Self propagation/ replication is endemic in the universe. Certain patterns have this natural characteristic (common subatomic particles, photons, etc). This is evident because there exists things to observe, the universe is not just chaos. Every one of these things that exists has some sort of 'pattern'.
As the wave function of everything exists on a continuum, This pattern contains an infinite amount of information. There exists several distinct 'patterns' containing infinite amounts of information that when projected onto our three space can propogate themselves (exist through time). These patterns are the different particles that we know to exist.
We also know that these patterns within the same classification can contain different information from each other. For example, two distinct electrons can have different energies, spin states, etc.

Say we abstract this pattern as a infinitely long vector occupying an infinitesimal 3D space. We assign two rules to the contents of these vectors:
1) The contents can randomly change within a margin of error (we recognize this as the fundamental nature of the universe)

2) Contents of neighboring vectors are an influencing factor

3) contents of vectors are more likely to be empty than have any other value (basic statistical thermodynamics)