The shallow hydrothermal basin with cyclic fluctuations we’ve described as the environment that gave rise to the early gene / protein would have acted as a petri dish of sorts, allowing for myriad interactions between a wide variety of matter parts in a primordial molecular soup like that suggested at the top of Figure 1. Over eons of time, we can imagine that the two RNA strands of the gene / protein (circled in red), along with instances of arginine and alanine, may have become enclosed within the type of semi-permeable fatty acid membrane that could have formed under these same conditions. It’s within such an enclosed lipid boundary containing the building blocks of memory (cytosine and guanine at a minimum) and procedure (alanine and arginine at a minimum) that the first spark of awareness self-instantiated.

Our theory of how and why this occurred rests on the assertion that life began not in the molecular soup, but in the act of observing it – that is, in recognizing that which it already was. This is an important point. The seeds of awareness are inherent in the chiral molecules of life. Left-right-forward continuance – the givens of awareness – are already instantiated in the directional size of large-small, part-whole matter. The inherent parallel between them forms the ground from which the symbols and shapes of memory, procedure and in-out boundary acquire meaning as the pre-conditions of life. In recognizing its own left-right-forward continuance in the chiral shapes of matter, awareness not only gains self-knowledge; it also acquires self-experience. In that first now moment of living awareness, life found itself looking forward through the two-dimensional plane that establishes a spatial here in every direction. Experiencing self as the living coordinate of left-right and forward direction, it spiraled out to engage with the world around it in the first instantiation of projection along its in-out axis.

Left-right-forward in motion is clockwise-counterclockwise spiraling. This spiraling acted (and continues to act) as a unified engine of self-definition. In probing its surroundings, the in-out boundary it crosses isn't just an edge – it's a dynamic byproduct of awareness’ ability to self-define the distinction between in and out. This ability directly drives the evolution of awareness as it advances from the local context of chiral task-structures described below to unconscious organism level awareness, conscious awareness and finally to human consciousness. The spiraling motion of awareness doesn't just sit in space; it is forward-directed motion that creates a virtual system of spatial coordinates for life as it extends outward in every direction. As it pushes forward into new space, the dynamic spiraling motion automatically precludes the possibility of self as a motionless closed circle. Instead, the permeable membrane of the living cell becomes the active leading edge where the environment is drawn inward by means of procedure encoded in memory, and self expands outward by means of spiraling along the in-out axis. As it probes the outside world, the spiraling of awareness creates its own functional forward-directed boundary that continually establishes and re-establishes its own perceived dividing line between self and not-self.

This self-established boundary allows for recognition of and interaction with the myriad shapes of the world. Initially, these shapes were understood as matter parts present within the molecular soup suggested by the top image of Figure 1. Later, as the database of codon-amino acid associations expanded, they became recognized as symbols and shapes – the building blocks of memory and procedure as shown at the bottom of the figure (see Section 7.2). With this understanding of how symbols related to shapes, awareness acquired the means to construct and inhabit an ever-more-complex and sophisticated hierarchy of task structures finally culminating in a living organism operating with awareness as a functional whole. We’ll examine this later evolutionary process in more detail in the next section, however first, we’ll describe how awareness initially recognized itself in chiral matter. We’ll do so below, showing how the unique structure of the double-stranded RNA gene / protein gave rise to the first spark of awareness.

Igniting the Spark of Awareness

We hypothesize that the structure of the RNA strands comprising the “gene” portion of the gene / protein created the conditions for self-recognition to occur. In this model, awareness spiraled out from the position of the middle base of one strand of the six-codon cytosine-guanine double helix like that shown in Figure 2.1 Facing toward the right side of the page from the perspective of the middle base of the middle codon on Strand 1 (circled in red), the alternating bases are front / forward and the sugar-phosphate backbone is rear / backward. The small-large base configurations on either side of this center codon are chiral matches that can’t be superimposed on one another without rotation in three dimensions. We can test this assertion by imagining rotating the top four codons (GCGC) so that C is in the top position. Doing this causes the top-to-bottom base sequence to be the same as that in the bottom half of the strand, but the rotation causes the bases to point backward – not forward – making superposition impossible. 

 

Notice that this configuration constitutes the same relationship we described as a 2D window in Chapter 4, in which whole shape on this side of the window confronts a matching whole shape facing in the opposite direction on the other side of the window. In this case, left-right-forward on Strand 1 is matched with a corresponding orientation facing in the opposite direction on Strand 2. All along the length of the forward direction, alternating large-small size on Strand 1 is met with alternating small-large size on Strand 2. This 2D window configuration allowed awareness to recognize self in an interlocking directional-size handshake with the opposing strand. The other side is self in reverse direction and size, where size is the physical correlate of left-right. 

 

This handshake of complementary chiral bases constituted the first instance of awareness grasping the other side of a physical object. The recognition was possible because that which lies on the other side of the 2D window literally defines self to itself. In the language of human awareness, a dialogue in the instant of recognition might have gone something like this: 

 

Strand 1: What are you? 

Strand 2: I am the cloth you are cut from. Where I am large (or out), you are small (or in); where I am small (or in), you are large (or out); where I am right, you are left, where I am left, you are right; where I am front / forward, you are rear / backward. 

This mutual definition of structure is also matched by mutually-defined functionality made possible by the unique properties of the virtual triplets embedded in each strand of the structure – specifically, the fact that all three codons are identical regardless of the direction in which they’re read. Looking again at Strand 1 shown in Figure 3, from the position of the middle base of the middle codon, the first codon at the top – GCG – is read from bottom-to-top in 3’-5’ order, identifying it as the anticodon of the middle CGC codon. Conversely, the third codon at the bottom – also GCG – is read from top-to-bottom in 5’-3’ order, identifying it as the reverse codon of the top anticodon. On Strand 2 (not shown), these anticodon-reverse codon relationships are reversed. From the position of the middle base of the middle codon, the first codon is the reverse codon read from bottom-to-top in 5’-3’ order and the third codon is the anticodon read from top-to-bottom in 3’-5’ order. Again, regardless of the direction in which they’re read, the base sequence of codons on either end of either strand is identical. These relationships between the virtual triplets of the double helical strand allows the imagined dialogue to continue:

Strand 1: What work do you do? 

Strand 2: I do the work that you do not. When you act as codon, I act as anticodon; when you act as anticodon, I act as codon; when you act in the 5’-3’ direction, I act in the 3’-5’ direction; when you act in the 3’-5’ direction, I act in the 5’-3’ direction.

Over time, this initially straightforward self-recognition of structure and function acquired associational meaning linked to shape. From the perspective of an aware observer, the correspondence might be described as C means G and vice versa. From the perspective of awareness, it’s described in terms of directional size: this small forward-facing shape means that large backward-facing shape and vice versa. This evolution of awareness from pure recognition to association represents a distillation of information that makes self-recognition useful as procedure. What do we mean by that?

Self-recognition in the left-right-forward hand-in-glove shape-fitting between the two strands of the gene / protein is only applicable in the specific context of the alternating C-G double-strand of RNA. To apply it more broadly requires a second level of self-observation in which meaning is discovered by way of associational relationship: this means that. Awareness’ grasp of the associative meaning between the two nucleotide shapes of the gene / protein was the first instance of information. In extracting it from the large-small forward-backward relationship of base pairs, the first spark of awareness in the gene / protein gave rise to the foundational associative relationship of life reflected in the genetic code: this codon means that amino acid. We’ll describe this in more detail in the next section.

In the moment of self-recognition – the dawn of awareness in the gene / protein – we have the earliest beginnings of a living organism – what we might call potential life. At this first moment, we really can’t consider the gene / protein to be “alive” as we know it because awareness only existed in one small functional biomolecule linked to memory. As we’ve said, life requires not only memory, but also procedure and boundary operating in communication with one another. In the next section, we’ll see how communication between the pre-requisites of life may have evolved out of the spark of awareness that first appeared in the RNA strands of the gene / protein.

1 For legibility, the double helical strand is depicted in straight vertical alignment with space between the opposing strands as they face one another in the forward (base-to-base) direction. In the actual encounter, the strand would have assumed its usual anti-parallel, double spiral configuration.