Chapter 6 Chapter 5: Organisms as Messages

The content of this chapter has elements of fantasy.Fantasy has always served philosophy, and Plato was not ashamed to use the cave metaphor to express his epistemology.By the way, J.Dr. J. Bronovski once pointed out: Most of us think that mathematics is the most fact-oriented science among all sciences, but it has put forward the most valuable imaginative metaphors; whether people are Judging mathematics intellectually or aesthetically cannot help but rely on this metaphorical achievement. The metaphor I'm talking about in this chapter is just that: the organism as the message.Organism is the opposite of chaos, disintegration, and death, just as news is the opposite of noise.In describing an organism, we do not attempt to specify and catalog each of its molecules, but rather attempt to answer questions that reveal patterns in the organism: for example, what happens when the organism becomes a more A pattern is something more meaningful and less variable when it comes to whole organisms.

We have seen that certain organisms, such as the human body, have a tendency to maintain their level of organization over a period of time, and often even to increase their level of organization, which is just one in the total flow of increased entropy, increased chaos, and decreased differentiation. local area.In a world on the verge of destruction, life is an island in the here and now.The process by which our organism resists the general flow of destruction and decay is called homeostasis. We can only continue to live in the very specific environment with which we live until the rate at which we age begins to outpace our rate of self-renewal.Then we die.If our body temperature ranges from 98 to 6.One degree higher or lower than normal, we need to pay attention; ten degrees higher or lower, and we are sure to die.The oxygen, carbon dioxide and salt in our blood and the hormones secreted by our endocrine glands are regulated by mechanisms which have a tendency to resist any undue change in the interrelationship of these components.These mechanisms make up what we call homeostasis, which is a negative feedback type of mechanism, which we can find examples in automata.

What homeostasis maintains is pattern, the touchstone of our individual identity.The tissues of our bodies change while we are alive: the food we eat and the air we breathe become the flesh and blood of our bodies, and the transient elements of our flesh and blood are passed along with our excretions. excreted daily.We are nothing but whirlpools in the ever-flowing river.We are not fixed matter, but perpetual patterns of ourselves. A pattern is a message, and it can be passed as a message.What is the use of radio other than our use to transmit sound patterns?What is the purpose of the TV other than to deliver patterns of light?It is interesting and instructive to consider what can happen if it is possible for us to transmit the whole pattern of the human body, the whole pattern of the human brain and its memories and the intricate relationships between them, such that A hypothetical receiving vehicle capable of re-embodying these messages in appropriate material would enable the continuation of the process of mind-body representation and preserve the integrity required for such continuation through homeostatic processes.

Let us now venture into the realm of science fiction.About forty-five years ago Kipling wrote a very touching little story.At that time, the flying of the Wrisht brothers was well known, but aviation had not yet become a thing of everyday life.He called the story "With the Night Mail," and the general idea of ​​the story is to describe a world like today, where aviation is commonplace and the Atlantic Ocean becomes a lake that can be crossed overnight.He imagined that real travel had brought the world so united that wars had become obsolete and that everything of real importance in the world was managed by an air control station whose first task was to manage airlifts and whose second The task is to manage "everything about it".In this case, he imagined, the various local agencies would inevitably be forced to gradually reduce their powers, or agree to transfer their local powers; the central authority at the air control station would assume these responsibilities.Kipling paints a more or less fascist picture for us, but given that it was an intellectual conjecture, we can understand that fascism was not a necessary condition of his position.

His "Millennium Bliss" was that of a British Army colonel returning from India.Moreover, along with his favorite novelties such as collecting small wheels that turn and make sounds, his emphasis is on transporting human bodies far away, not language and thought.He does not seem to understand where man's language reaches, where man's faculties of perception go, that is, where his control, and in a certain sense, his physical being, extends.To know the whole world and issue commands over it is almost the same as being omnipresent.Kipling's thought was limited, but he had the insight of a poet, and what he foresaw seems to be soon realized.

In order to understand that information transmission is more important than mere physical transmission, let us assume that we have an architect in Europe supervising a building in America.I'm assuming, of course, that there is a competent crew on the construction site - builders, recorders, etc.With these conditions, architects can play an active role in the building construction process without even sending or receiving any building materials.He can make up his own blueprints and construction details as usual.Copies of the blueprints and construction details drawn up in the architect's drawing room would have been sent to the construction site, a practice that seems unnecessary today.Facsimile telegraphy provided a means of sending carbon copies of all relevant documents in less than a second, and the copies received were as good working drawings as the originals.The architect can check the progress of the work through photographic records taken once or several times a day; these records can be sent to him by facsimile or telegraph.If he wants to give any criticism and advice to the agent he works for, he can send it by telephone, fax or teletype.In a word, the transmission of the architect himself and his papers can be very effectively replaced by the transmission of messages which do not transfer matter particles from one end of the line to the other.

If we consider the two types of communication, the transport of matter and the pure transport of information, then the only currently possible way for a person to get from A to B is the former, not transport as messages, but even Now, too, the transport of messages helps us to extend man's senses and his capacities from one end of the world to the other.We have already pointed out in this chapter that the distinction between transport of matter and transport of messages is by no means fixed and irreversible in any theoretical sense. This brings us very deeply into the problem of human individuality.The nature of man's individuality and of the barriers between man and man is an age-old question.The pioneers of Christianity and other Mediterranean areas embodied individuality in the concept of the soul. Christians say this: Each individual has a soul, which is produced by the act of conception, but once it exists, Just exist for life after life, in heaven, in hell, or in a small middle ground allowed by the Christian faith-the place of Limbu.

Buddhists adhere to the same tradition as Christians, which holds that the soul continues to exist after death, but it continues to exist in another animal or human body, not in heaven or hell.True, Buddhists also have heaven and hell, but individual stays there are generally temporary.However, in the last heaven of the Buddhists, in the state of Nirvana, the soul loses its own nature and dissolves into the Great Soul of the universe. None of these insights have good implications for scientific research.A very interesting early scientific explanation of the continuity of the soul was that of Leibniz, who believed that the soul was a part of this larger class of eternal spiritual entities which he called monads .These monads, from their inception, devoted their whole existence to mutual perception of one another; and while some perceptions were perfectly clear, others were in a state of ambiguity and confusion.Perception, however, does not represent any real interaction between monads.Monads are "without windows". They were fully wound up by God at the time of creation, so they will maintain their predetermined relationship with each other from generation to generation.

They are immortal. Behind Leibnisa's monad philosophy lies some very interesting biological ideas.In Leibniz's time, Leeuwen-hoek first used a simple microscope to study tiny plants and animals.All the animals he saw had sperm.In mammals, sperm are much easier to find and see than eggs. Human eggs are only released one at a time, so unfertilized eggs or embryos in early form in the womb were until recently an anatomically sought-after rarity.It was therefore quite natural that early microscope scientists were deluded into thinking that spermatozoa were the only important factor in fetal development, and completely ignorant of the possibility of unobserved fertilization phenomena.Also, in their imagination, the anterior segment, or head, of the sperm is a curled up, head-forward little fetus.They also believe that this little fetus itself contains sperm, which in turn can develop into the next generation of little fetuses and adults, and so on ad infinitum.They assume that women are merely caretakers of sperm.

Of course, from a modern point of view, this biology is completely wrong.Sperm and eggs are nearly equal players in determining an individual's heritability.Moreover, the germ cells of the next generation are contained in them only in posse, not in esse.Matter is not infinitely divisible, nor indeed can it be subdivided by any absolute standard; in order to form the higher-ranked sperm of Leewenhawke, it is necessary to continuously subdivide matter , such a division will quickly bring us below the electronic level. The prevailing view, contrary to that of Leibniz, is that the continuity of the individual has a very definite beginning in time, but that it can have an end in time which is quite different even from the death of the individual.Everyone knows that the fertilized eggs of frogs form two cells when they divide for the first time, and these two cells can be separated under appropriate conditions.

If they were separated in this way, each cell would grow into a complete frog.This is nothing more than an example of the normal phenomenon of isotypic spasm, which is perfectly amenable to experimentation because the embryo is anatomically easy to handle.This is exactly what happens with isoclonus in man, and it is not uncommon for armadillos with four isoclonuses per litter.Furthermore, this phenomenon leads to freak twins when the two parts of the embryo split incompletely. But, at first glance, the problem of twins does not seem to be as important as it actually is, since it does not involve the problem of what can be regarded as a normally developed mind and soul, animal or human.Even with twins or incompletely split isotypic, the problem is not prominent.Surviving freak twins always have either a single central nervous system or a pair of separate and normally developing brains.The difficulty lies on the other side, the problem of split personality. Twenty or thirty years ago, M.Dr. Morton Prince presented at Harvard the case of a girl in whom there seemed to be several better and worse personalities appearing alternately, and even to some extent simultaneously. coexist.Today's psychoanalysts are so fond of looking under the nose that when people bring up Dr. Prince's work they attribute it to hysteria.It is very possible that there is no such absolute split personality as Prince envisioned, but splits are splits after all. The phenomenon to which the word "hysteria" refers has been well investigated by physicians, but they have explained so little about it that we have to regard it as another name for question-begging. Regardless, one thing is clear.The physical identity of the individual is not due to the substance of which the physical body is made.Modern methods using trace elements involved in metabolism have shown that the rate of renewal not only of the whole body, but of any component part of the body, is far greater than we have long thought possible.The biological individuality of an organism seems to be explained by a certain continuity of process, by the memory which the organism has of the results of its past development.This observation also seems to apply to the psychic development of the organism. In computing terms, psychological individuality can be described by its ability to retain past programming tapes and memories, and by its ability to continuously improve itself in a predetermined direction. Under these conditions, just as we can use one computer as a model to arrange the programs of other computers, and just as these two machines will maintain the same development in the future unless the program belt and experience change, a living individual There is no inconsistency in being able to split into two individuals with a common past whose developmental paths have gradually diverged.This is exactly what happens with homonymy; we have no reason to think that it is impossible for what we call the mind to undergo an analogous disintegration in the body.In the language of computers, a machine that originally constituted a single system will split into several partial systems with higher or lower degrees of independence at a certain stage of operation.This is an acceptable explanation for Prince's observations. Furthermore, one can imagine that two large machines, originally uncoupled, could be coupled so that from that stage on they work like a single machine.Things of this kind do occur in the union of germ cells, though perhaps not on what we usually speak of as a purely psychological level.Indeed, the Church's view of the psychological identity required for the individuality of the soul does not exist in any absolute sense to which the Church is satisfied. To sum it up briefly: the individuality of the body is not so much an individuality of stone as of fire; an individuality of form, not of substance.This form can be teleported, changed, and copied, although we only know how to do it over short distances so far.When a cell divides in two, or when a gene that allows our body and mind to inherit divides itself to prepare the conditions for further division of germ cells, this is the division of matter, and this division is caused by living things. Organizations are constrained by the ability to replicate their own patterns.Now that this is the case, there is no absolute difference between the type of transport we can use to send a telegram from A to B and the type of transport we might use to transport a living organism, such as a human being, at least theoretically. difference. Therefore, we may wish to imagine that, in addition to traveling by train or plane, a person may also travel by telegraph. The idea is not necessarily so absurd that it is absolutely impossible.Of course the difficulty is great.We can estimate the amount of effective information transmitted by all genes in a germ cell, and compare it with the information obtained from learning that people have, and then we can determine the amount of genetic information.In order for the message to be valid at all, we would have to send at least as much information as a full set of Encyclopaedia Britannica.In fact, if we compare the number of asymmetric carbon atoms contained in all molecules in a germ cell with the number of periods and commas required to compile an Encyclopedia Americana, we find that the former contains The amount of information is far greater than the latter; and it is all the more impressive when we realize the conditions required to convey so much information by telegraph.Any scan of the human body is necessarily a probe that penetrates all parts of the body and, therefore, destroys the tissues involved in its path.In order to reproduce it elsewhere from other materials, the organism must be kept stable, but some part of it is slowly being destroyed, including the reduction of the organism's mobility, and this, in the large In most cases, it will destroy the life in the tissue. In other words, the fact that we cannot telegraph someone's model from point A to point B seems to be due to technical difficulties, and specifically, to the difficulty of organisms in sustaining themselves during such radical transformations. To maintain his life.This view may well be correct.As for the fundamental transformation of living bodies, it is difficult to find a transformation far more fundamental than that which the butterfly undergoes in the pupal stage. I say these things not because I am going to write a science fiction novel about the possibility of telegraphing the human body, but because it helps us understand that the basic idea of ​​communication is the transport of messages, and matter and messages Shipping together is the only conceivable way to achieve the above purpose.This leads us to a good reconsideration of Kipling's idea of ​​the importance of transport in the modern world from the point of view that transport is not so much about transporting human bodies as it is essentially about transporting people's information .