Rather than attempt to model the electromagnetic ground state by treating Maxwell's equations, electric and magnetic fields, light and "velocity c", I have decided to focus the entire model on the biological domain of life and related chemical (electron shell) interactions, with no reference to any higher-energy nuclear transformations (even though the atomic nucleus provides the substantial basis of the electron shell). The miracle of life is the single towering fact of the electromagnetic ground state, including (on planet Earth) the grand phenomenon of humanity, which has carried the information realm into a vast new domain of language, imagination, abstraction, culture and technology. Of course, we need the nuclear reactions of the Sun to sustain us, and we need the gravitational force to provide us with a galactic and solar system home in cosmic spacetime, but the nuclear and gravitational forces are primarily of astrophysical import rather than biological significance, notwithstanding the obvious fact that they (like the atomic nucleus) play vitally necessary supporting roles for the biological dimension. Light, water, the elements of the periodic table, and carbon chemistry are the major abiotic players of the immediate biological realm. I will take the position with Teilhard de Chardin (and many other thinkers), that life is what the universe is all about. The Universe exists for life, and life exists so that the universe may experience itself and explore new modes of creativity in the information dimension. We are not only "the eyes and the ears" of the universe, we are co-creators with it in the information realm of biology. In fact, humans have vastly expanded the information dimension by discovering how to abstract it through language, thought, imagination, mathematics, art, science, religion, philosophy, technology, etc. See: "The Information Pathway"; and "The Fractal Organization of Nature".

In Fig. 5 I trace the flow of information from the atomic realm of the periodic table of elements (its abiotic physical origin), to the human brain and its abstract creations. The physical pathway is through the 4x3 fractal resonance of the alpha particle and carbon, as traced in various General Systems papers on this website.

The 4x3 fractal information code passes from carbon to DNA and the genetic code of life, where replication, competition, and evolution carry it swiftly forward to the abstract realm of the human mind and its technological inventions. The flow of information in single cells is due to osmosis, and hence is very slow. In multicellular plants, information flows more rapidly through an organized vascular system, while in animals the development of an electrochemical nervous system allows swift communication, coordination, and integration of all bodily functions in an organism which may have to move rapidly. The brain develops as a concentration of perceptual functions and system inputs for ever-more efficient and faster management of information flow servicing three major biological imperatives: food-finding, mate-finding, and enemy-finding. In humans, our clever hands combine with our language and social skills, and our curious, imaginative, and abstracting brains, to provide tools and eventually complex technology such as computers, in which information flows at light speed through mechanical centers of immense power, information storage, and processing capacity. The biological Earth is becoming a single integrated super-organism bound together by the mutual exchange of vital gases, foods, services, and information. Biological systems are far and away the most complex information systems in the Cosmos, and far from being small and insignificant entities dwarfed by the immense astrophysical structures of the galaxy, in terms of information we are the equal of any of them, and in terms of significance, their whole rationale.

It should give us pause to consider that we are in some sense part of a symmetry group of light - the biological information group - since all the vertices of Fig. 5 actually do transform into one another through evolutionary time. More than this, the entire material system, as we have seen in the previous diagrams, is derived entirely from a conserved set of light's symmetry debts, manifest in a form which we embody and experience but clearly do not yet completely understand, and which must be repaid in full at some future time. (See: The Human Connection".)