their own psyche. However, from the standpoint of inner experience, each Ego can only know the dynamics of its own psyche, overcoming many difficulties. The various factors that determine the personal destiny of every human organism, among which a significant role is played by the environment in which it is formed and developed, mean that in some cases the Ego feels satisfied and content with its social role, in other cases it may feel unhappy and completely out of place, while in most cases it finds itself in an intermediate state in which, as they say, it makes a virtue of necessity in order to cope with the needs of organic life. Precisely because of the difficulties created by the continual struggle with its own psyche, the conscious Ego can feel the condition imposed on it by organic life as vulnerable and difficult to bear, also because of the limits it encounters in understanding the way in which the conscious Ego of other human beings is subjected to attunements of the psyche very different from its own. This is, we might say, the current state of our understanding, as regards the knowledge of the condition of the conscious Ego, considered as an emergent property of the evolutionary process of our world.

The resources available to the conscious Ego (which, as it must always be remembered, vary greatly from person to person) may be sufficient to face the challenges and difficulties of human life, but very rarely can they offer the Ego itself even a glimmer of insight into the enigma of its own existence. As far as organic life is concerned, the conscious Ego is almost always content to consider itself as the product of the organism to which it feels so intimately linked, generally avoiding any deeper inquiry into the complex dynamics that led to the formation and development of that organism and of the particular environmental and sociocultural conditions in which its organism was born, grew, and continues to live and act until death. But as regards its own existence as an autonomous entity, freed from the demands of organic life and the bipolar dynamics of the psyche in which it is involved due to its dependence on its organism, the conscious Ego almost never has direct, certain and unquestionable knowledge regarding such a condition. However, as the end of human life approaches, the conscious Ego may feel a growing unease at not having sufficient information and reliable certainty regarding its own destiny, or at not having devoted sufficient resources and energy to deepening its self-knowledge. In this respect, the experience of the Spirit dimension described by many who have had an NDE can serve as a compass that helps the conscious Ego navigate the difficulties of the final stage of organic life while remaining on the course that may enable it to experience something very different from the attunements of the human psyche.

At the same time, as long as we live in this world, we should constantly marvel at that extraordinary emergent property that allows the mind of each of us to experience some of the countless phenomena of life and to interpret them, thus contributing – in one way or another – to their very existence. In fact, despite all the difficulties, limitations, errors, and conflicts determined by the dynamics of the human psyche in which the Ego is involved, what we perceive and interpret as the reality of this world is nothing other than the creative product of our mind, shaped by our intellectual faculties. As I have already highlighted several times, a reality that exists without any form of consciousness capable of perceiving and interpreting it is something that leaves us bewildered and almost unable to conceive of it, as accustomed as we are to experiencing the effects of our mental activity on something whose essence we do not know, and which we regard as truly existing or having existed. Nor can we know for certain whether and how this complex system, of which we ourselves are a part, is intentionally managed by alien entities operating in an organized manner. It's as if, being enclosed inside a gigantic bubble that contains an entire world, when we look at the walls of this bubble we can only see the reflection of what is contained inside it, but not what is outside. Yet, we can understand that this bubble is nothing more than the interpretive perception created by our mind, as a result of its connection with a multitude of other human minds, each of which makes its own contribution to the collective creation of the multifaceted and changing reality contained within the bubble. An interesting and fascinating process, which however does not fully satisfy the conscious Ego when it begins to feel the need to explore the dimensions beyond the walls of the bubble, which it cannot access with the resources of its organism.

Generally speaking, for us, the birth of an organism does not refer to the moment when the fertilized ovum begins to multiply to develop into an embryo, but to the separation of the organism, now sufficiently developed, from the mother organism within which it formed, or from its emergence from an egg whose protective and nourishing function has been completed. Similarly, the conscious Ego must also reach a sufficient degree of evolution to be able to separate itself from the organism from which it originated and in connection with which it developed, at least up to a certain level. The death of the organism can therefore be interpreted as the birth of the conscious Ego in the dimension of the Spirit, that is, as the beginning of an existence no longer conditioned by the precariousness of time and the vulnerability of the human organism. The feeling of having returned to one's true home, reported by many of those who have experienced an NDE, does not necessarily imply a dualism between the conscious Ego, subject to the experiences of human life that fate imposes on it, and the spiritual Ego that lives in a dimension separate from that of the organic world in which human life takes place. These are probably two aspects of the same phenomenon, and I believe that the dimension of human life is already part of the dimension of the Spirit, even if the conscious Ego, during the course of organic life, is hardly able to perceive this connection. Let me clarify my point of view with an example: during the day, intense sunlight allows us to clearly see all the aspects of the physical reality of our world that we can perceive, but at the same time it prevents us from seeing the universe of which we are a part, and which is present all the same, but beyond the reach of our sensory perceptions saturated by sunlight. Only at night, when our world is plunged into darkness, can we see the complexity of a firmament that fascinates and amazes us. Likewise, the intense light of the human psyche, which dazzles the consciousness of the Ego through the mental faculties of the organism, prevents that consciousness from perceiving the faint signals coming from the dimension of Spirit.

However, when we manage to become aware of the infinite splendor of the universe, we must recognize that the world we live in, despite all the wonders it contains, is nothing but a tiny entity, one among the countless billions of existing worlds, about which we know absolutely nothing. The same can be said for the human psyche, and in particular for that limited range of attunements of the psyche that each conscious Ego experiences in the course of its organic life, when confronted with the immensity of the dimension of the Spirit. And the simple fact that our organism is a product of the evolution of life on our planet, and therefore tied to the Earth's environment for its survival and incapable of moving at will in the boundless interstellar spaces, sets a definite limit to the power of the human psyche, which binds the conscious Ego to itself just as Earth's gravity keeps our organism bound to the planet. Yet the lifespan of each individual human organism, more or less long or short, can be sufficient not only for the formation and development, but also for the evolution of the conscious Ego, to the point where it is able to perceive, interpret and understand the existence of the universal dimension of the Spirit, striving to attune itself to it through the intellectual resources at its disposal, and at the same time reducing its dependence on the human psyche. Once again the factor of time comes into play, giving rise to a new emergent property determined by the expansion of consciousness and the activity of the human mind. The perception of the immensity of the universe, in fact, radically transforms our interpretation of what takes place on our world – and especially in our own backyard – no longer allowing us to regard it as the sole source of information about a reality that our intellectual resources seek to understand.

Everything we don't know about the universe can exert a particular fascination on the conscious Ego because – among other things – it leads it to consider the human psyche as a phenomenon confined to a particular domain, that is, to one of the countless worlds that this universe contains. The very needs of that organism through which the conscious Ego experiences life on our planet make direct exploration of the universe impossible due to the dimensions of space-time that separate star systems. We can also place our hopes in the advances of science and technology that could in the future offer humankind new resources, technologies, and means to tackle the exploration of other systems in our galaxy, but these are, precisely, hopes, that have, at present, no solid foundation. For us, the universe is like a huge book on whose pages, which to our eyes appear blank, the creative Spirit has written billions and billions of stories that our minds can barely even glimpse through the faculty of imagination. At the same time, new knowledge about different aspects of the universe is acquired by the Ego's consciousness, thereby greatly extending the scope and potential of consciousness itself, thus giving rise to a new emergent property of the human mind that allows the latter to participate creatively in the interpretation of the universe. Indeed, since we cannot experience and study the phenomena of the universe with the same ease and immediacy with which we can verify what happens in our own world, the human mind must engage in bold and imaginative intellectual elaboration in an attempt to explain what we are able to perceive and know about these phenomena. The immense scales of space and time mean that these hypotheses and interpretative theories can rely only partially – and only within certain limits – on experimental evidence capable of confirming or refuting them. As a result, something akin to a hall of mirrors emerges, reflecting the inventiveness of the minds engaged in this endeavour.

Faced with the immeasurable vastness of the universe, our mind must acknowledge that the creative power that manifests itself by unfolding its effects in the dimension of space-time goes far beyond the comprehension capabilities determined by the human psyche. Consequently, we cannot exclude that the conscious Ego, arising from the life of an organism produced by the evolutionary process that takes place on planet Earth, may continue to exist in another form once that organism has definitively concluded its life cycle. This is true in the case in which the existence of the conscious Ego is attributed exclusively to the creative power in the dual aspect in which it manifests itself to the human mind and is interpreted by the latter: 1) as an evolutionary process that first gave rise to life and the development of living forms on our world, and then to the emergence of the first glimmers of consciousness and its evolution, up to the development of the intellectual qualities of the human mind; 2) as a process that determines everything that can happen in a universe (or even in a plurality of universes) that manifests itself through space-time, of which the human mind can perceive only a pale reflection. If, however, we consider the conscious Ego as an entity whose development and evolution are also influenced by an energy of a different nature from that which produced the human organism, and if we recognize that this energy plays a decisive role in directing the creative process of the universe, then the existence of the conscious Ego beyond the life cycle of the organism to which it is linked in human life follows almost by necessity. This should be the case, at least, if the conscious Ego has reached a level of evolution during human life that allows it, in the light of its own mental resources, to feel, recognize, interpret and understand its role within the creative process of the universe from which it originated, and of which the intellectual and creative faculties with which it is endowed have now become an integral part.