Author David Cooperrider suggests in his book Appreciative Inquiry, ‘Human systems grow in the direction of what they persistently ask questions about, and this propensity is strongest and most sustainable when the means and ends of inquiry are positively correlated.

Before Schrödinger delivered his Dublin lectures, which were published a year later in the form of a short book called What Is Life?, biology was an orphan among the natural sciences. Up until then, most scientists were content to accept that life operated according to its own strange and distinctive rules. Schrödinger, however, was of the view that biology should be adopted as a fully fledged member of the scientific family.

George Armitage Miller lived in a world of words. Every object that fell into his vision and every word he heard instantly set off a cascade of associations, synonyms, and antonyms that flashed through his mind. A psychologist with an interest in understanding the cognitive processes behind language and information processing, he founded the Center for Cognitive Studies at Harvard. And, in 1980, long before digital networks were part of everyday life, he was the driving force behind the development of Wordnet, a still functioning online database that details the myriad lexical relationships between most words in the English language.

But for a while in 1983 he was stuck looking for a word to describe the relationship between living organisms and information. A fan of Erwin Schrödinger’s What Is Life, Miller was certain that Schrödinger had left something important out of his definition of life. In order for living organisms to consume free energy per entropy’s demands, Miller insisted, they had to be able to find it, and to find it they had to have the ability to acquire, interpret, and then respond to useful information about the world around them. It meant, in other words, that a significant proportion of the energy they captured was expended seeking out information using their senses and then processing it in order to find and capture more energy.

The book Be Here Now by Ram Dass was published in 1971, when I was nineteen, and it had a major impact on me. It presented the possibility of finding a meaningful life by going beyond conventional ways of seeing ourselves and the world. I was introduced to the concept of not being an expert, of beginner’s mind, through what Ram Dass called “the most exquisite paradox” — as soon as you give it all up, you can have it all. When you relax thinking that you already know, there are many more possibilities.

A funny thing happens to people in a community of truth. Somebody has a thought. The thought is like a little circuit in their brain. When someone shares a thought and others receive it, then suddenly the same circuit is in two brains. When a whole classroom is considering the thought, it’s like the same circuit in twenty-five brains. Our minds are

intermingling. The cognitive scientist Douglas Hofstadter calls these circuits loops. He argues that when we communicate, and loops are flowing through different brains, we are thinking as one shared organism, anticipating each other, finishing each other’s sentences. “Empathy” is not a strong enough word to describe this intermingling. It is not one person, one body, one brain that marks this condition, Hofstadter argues, but the interpenetration of all minds in ceaseless conversation with each other.