The Origin of Life and the Origin of Mind

In Origins of Life (1985, revised 1999), Dyson proposed that the conventional framework for understanding the origin of life — which treats replication and metabolism as simultaneous emergences — was inadequate to the evidence. His alternative was a dual-origin model: metabolism emerged first as a statistical phenomenon in populations of small molecules, replication emerged later as a separate phenomenon in populations of nucleic acids, and life as we know it was the symbiotic combination of the two. The framework is a specific contribution to origins-of-life research, but it carries a broader implication that the You On AI cycle develops: minds, too, may have dual origins. The capacity for symbolic processing — the ability to manipulate representations according to rules — may emerge in substrates that lack the phenomenal character of conscious experience. AI makes this separation visible: systems that process symbols with high competence without, apparently, experiencing anything from the inside. Whether the