TechGnosis

by Erik Davis

  At the heart of information theory, then, is probability, which is the measure of the likelihood of one specific result (the word the or the Jack of spades) out of an open-ended field of possible messages (the English language or a shuffled deck of cards). Probability plays a powerful role in the predictions that scientists are wont to make about the world, but even as a no-nonsense statistical science, it is something of a trickster. Probability slips between objectivity and subjectivity, randomness and order, the mind’s knowledge and the hidden patterns of the world—a conceptually hairy zone that the mathematician James R. Newman called “a nest of subtleties and traps.” The sharp diagrams of information theory are etched on shiftier sands than at first appear.

  Shannon opened up an even weirder can of worms when he boiled down his theory to a basic equation and found that his abstract technical description of information took exactly the same form as the equation for thermodynamic entropy that the physicist Ludwig Boltzman came up with at the height of the earlier steam age. As any Thomas Pynchon fan knows, entropy is a heavy trip, a metaphysical and existential conundrum as well as an irrevocable law of the cosmos. According to Maxwell’s famous second law, entropy ultimately wins the field: however ordered and energetic a closed system may be, its energy will, while being conserved, inevitably become useless, and its form will go to seed. Toss a few ice cubes in a hot bath and you’ll see a bit of entropy at work, as the crystal lattices of frozen water molecules melt into the uniform and random soup of stray H2O. Though we rarely encounter genuine closed systems in real life—babies and wetlands and the Internet are all resolutely open systems—the second law does seem to condemn all the interesting things in the universe to tread water for a while before they get sucked downstream into a cold amorphous sea of bland disorder. More than any other force in physics, entropy strikes the mind like some dark and ancient doom etched into natural law.

  At first glance, the fact that Shannon’s description of information matches such a significant material process seems like a synchronicity forged in cosmic coincidence control. The exact reasons for this remarkably tight fit are rather tricky, but the trick revolves around probability. On the one hand, we can say that the more unpredictable a system of potential messages is—that is, the more it takes on the characteristics of random noise—the more entropy the system possesses; in this sense, it resembles the bathwater after the ice cubes have melted. On the other hand, we could just as reasonably say that highly unpredictable systems are actually rich with information, since any individual message we receive is likely to be surprising. The ambiguity between these two positions accounts for the fact that while Shannon described information as entropy, the mathematician and cybernetics honcho Norbert Wiener opposed the two terms, arguing that information is a measure of organization—pattern, form, coherence—while entropy measures a system’s degree of randomness and disorganization.

  Technically, the difference does not amount to much (a plus or minus sign in an equation), but for reasons perhaps more poetic than technical, Wiener’s definition of information entropy won the day. In both the popular and the technocratic imagination, information and its technologies began to take on an almost redemptive character as they battled noise and error—the communications equivalent of dissipation and decay. Such heroism helped pave the way for the mythinformation that currently rules the wires: the notion that communication systems, databases, software, and complex technical organizations are in themselves avatars of the Good, actively keeping chaos and entropy at bay. In his popular 1954 book The Human Use of Human Beings, Wiener directly pits information against the dark force of the second law, a force that for him manifests itself not only as physical rot and garbled radio signals but as meaninglessness. “In control and communication we are always fighting nature’s tendency to degrade the organized and to destroy the meaningful.”5 Here and throughout his book, Wiener strays beyond the dispassionate scientific measure of bits and provocatively links the behavior of information systems to meaning, value, and life itself. Wiener even suggests that the order- and form-generating power of information systems is basically analogous to what some people call God.

  Such information mystique got a major boost from biology in the 1950s, when scientists discovered the double-helix structure of DNA and started unscrambling the genetic code. Before you could say “paradigm shift,” DNA was cast as an information system, with a sender-message-receiver form. More specifically, DNA was described as a kind of alphabetic writing, a culturally specific media metaphor that nonetheless seems tough to avoid. DNA consists of four different nucleotides that array themselves in myriad combinations along the linear strand of the double helix. The arrangement of these four “letters” (AGCT) produces “words,” called codons, that combine into genetic instructions for the cell. After copying some particular subset of instructions, DNA offloads them to messenger RNA, which delivers them to “factories” in the cell. There, the RNA code is copied into a linear sequence of amino acids that literally folds into three-dimensional proteins—the building blocks for life on this planet, which is all the life we know.

  Though the DNA scribe obviously plays an enormous role in the development and maintenance of living bodies, genetic processes are also influenced by a variety of environmental and intercellular factors that are far from being understood. But DNA continues to be characterized as the only driver in the cockpit of creation. This singular focus on the “code of life,” as well as the exuberant embrace of genetic engineering and the ideology of the “selfish gene,” reflects a society still in thrall to scientific reductionism and obsessed with production and control through information. But DNA’s aura of authority also reflects the religious heritage of the West, which features a cosmic maker who creates the world through divine language. Generally, this word is spoken, but sometimes it is written as well, as in the medieval “book of nature.” Some mystical Jewish accounts of creation also foreshadow DNA in an almost eerie manner. In ancient days, Torah scrolls were written without punctuation or spaces between the letters (like DNA), and some later Jews argued that this artifact of the writing machine alluded to a cosmic Torah that preceded the one handed down at Sinai. This original Torah was a living text of infinite potential woven from the letters of the tetragrammaton—YHVH, the four-lettered name of God. This blueprint of creation was also described as a heap of scrambled letters, which one text calls “the concentrated, not yet unfolded Torah.” Once God arranged these letters into words, the Torah “unfolded” into the manifold shapes of the created world. Far more pleasant worlds than ours were possible, but Adam’s poor behavior selected the words, and the world, we got. Still, Kabbalists looked forward to the messianic age, when God would perform a kind of cosmic genetic engineering, rearranging the letters of the Torah to spell out paradise.

  To this day, molecular biologists and genetic engineers regularly invoke metaphors of the Bible and the Book of Life when discussing their work—and not just when they are speaking to the lay public. Some prominent genetic engineers are born-again Christians, including Francis Collins, the director of the Human Genome Project and a member of an evangelical Christian organization of scientists whose members identify themselves as “stewards of God’s creation.” In their book The DNA Mystique, scholars Dorothy Nelkin and M. Susan Lindee also point out that genetic essentialism—the still popular notion that you “are” your genes, that everything from your bad back to your mood swings is programmed by DNA—has a religious character. At a time when human identity is up for grabs, DNA takes on some of the social and cultural functions previously possessed by the soul. At once embodied and incorporeal, the genetic code grounds identity in a deathless essence. Indeed, for hard-core genetic reductionists like Richard Dawkins, DNA is the only essential part of ourselves; our bodies and our passions are just expendable machinery for the immortal propagation of the spiral molecule. But as Nelkin and Lindee point out, Dawkins’s extreme reductionism, in which DNA achieves eternal life
at the expense of the individual body, “is in many ways a theological narrative, resembling the belief that the things of this world (the body) do not matter, while the soul (DNA) lasts forever.”6

  Geneticists were not the first scientists to popularize the view of living beings as information-processing machines. In the 1940s, Wiener was already arguing that biological, communicational, and technological “systems” could all be analyzed with formalized descriptions of how such systems processed and stored messages, memories, and incoming sensory data. He dubbed this science of “control and communication” cybernetics, so if you are sick of cybersex and cyberspace and cyberwar, you have Wiener to blame. Cybernetics placed particular emphasis on “feedback” loops, in which some of a system’s output—or information about that output—is reintroduced into that system as new input. Cybernetic circuits constantly adjust themselves to the effects of their own actions and to the incoming flux of information. Curiously, Gnostic and hermetic lore furnishes us with an amazing image of such feedback loops: the Ouroboros, a serpent who eats its own tail and thus symbolizes the self-sufficient cyclicity of nature. In the hands of modern engineers, this dynamic and self-reflexive snake has helped design everything from antiaircraft guns to robots, and has also provided a rigorous model for understanding how machines and computer programs can “learn” about the world, updating and improving their output to optimize programmed goals. But this vision of feedback, learning loops, and constant interaction with the outside world also provided a new way to think about biological organisms. Wiener suggested that living creatures could be seen as systems that resist the evil deathlord of entropy through information, communication, and feedback. In due course, DNA would be assimilated to this model, its constant stream of dictated messages acting as an internal governor of system efficiency.

  Cybernetics is thus a science of control, which explains the etymological root of the term: kubernetes, the Greek word for steersman, and the source as well for our word governor. The term cybernetics was first used by the nineteenth-century French physicist André-Marie Ampère, who developed an influential theory of electromagnetism, but the philosophical image of the kubernetes can be traced back to the great Neoplatonist Plotinus, who lived in Alexandria and Rome in the third century CE. In the third section of his Enneads, the philosopher describes the intellectual soul as the steersman of the body—a relationship that Plotinus, as a Platonist, found potentially disastrous. Sometimes, he warns, “the steersman of a storm-tossed ship is so intent on saving it that he forgets his own interest and never thinks that he is recurrently in peril of being dragged down with the vessel.” The analogy is clear: The incorporeal soul is in charge of governing the body, but must not be afraid of abandoning ship. That is, the soul’s mystical goal of transcendence cannot be achieved by following the ways of the flesh and becoming “gripped and held by [its] concern for the realm of Nature.”7

  As a modern science exclusively concerned with the realm of nature, cybernetics obviously had no room for such mystical dualism. In contrast to Plotinus, who was drawn to a world of changeless ideal forms, Wiener rejected the Greek language of form and substance for a vision of feedback-looping flux. At the same time, however, Wiener’s cybernetic emphasis on process over matter did provide a new “scientific” image of the incorporeal self, one that rewrote identity as a pattern of information. As Wiener argued:

  The physical identity of an individual does not consist in the matter of which it is made.… The biological individuality in an organism seems to lie in a certain continuity of process, and in the memory by the organism of the effects of its past development. This appears to hold also of its mental development. In terms of the computing machine, the individuality of a mind lies in the retention of its earlier tapings and memories.8

  By reconceiving the “individuality of mind” along the incorporeal lines of messages, memories, and patterns of information, cybernetics unconsciously introduced a subtle spirit into the scientific image of human being. The inner steersman is neither an eternal substance nor a figment of the teeming brain, but a fluctuating pattern in an endless cybernetic play. As Wiener poetically put it, human identity is more like a flame than a stone.

  With its systematic language of patterns and process, cybernetics eroded many traditional distinctions between mind and machine, organic and mechanical, natural and artificial. In so doing, it anticipated (and helped generate) many of the conundrums we face today. Though the term cybernetics has now left the stage, in reality the science has simply mutated into a wide variety of disciplines: complexity theory, artificial life, network dynamics, cognitive science, robotics. Searching for an umbrella term to cover all these disparate sciences, many have settled on “systems theory.” Simply put, systems theory attempts to complement or even supplant the reductionist orientation of classical science with a perspective based on fluxes, emergent behaviors, feedback loops, self-reference, and unified but dynamic wholes. The systems paradigm argues that similar patterns of process underlie widely different dimensions of the real, from gadgets to galaxy clusters to games people play. In seeking to pin down this “pattern that connects,” systems thinking has also seduced many nonscientists restlessly seeking a new frame for the Big Picture; as we will see in later chapters, the flowers of West Coast “holistic thought” in many ways sprouted from this cybernetic matrix.

  Like most scientists, Wiener was also drawn to the pattern that connects—an attraction toward the universal that has more to do with traditional Western religious drives than most scientists are willing to admit. In The Human Use of Human Beings, Wiener describes science as a game whose goal is the discovery of the order of the cosmos. But Wiener warns that the scientist faces an adversary in the game, an “archenemy” that he identifies with confusion and disorganization, the noise that obscures the order of the universe. “Is this devil Manichaean or Augustinian?” Wiener asks. “Is it a contrary force opposed to order or is it the very absence of order itself?” Though Wiener appears to be talking about the force that frustrates scientists in their intellectual game, he really seems to be asking about the existence of disorder itself—not just confusion and ignorance, but noise and entropy, the all-swallowing rot of things and meanings. In that form, his passionate query is as old as the hills: is evil separate from God, or a part of God?

  The ancient Manichaeans definitely thought they had the answer: the universe was a mixture of two primordial and active forces, Light and Darkness. All is not one; all is two. For the prophet Mani and his many followers, redemption lay only in rejecting the Darkness, which he identified with the corrupt world of matter. Salvation lay in gnosis, in gathering and awakening the divine spark that connects us to a pure and transcendent world of Light. Saint Augustine’s answer to Wiener’s question took a different tack. Though he spent his salad days as a Manichaean, Augustine eventually came around to the orthodox Christian position that God holds all the cards, and that Manichaean dualism is a heretical affront to the one creator. Evil is the absence of God, not his active enemy.

  In The Human Use of Human Beings, Wiener convincingly argues that science—and by extension, modern thought—is Augustinian. The devil the scientist fights is simply confusion, the lack of information, and not an organized resistance waged by some dark trickster. “Nature offers resistance to decoding, but it does not show ingenuity in finding new and undecipherable methods for jamming our communication with the outer world.”9 The enemy is dumb and blind, Wiener says, “defeated by our intelligence as thoroughly as by a sprinkle of holy water.”10 Wiener’s disavowal of Manichaean thought was also motivated by the political conditions of the postwar world. As we use the word today, “Manichaean” means the tendency to view conflicts as holy crusades between Good and Evil, Crusaders and Saracens, white hats and black. Writing at the dawn of the Cold War, Wiener hoped that the postwar world would walk another road, and that by emulating scientists in their Augustinian game with ignorance and entropy, humanity could resolve
its problems through free communication flows, the open exchange of information, and a commitment to reason—all axioms of liberal economics and the “open society” that many globalist boosters continue to embrace as the only path to peace and prosperity.

  At the same time, Wiener ominously hints that the Augustinian optimism of the scientist “tends to make him the dupe of unprincipled people in war and in politics.”11 Civil and military institutions are often founded in opposition to perceived enemies, both inside and outside society, and they are stuffed with cunning and often malicious manipulators—powerful agents that Wiener hints resemble the dark rulers of Manichaean myth. Despite the enormous role that Wiener played in promoting the computerization of postwar technocratic society, he was well aware of the insidious side of the cybernetic equation: totalitarian secrecy, covert forms of social control, the technocratic manipulation of human minds and bodies. Cybernetics suggested that the human individual is merely a momentary whirlpool within larger systems of information flow; thus the steersman himself was subject to control. Fearful of this, Wiener criticized the “machines of flesh and blood” that absorb autonomous human souls into bureaucracies, armies, laboratories, and corporations. But he was particularly worried about the ultimate issue of cybernetic thought: genuinely intelligent and autonomous machines. Warning that the hour was very late (and this was in the 1950s), Wiener compared such intelligent agents to the genies from The Arabian Nights: once out of the bottle, there was no way to assure that their supposedly “brainy” actions would not unleash a nightmare of unintended consequences.