  A major challenge when describing the origin of life is to explain "how
instructional information control systems emerge naturally and spontaneously
from mere molecular dynamics". So far, no one has clarified how information
control emerged ab initio and how primitive control mechanisms in life might
have evolved, becoming increasingly refined. Based on recent experimental
results showing that chemical computation does not require the presence of
life-related chemistry, we elucidate the origin and early evolution of
information handling by chemical automata, from information processing
(computation) to information storage (memory) and information transmission
(communication) and later digital messengers, covering at the same time its
syntactic, semantic and pragmatic flavors. In contrast to other theories that
assume the existence of initial complex structures, our representation starts
from trivial self-replicators whose interaction leads to the arising of more
powerful molecular machines. By describing precisely the primordial transitions
in chemistry-based computation, our framework is capable of explaining the
above-mentioned gaps and can be translated to other models of computation,
which allow us to explore biological phenomena at multiple spatial and temporal
scales. Being compatible with the free energy principle, we have developed a
computational enactivist theoretical framework that could be able to describe
from the origin of life to high-level cognition, as if it were a purely
constructivist narrative. At the end of our manuscript, we propose some ways to
extend our ideas, including experimental validation of our theory (both in
vitro and in silico).
