A Difference in What?

As Gregory Bateson noted [1], information can be described as 'a difference that makes a difference'. But a difference in what? Is it possible to communicate information between spatio-temporal locations as itself? It would seem not. We as humans communicate by speech, as a modulation of acoustic waves. We transmit images by modulating electro-magnetic waves. Information moves around in computers as a modulation of the clock frequency. Within a system's scalar level, information is exchanged as a modulation of properties of the level's population. Can information alone be communicated? No - as a 'difference', or as 'novelty', it is always superimposed on a structured 'carrier'. So let us look at the implications of this in different contexts.

One of the present authors has published elsewhere details of the elastic similarity of zinc blende crystals of the group IV elements, the III-V compounds and the II-VI compounds [2]. Educational studies of crystallography would lead us to suppose that the directional elastic properties of macroscopic crystals should correspond exactly to those of their representative unit cells, but this is not strictly true. The correspondence is very nearly exact - to within less than ½ % for a comparison between the III-V compounds, for example - but there is a remaining degree of dependence on the atom types present. Elastic anisotropy in single crystals depends mainly on the basic order of the nominal crystal structure, but information about the atoms present is carried across from micro- to macro- scales, superimposed on the lattice structure: like a wireless transmission, it is transported 'on the back' of a carrier.

It is interesting to note that in highly multi-scalar stems - i.e. uniquely biological ones - success in generating a 'higher' scale results in the imposition of downward 'slaving' on its progenital population, in turn strengthening the structural carrier which both permitted its emergence and transported the elements of its cross-scalar differentiation. The more levels that are generated, the more strongly lower levels will be slaved, only later resulting in their apparent structural stasis and 'simplicity'. It would be unwise, for example, to suppose that all electrons were identical in an early primeval post-bang soup - the simplicity of their contemporary low-quantum-number description is more likely the result of slaving from the multitude of higher scalar levels they now experience.

We note, then, that this appears to be a general property of all information transport, whether in-scale or cross-scale: a structured carrier is always necessary to communicate 'a difference that makes a difference'. Bateson's 'difference' is a difference in a structured carrier.

If we turn to bio-chemicals we find a similar situation. Based on the directional bonding of carbon, the smaller bio-molecules often exhibit nearly crystallographic atomic arrangements with only minor differentiating regions. A prime case is the lipid pdmpg, around 170 of whose some 200 molecular atoms are aligned in a tetrahedrally-regular 3D structure, leaving only a tail of 30 or so atoms to 'carry its message' to a higher scale. Ultimately, when we arrive at DNA, we find it to be a unified physically structured carrier - the double helix - which supports the dogmatically-supposedly 'sufficient' set of protein-representative genes (if we leave aside for the moment the last five-or-so years' revelations about conserved sequences and expression-control from within the 'junk' DNA!). It would not be stretching the point too much to describe DNA as a quasi-crystal, based on a quadruple distributed-unit-cellular basis of adenine, cytosine, guanine and thymine. In the massive proteins we find blossoming of this structural-carrier/differential-signal metaphor into the digital-analog bi-coding we associate with living tissues, where the combination of structural-bonding 'rigidity' and real-3D constraints produces the beauty of protein bending.

But let us now take a step sideward into the properties of natural hierarchy. A radical difference between biological hierarchies and those we construct as engineers is that higher bio-levels operate faster than their constituent lower ones, and not more slowly as our own meager constructional experiences would lead us to expect. In addition, the natural world operates ecosystemically, and not mono-rationally as we ourselves aspire to do. We have published elsewhere extensive details of the bi-rational properties of natural hierarchies [e.g. 3, 4], where the correlated hierarchical scales we observe are interleaved with a second complementary correlated hierarchy which appears to consist of complexity ejected from the scales themselves. Within the observable Newtonian scales, information is naturally communicated as we described above - as quasi-disorder 'difference signals' superimposed on quasi-ordered 'carriers'. In the second, complementary hierarchy, however, we would expect to find information as quasi-ordered 'signals' superimposed on quasi-disordered 'carriers'. We now believe that, much as the observable scales can be reductively associated with 'matter', the complementary 'complex' scales may be associable with 'fields'.

So what are the implications of all this to our understanding of our very selves, of our apparently dualistic nature of 'mind and matter'? First of all, we should remember that, much as biological evolution may 'wish' - whether by direction or stochastics - to implement a 'template' it finds all around in crystals and molecules, it is always dependent on what it already achieved - it cannot (easily!) 'start over again'. Consequently, although the relationship we find between unit cell and macroscopic III-V crystal may be elegant, evolution would be hard put to reproduce such a simplistic 'carrier-signal' relationship at the highest level of our being. And yet this seems to be the case.

The two hemispheres of our brains appear to approximately correspond to the two interleaved 'structures' of a natural hierarchy: one is somewhat 'logical' (reductive towards localization), the other somewhat 'creative' (reductive towards delocalization). Most interestingly, although split-brain patients sometimes refer to a 'duality of consciousness', this is more generally a singular phenomenon, which is surprising for a brain which is divided into two parts! The hemispheres are connected by a massive 'information highway' - the corpus calossum. A number of researchers have suggested that the 40Hz EEG waves associated with consciousness couple the two hemispheres together through the corpus calossum - a reasonable conclusion. But is that all? Is it possible that these waves are primarily the carrier which supports the emergence of an integrated high level of awareness from brain-wide informational 'signal' fluctuations, thus delivering consciousness? If so, then life corresponds to a resonance between the quasi-ordered and quasi-disordered carriers of the two sub-hierarchical 'structures', and the evolution of high-level awareness in organisms would most likely follow that of the corpus calossum.

[1] G. Bateson. Steps to an Ecology of Mind, pp. 457-459. U. C. Press, Chicago, 2000.
[2] R. Cottam and G. A. Saunders. "An Extension of Keyes' Correlation." Physica Status Solidi (a) 33, 367-373, 1976.
[3] R. Cottam, W. Ranson and R. Vounckx. "Autocreative Hierarchy I: Structure - Ecosystemic Dependence and Autonomy." SEED Journal 4, 24-41, 2003.
[4] R. Cottam, W. Ranson and R. Vounckx. "Autocreative Hierarchy II: Dynamics - Self-organization, Emergence and Level-changing." In: H. Hexmoor (Ed.), International Conference on Integration of Knowledge Intensive Multi-Agent Systems, pp. 766-773. IEEE: Piscataway, NJ,

Publication year:2009

Keywords:Information, Carrier, Hierarchy, Consciousness