Cells in embryos make their way across a steep “developmental landscape” to their eventual fate.
Embryonic cells continuously monitor their changing surroundings and make small corrective adjustments, optimizing as development proceeds, locking in on their planned identity relatively late.
Processing positional information makes genes variously switch on and off throughout the embryo, giving cells distinct identities based on their location. (Some cells unfortunately take the wrong paths and are unable to get back on track.)
All the information is there in the landscape and processing that information effectively may be the phenomenon that makes a bunch of loosely stuck-together atoms behave like the thing we call life.
Had I been like a man living in a wood from which he knows there is no exit, I could have lived; but I was like one lost in a wood who, horrified at having lost his way, rushes about wishing to find the road.”
Zeus would sometimes come down from Olympus and walk incognito amongst mortals. Eventually he would be recognized and people would cry out “Hey! Zeus!” …
Is it worthwhile in any individual case to look for the meaning of a dream, supposing that dreams have any meaning at all and that this meaning can be proved?
Steps of City Hall
The psyche is the most baffling phenomenon with which the scientific mind has ever had to deal. Although we must assume that all psychic phenomena are somehow, in the broadest sense, causally dependent, remember that causality is no more than a statistical truth.
