SHANNON+WEINER+SCHROEDINGER

toc Afterthought 2004: Two of the giants of quantum math, Schrödinger and Dirac, both spent time at the Institute for Advanced Studies in Dublin. Schrödinger, in fact, wrote his most important nonmathemetical book there -- //What Is Life?// [1948], in which he defined life as a function of negative entropy. This thought seemed so radical and far-out that nobody began to grasp it until Wiener and Shannon showed that information also behaves like negative entropy. Information = that part of a message you didn't expect; the unpredictable part.

 Or as Wiener once said, great poetry contains high information and political speeches contain virtually none.

 And therefore Life = negative entropy = high information = surprise and initial confusion = tuning-in the previously not-tuned-in.....

 Got it?

[|**The Celtic Roots of Quantum Theory**] [| By Robert Anton Wilson]

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[|SCHROEDINGER'S CAT TRILOGY]
"The main plots throughout these books are many. One follows Markoff Chaney, a midget, and his pranks played on the world that continuously screws him over. Most of his pranks are played on Dr. Dashwood, of Orgasm Research. However, the most important plot line follows the path of one Hugh Crane which may or may not be this Universe's Hagbard Celine; a character that is an obvious representation of Wilson himself.

Another follows an "Ithyphallic Eidolon", a penis removed from a [|transsexual] woman named Epicene (post-surgery, Mary Margaret) Wildebloode. She puts it on display on her mantelpiece, and it gets stolen. It passes through the vicinity of almost every character in the series at least once. There are dozens of [|conspiracy] theories, [|strange loops], [|satire] and [|paranoia] included within those pages. In addition, there are numerous references to other works and occasional outright appropriation of characters from them (including cameos by [|Captain Ahab] and [|Lemuel Gulliver], among others).

[]

WHAT IS LIFE? BY ERWIN SCHROEDINGER PDF: []

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INTRODUCTION
"In this formulation, information begins to appear as structurally similar to Schrödinger's onto theological concept of life, which also comes to our attention through the mediation of a code-script."--Steve Garlick

Code-Scripting the Body: Sex and the Onto-Theology of Bioinformatics by Steve Garlick, seems to me to be a 'gem' hiding away somewhere in the vast virtual academic library waiting for a search engine to strike up 'Claude Shannon' and 'Norbert Wiener' and ;Schroedinger'.

I personally never heard of Steve Garlick before this article, I am attracted to his name though as a near anagram of Agarick without the 'L' and so here I realigned his fine words, with the upmost respect, and re-present compressed 'illuminated highlights' from the essay I highly recommend.

Code-Scripting the Body: Sex and the Onto-Theology of Bioinformatics by Steve Garlick
Remixed and annotated by Steve 'fly agaric 23' Pratt. For ETTT.

"onto-theological" from Heidegger, who uses it to refer to the essential character of metaphysical thinking insofar as it represents beings in terms of both "the ground that is common to all beings as such" (onto-logic) and "with respect to the highest being which accounts for everything" (theo-logic).

In this new physics of life,[| Schrödinger]'s influential contribution is the idea of a "code-script," which he likens to an "all-penetrating mind" that always already knows the future development of the organism.

The term "code" implies that there is an underlying systematicity to nature, or a technic that is fundamental to life itself. Yet a code is also something that conjures up secrecy.

Presumably, the secret possessed by a genetic code-script concerns the origin of the natural order that sustains the life of the organism as it battles thermodynamic entropy.

"It seems neither adequate nor possible to dissect into discrete 'properties' the pattern of an organism which is essentially a unity, a 'whole'"--Schroedinger.

Schrödinger's conclusion is as follows: ...I in the widest meaning of the word, that is to say, every conscious mind who has ever said or felt "I"-am the person, if any, who controls the "motion of the atoms" according to the Laws of Nature.

Within a cultural milieu where certain conceptions. . . have been limited and specialized, it is daring to give this conclusion the simple wording that it requires. In Christian terminology to say: "Hence I am God Almighty" sounds both blasphemous and lunatic.

But please disregard these connotations for the moment and consider whether the above inference is not the closest a biologist can get to proving God and immortality at one stroke.

The conscious mind may be that which allows us to recognize our identity, but it is not the essence of life itself. Indeed,[| Schrödinger] never explicitly defines life in his text.

It appears as a somewhat mysterious, natural force that organizes thermodynamically open systems, and which evades the tendency towards maximum entropy. --- Schrödinger, then, introduces into genetic science the metaphor of the code of life with implicit and interrelated connections to both onto-theology and (hetero)sexual difference.

The way in which this was to be picked up in the emergent discipline of molecular biology depended to a large extent, however, upon the resonance that readers of What is Life? found with two other major intellectual tributaries of the mid-twentieth century: information theory and cybernetics.

At that time, (1940's) Schrödinger was posing the question of life, and of its code-script, in a way that complemented and fed into two other influential contemporary approaches to problems concerning the communication of information and the control of bodies (both mechanical and living): Claude Shannon's information theory, and Norbert Wiener's cybernetic theory.

In this formulation, information begins to appear as structurally similar to Schrödinger's onto theological concept of life, which also comes to our attention through the mediation of a code-script.

The convergence becomes all the more apparent when we consider that, for Shannon and Weaver, the measure of information is defined in relation to entropy, while for Schrödinger (and for the biological tradition more generally), life is defined through an antagonistic relation to the dissipating forces of death.

Thus, in a sense, information theory makes apparent something that was implicit in biological discourse all along. In both cases, the freedom that belongs to information or to life is a product of the entropic disorder t hat sustains-through its opposition-the organization and order to be maintained.

The concept of a (secret) code enables the reproduction and development of life, or the transmission of information, to take place within a context of overall disorganization.

--- The rejection of meaning as a relevant aspect of information theory is a key feature here.

The transmission and reception of a message are conceptualized simply as an engineering problem. Shannon and Weaver insist that, "information must not be confused with meaning. In fact, two messages, one of which is heavily loaded with meaning and the other of which is pure nonsense, can be exactly equivalent, from the present viewpoint, as regards information"

--- Yet insofar as the transmission of biological information comes to be taken as analogous to the reproduction of life, information theory implies a new role for sex within genetic science-one that has proven difficult to reconcile with the onto-theological commitments of earlier biological thought.

-- He was especially concerned with the role of feedback processes in enabling a system to adapt to new circumstances through time.

Systems, whether technological, social, or biological, which incorporate feedback hold the potential for adjusting themselves to deal with changing situations.

Crucially for Wiener, to be effective as feedback the information content of a message must be resolutely defended against attacks of "noise."

Like Schrödinger, he was interested in the implications of quantum theory for the understanding of life, especially in the lack of absolute determinacy that it implies, and for the possibilities it holds for explaining the maintenance of homeostasis.

Rather than the immortality offered by a code-script withdrawn from the thermodynamic flux, however, Wiener believes that the stability of the organism is wholly dependent upon its acquisition and use of reliable information from the world around it.

--- Where Shannon and Weaver associate information value with entropy, Wiener opposes the two.

This divergence in definition is more apparent than decisive for the import of the two theories. The crucial difference actually lies in Wiener's extension of the concept of information in such a way that reintroduces the meaningful content of the message.

While Shannon and Weaver measure information quantitatively in terms of the freedom of choice among potential messages within the communicative situation as whole, Wiener is not prepared to accept such a narrow definition of information. Most notably, by removing the bracketing of meaning from the message, and by associating information with organization, Wiener opens up the communicative system to a return of the onto-theological.

Just as Schrödinger's code-script is the expression of God at the basis of life, Wiener's concept of information evokes a divine origin for organized life.

Again, in the battle of life and death, of order and entropy, we discover the underlying dynamic that shapes the situation of the natural organism or communicative system.

Wiener advocates a new conception of quantum physics that will address the element of chance and contingency in the fabric of the universe.

About this element of chance he writes: "For this random element, this organic incompleteness, is one which without too violent a figure of speech we may consider evil; the negative evil which St Augustine characterizes as incompleteness, rather than the positive malicious evil of the Manichaeans".

Entropy-the tendency towards disorganization and disorder-is the manifestation of evil; it threatens life with a slow descent into total chaos.

Information resists this evil, and therefore is on the side of the good, and, as per Wiener's reference to St Augustine, on the side of God.

Cybernetics is the study of messages that organize and are, at bottom, of divine origin.

-- "A truly singular, unprecedented phenomenon would in some sense make no sense-we would lack the tools of signification necessary to read or interpret it"

By bringing the meaning of the message back into the equation, Wiener may be said to expose the unthought thought of information theory, and we find that this is the secret of a divine origin.

The question is: from whence would the message with the highest possible information value arise?

What is the name that we may give to the source of order and organization, which first informs matter and energy?

Wiener's implicit invocation of God in this place of origin is reflected in the fact that, for him, information and life are identified with meaning: "In control and communication we are always fighting nature's tendency to degrade the organized and to destroy the meaningful".

The fight against evil is one in which the meaning and natural order of life are clearly at stake.

Whereas for Shannon and Weaver the freedom associated with information is sustained by entropy and disorder, Wiener gives voice to the other side of the tension between meaning and information insofar as he posits that entropy or freedom is a threat to life.

--- Might this unconscious connection between sex and the hormonal feedback mechanism that coordinates affective messages be a sign of some greater force or purpose in life?

The concept of genetic information was formalized in 1958 when Francis Crick laid out what was to become the key tenet of molecular biology: the Central Dogma.

This is the idea of a unidirectional flow of information from DNA to RNA to proteins as the fundamental chain lying at the basis of life.

The Central Dogma rejects the cybernetic notion of feedback in favor of an emphasis on the delivery of a message carefully composed at the origin of a causal chain.

In Crick's formulation, which was quickly to become accepted truth, genetic information is self-contained, inviolable, and holds the key to life.

-- we find that information discourse is identified here as a dematerializing force that cannot comprehend the plenitude of nature's materiality.

-- "fundamental reprogramming of the rhetorical software of genetics." -- Concepts of (hetero)sexual difference provide a resolution (however unstable) to the problem of the paradoxical freedom of nature by distributing the divergent desires for control of nature and a subordination to a divine or natural order into separate ontological dimensions of life, implicitly coded as masculine and feminine, respectively.

While cyberscience marshals an informatic discourse that implicitly throws the meaning and stability of natural order into question, the resulting anxiety is repeatedly alleviated by the reaffirmation of (hetero)sexual difference, which functions to ensure the reproduction of order, authority, and the biological knowledge of nature."

//--[|Steve Garlick] is Assistant Professor of sociology at the University of Victoria. His research interests focus on gender, sexuality, and the sociology of knowledge. He is the author of “Organizing Nature: Sex, Philosophy, and the Biological,” forthcoming in Philosophy and Social Criticism, and of “Mendel’s Generation: Molecular Sex and the Informatic Body,” in Body and Society 12.4 (2006): 53-71.//

=[|////What Is Life?////]=

"He continues to explain, in chapter V, that true [|solids], which are also permanent, are [|crystals]. The stability of molecules and crystals is due to the same principles and a molecule might be called "the germ of a solid." On the other hand an [|amorphous] solid, without crystalline structure, should be regarded as a [|liquid] with a very high [|viscosity]. Schrödinger believes the heredity material to be a molecule, which unlike a crystal does not repeat itself. He calls this an aperiodic crystal. The aperiodic nature allows to encode an almost infinite number of possibilities with a small number of atoms. He finally compares this picture with the known facts and finds it in accordance with them. In chapter VI Schrödinger states:

> ...living matter, while not eluding the "laws of physics" as established up to date, is likely to involve "other laws of physics" hitherto unknown, which however, once they have been revealed, will form just as integral a part of science as the former. > He knows that this statement is open to misconception and tries to clarify it. The main principle involved with "order-from-disorder" is the [|second law of thermodynamics], according to which [|entropy] only increases. Schrödinger explains that living matter evades the decay to [|thermodynamical equilibrium] by feeding on [|negative entropy].

PART 2 FEEDBACK:
As Weiner wrote, great poems contain high information, Political speeches contain little.--RAW, Recorsi

To continue I would like to add some reminders of why Schroedinger, Shannon and Weiner are important in the context of RAW, and 'the tale of the tribe'. RAW seemed to me to be contemplating and writing on Schroedinger, Shannon and Weiner, in both his fiction and non-fiction since the late 1950's, some hard motherfucking science, is what I'm saying.

"What underlies the accelerations noted by Henry Adams and Korzybski is nowadays known as the selection of [|negentropy] out of stochastic processes. Our understanding of this is chiefly due to almost-simultaneous discoveries (1946-48) by quantum physicist Erwin Schrodinger, mathematician Norbert Weiner and an electronics-communication expert at Bell Laboratories, Claude Shannon. --Robert Anton Wilson, Prometheus Rising, page 110.

"There is clear relevance between all these notions, and they all contribute to our understanding of socio-economic change. The Adamses on migration and acceleration,[| Douglas] on increment of association, Korzybski on “time-binding,” Fuller on synergy, Schrödinger on life as an anti-entropic process, Shannon and Weiner on information as negative entropy, and Leary on neuro-genetics, all illustrate part of what we mean by Information Increase.--Robert Anton Wilson, Human Intelligence Increase.

"lastly but mostly, in her genesic field it is all game and no gammon; she is ladylike in everything she does and plays the gentleman's part every time. Let us auspice it! --[|James Joyce, FW, pg. 112]

//Today, after more than a century of electric technology, we have extended our central nervous system itself in a global embrace, abolishing both space and time as far as our planet is concerned. //--Marshall McLuhan, [|//Understanding Media//, 1964.]

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