The process of knowledge is also the process of living. Life is an interpretation of the world, a bet about what might work given or about its environment.

Living organisms constitute a very special class of physical systems, since they’re able to use the available energy from their surroundings to do self-sustaining work. They can do this thanks to complex physiological structures that have evolved during a continuous process of adaptation called phylogenesis. Today we know that the ‘construction project’ of all organisms, from single-celled bacteria to human beings, is stored in their DNA.

Think of the DNA as a code of building instructions that can replicate itself. It is made up of two identical chains of carbon nucleotides held tightly together in the shape of a double helix. Every time a cell duplicates its DNA splits in two, and then each half clones itself to compose a new double strand.

Sometimes, during the replication process, some small mistakes occur: this is what is called a random genetic mutation. That’s one way DNA can change. Other ways are the horizontal genetic transfers among bacteria (also known as “gene trading”), the creation of new forms of life by mashing together different genomes in a process known as symbiogenesis, and finally, in those species that reproduce sexually, the crossover of two parent DNAs to form a new genetic combination in the offspring.

If the new mutations or combinations of genes prove to be not functional for the survival of the organism, they’ll be lost thanks to natural selection. Otherwise, the new instructions will be successfully carried forward from generation to generation, becoming part of the genetic heritage of the species. The DNA sequence is thus a record of past success in the game of life, and represents for living beings an evolvable set of inherited expectations about the right way to interact with their environment. It is in other words an inbuilt wealth of functional knowledge (know-how) which provides them with a secure base to explore the outside world and experiment with new variations.

Genetic instructions are necessary for the growth, development, functioning and reproduction of all known living organisms. They constitute the sum of all the useful information acquired by a species: everything the species has learned becomes encoded in its DNA and shapes the new generations accordingly. Hence, the process of living involves a process of learning: this is also the central insight of the Santiago theory of cognition, developed by Chilean biologists Humberto Maturana and Francisco Varela.

The interactions of living organisms with their environment are cognitive interactions. Hence, life and knowledge are inseparably connected. Some sort of mind— broadly intended as interpretative activity about the world — must then be present at all stages of life’s evolution.

In this sense the mind is not a thing but a process — the process of cognition, which is identified with the process of living. The brain is one specific structure through which this process operates, but it’s not the only one: in fact, the entire body of an organism participates in it, whether the organism has a brain or not. The DNA, just like the nervous system in later stages of biological evolution, already functions as an ‘anticipation machine’ that guides the organism in its explorative interpretation of the world. The genetic template provides a static representation of the organism’s life-sustaining dynamics, endowing the organism with what can be regarded as an emergent proto-mind or proto-consciousness (with “consciousness” broadly defined here as “self-represented awareness”).

In information theory, “information” is usually measured as the divergence from expectations about what’s likely to occur in the future. Redundancy, as in repeating the message over and over again, increases communication reliability over background noise by relaxing the constraints on the dynamics. In the case of early life forms such as prokaryotic cells, the genetic template is redundant in that it constitutes a hard copy of the cell’s vital functions in a way that can be stored and passed on, allowing for greater evolved variability and making it possible to accumulate a wider range of adaptations.

That’s how life is able to progressively carve out degrees of causal freedom from the fabric of existence (see free will). That’s how epistemology (they way we know things) emerges from ontology (the way things are). Genetic templates provide living beings with a first range of possible choices, a margin of “freedom-within-constraints” to play with.

And as the redundancy of their template increases, organisms have more options to “choose” from. Obviously at first it’s not a subjective choice but rather a function of the organism’s accumulated genetic information. Then, as the nervous system develops, some individual organisms learn to condition their instinctive behavior according to their own subjective experiences (memory of success or failure), thus overriding the genetic template with a psychic template. Eventually, those who live in groups also learn to hand over what they know to their offspring and fellow specimen.

For example we observe how, in certain classes of highly evolved social animals such as birds or mammals, individuals become capable of communicating to others what they’ve learned by direct experience in the course of their life. Such knowledge is not passed on via the genes, but in the guise of a cultural tradition. Hence the new generations can learn, by imitating the behavior of the adults, how to recognize a specific threat or how to perform a complex skill set.

With humans, the development of our unique combination of symbolic thought and discursive language enabled the transmission of information also about things which are not immediately present as we speak, but that can be represented abstractly in our imagination. Cognitive neuroscientists call this feature Mental Time Travel (MTT), since it involves the capacity to mentally reconstruct personal events from the past (episodic memory) as well as to imagine possible scenarios in the future. This outstanding ability, further enhanced by the invention of writing, helped to create the vast and ever-expanding cultural heritage of our species: human knowledge.

For us, culture has become a sort of “second nature”. The huge amount of cultural information that we inherit from the previous generations profoundly influences the way we see the world. In fact, we can fully develop as human beings only within a community group of our own kind. One of the essential traits of our species, called neoteny, means our brains keep growing and developing for long time after we are born. In fact, most of the neural connections that will define our adult psychology are formed in the first years of life, by observing and interacting with our parents, family and social group.

As explained by Konrad Lorenz in “Behind the Mirror: A Search for a Natural History of Human Knowledge” (1973), “we must understand that human evolution is determined by two different orders of processes, asynchronous in timing but linked by a very close relationship of interaction: the slow phylogenetic evolution and the much faster cultural evolution.”

Within human society, knowledge, beliefs and behaviors spread between people and groups, much like genes do. That’s why Richard Dawkins coined the term ‘meme’ to define a unit carrying cultural ideas, symbols, or practices that can be transmitted from one mind to another through writing, speech, gestures, rituals, or other imitable phenomena. Memes are a viral phenomenon and evolve by natural selection in a manner analogous to that of biological evolution.

Recently, with the invention of digital media, the rate of expansion and propagation of human knowledge has increased dramatically. Many researchers in the field of communication have likened the Internet’s emergence to the manifestation of a global mind, or Noosphere — the sphere of human thought.

The momentous rise of the Internet is challenging some of the fundamental axioms of industrial age, such as intellectual property and copyright. Since the 17th Century, the author/inventor of any scientific, literary or artistic production was legally granted the exclusive control (monopoly) over the product’s distribution. The profits derived from selling it to the public were seen as an economic incentive that would encourage the author’s creativity.

But by privatizing innovations and thus making the sharing of knowledge and culture a crime, the IP regime ended up enforcing an “artificial scarcity” system that is actually slowing down our collective intellectual progress. Information Technology, by almost eliminating the cost and time of the information transfer, has effectively made those old regulations obsolete.

Wikipedia, the online encyclopedia written collaboratively by largely anonymous volunteers from all across the world, is a great example of how — in the digital age — no direct economic incentive is needed to produce quality cultural content. In conclusion:

We’ve seen how knowledge, in order to maximize its efficacy for living beings, needs to be as abundant and transmittable as possible. We’ve also seen why humanity needs to raise its collective consciousness as quickly as possible in order to survive the current crisis. Therefore, the WAM believes that, from now on, human knowledge must be considered as a world commons for all to share, and that no useful idea or innovation can be ethically withheld from the human population as a whole.