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Ticket to Heaven Daily Dose

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Hrvatski Noahid:
Before progressing to matters of the mind, a fundamental definition must be developed for this phenomenon known broadly as “life”. Intuitively and rationally, it can be surmised that there is something different between a human being and a table, or a human being and a rock, and that human beings share some similarities with dogs, trees, and shrimp. But what is the common element that differentiates “living” beings from “non-living” or “inanimate” objects?

Put generally, life can be defined as a process that moves something towards sophistication and utility over time. Indeed, the processes we describe as evolution take existing life forms, combine them with environmental inputs, and create new life forms that are better suited to respond to those environmental inputs. One way that scientists describe living beings is by calling them self-organizing, which means that within the living being’s own system, matter and energy are organized in particular ways to further the survival and replication of the organism. Additionally, although individual organisms may stop engaging in these processes – what we call “dying” – they can propagate their genetic code to future generations through reproductive mechanisms. This, notably, is something that rocks, stars, and other objects classified as non-living cannot do.

This seemingly trivial detail is not only one of the greatest mysteries of the sciences, given that the rest of the universe seems to tend towards disorder, but the basis of a more coherent view of psychological phenomena. Indeed, it can be said that in a very general and abstract way, the process we call “life” is involved in selectively propagating certain kinds of matter forward through time and the generations.

While this certainly includes genetic material, the traditional concern of evolutionary biologists, evolution has also come to encompass things like language and culture, which are typically viewed as the concern of the social sciences. However, by reconciling these different types of ordered matter under the singular concept of information, generally defined as ordered matter, it is possible to not only develop a coherent view of life but move towards an understanding of the function and form of human consciousness.

From the perspective of traditional biology, each living creature is said to have a genotype, or a specific set of attributes determined by the genetic information it inherits. Following Darwin’s initial publications, the work of Gregor Mendel and other early geneticists revealed that variation and selection mechanisms provided the “rules” by which this information is passed forward through the generations, which was the focus of biologists for decades until the discovery of DNA.

However, as researchers in other spheres of knowledge began to integrate these new concepts into their own paradigms, the concern of evolutionary biology progressively expanded. In addition to the genotype, or the genetic attributes of an organism, it was understood that organisms also had phenotypes, which encompassed environmental impacts, learned behaviors, and other elements of life relevant to survival and replication but largely independent of genetics. (Ticket to Heaven by Zachary R.J. Strong, PDF version, p 102-103)

Hrvatski Noahid:
Without doubt, the most famous addition to the West’s understanding of the role of non-genetic information in evolution is Richard Dawkins’ concept of the meme, a unit of information that is replicated and propagated much like a gene. Whereas genetic information is stored in cells, however, memes are comprised of mental information stored in the brain and are selected for reproduction based on their contribution to the survival of the organism.

A tangible example of a meme would be “an apple a day keeps the doctor away”, which is not only a simple rhyme that replicates easily, but an extremely sophisticated piece of dietary advice that support the survival and genetic replication of human life. More complicated memes include belief systems like Christianity, centered around the memes of sin, intercession, and indiscriminate neighbor-love, or the Western notions of “free speech” and “free trade”. All of these memes have both obvious and subtle effects on human social systems and the evolutionary outcomes of the people that are a part of them.

Although Dawkins’ concept of the meme has proven to be extremely useful and helpful when considering human evolutionary contexts, more recent work by Eva Jablonka and Marion Lamb revisited this concept and more clearly defined the kinds of information at work in evolutionary processes. They proposed that evolution was driven by genetic, epigenetic, behavioral, and symbolic inheritance processes, which can be understood as different kinds of information stored in genes and brain cells.

Indeed, much like a computer’s hard drive can be said to hold both raw data and software made of that raw data, the human brain is the storehouse for memes like behaviors, language, and culture, all of which support or hinder survival and replication. Additionally, just as physical organisms seem to compete over scarce resources, with the strongest prevailing, the best ideas seem to be propagated to the next generation through childrearing and education. Over several generations, the societies that adopt more workable ideas will tend to prosper, as was the case for much of America’s history. On the other hand, groups that adopt decadent or unrealistic metaphysics, such as Soviet economics or statue worship, tend to crumble and fade away.

Much like an organism requires food to support its metabolic processes, living creatures, especially human beings, require information from their environment as a necessity of survival. The uncertain and changing conditions faced by most people, animals, and plants means that even the most basic of organisms requires a way to detect and avoid unfavorable outcomes while pursuing positive outcomes. Whether this is something as simple as the flagellum on prokaryotes to the sophisticated eyes of eagles, living things are in a constant state of exchange with their environment – not only in terms of nutrients, but also in terms of valuable information. (Ticket to Heaven by Zachary R.J. Strong, PDF version, p 104)

Hrvatski Noahid:
Whereas most animals, plants, and other organisms seem to be content with basic perception and communication, human beings have an extraordinary appetite for all kinds of information, from sitcom trivia to the secrets of the universe. However, up until the invention of writing thousands of years ago in the ancient Near East, the sum total of everything human beings knew was almost entirely in the heads of the humans themselves. These storage limitations meant that much of what prehistoric peoples contained within the collective was largely for survival purposes, with many memes like stories, songs, or dramatizations serving both practical and aesthetic needs.

Once writing was invented, first on clay tablets, the information that humans could store, retrieve, and create grew in scope and complexity. Things such as records of transactions or taxes could now be “remembered”, facilitating new kinds of economies and organization. The scroll and codex, and later the book, made it possible to faithfully store entire religious texts like the Jewish Torah or the Buddhist Pali Canon, propagating them through time. Today, the advanced storage technologies available, such as computer hard drives, as well as the proliferation of sensors, have made information as much of a commodity as wheat or barley – and, in some cases, as or more valuable.

Uniquely within Earth’s many biospheres, the phenotype of homo sapiens includes not only genetic information propagated through reproduction and selection, but also memes that exist in the minds of human beings and are propagated through communication and popularity selection. Storing and sharing elements of this phenotype, especially in the age of server warehouses and cryptocurrency mining, has not only become more integral to our functioning as a society, but also occupies a larger share of human effort and energy expenditure than ever before.

Particularly as algorithms and artificial intelligences begin to perform more data processing work on behalf of humans, the phenotype of the species is progressing towards profound complexity very quickly. Instead of being occupied with survival-oriented concerns, which were “simple” enough to be mastered by even an illiterate caveperson, modern humans now spend most of their days swimming in a veritable sea of information, largely on social media and other websites.

This information is processed, regurgitated, remixed, riffed on, and sent back into the sea, where a combination of human signalling activity such as “likes”, as well as algorithms trained to detect patterns in those activities, determines the reach of the idea. To even engage with the information available online requires at least a decade of education in linguistic and digital literacy, a far cry from the cuneiform cattle counts of Mesopotamia or the campfire stories of prehistoric tribes.

It could be very easily argued that much of this activity is useless or wasteful, especially as the electricity requirements of digital communications technology continue to rise. (Ticket to Heaven by Zachary R.J. Strong, PDF version, p 105)

Hrvatski Noahid:
However, recent developments in neuroscience indicate that the human tendency towards inexhaustible curiosity, and therefore the need for information, is not only one of the defining features of the species, but the fundamental process of human consciousness and the reason for our species’ dominance in almost every environment on Earth. (Ticket to Heaven by Zachary R.J. Strong, PDF version, p 105-106)

Hrvatski Noahid:
With the genetic and memetic mechanisms of human reproduction contextualized within physics, it is now possible to further examine the role of information in the processes of life. Consider, as was previously mentioned, that life processes tend towards complexity and specificity, whereas the rest of the universe tends towards disorder. Indeed, proponents of evolutionary theories are known for their expansive view of life on Earth, which scientists think began with simpler life forms and moved towards more sophisticated organisms over millions of years.

Given that neuroscience and psychology are themselves subsets of the more expansive domain of biology, it would stand to reason that not only would we expect to see a trend towards genetic complexity, but also a trend towards psychological sophistication. To some degree, this would seem to be the case given the progression of world history from small tribal groups to international alliances of hundreds of millions of people. However, before moving immediately to issues of meme propagation, one must first consider how the laws of physics might shape the fundamental mechanisms that guide the processes of human thought.

Karl J. Friston is a member of the Royal Society, a recipient of the Golden Brain Award, and hailed by some as the “genius neuroscientist” whose theories may transform artificial intelligence. Among his many achievements is the provocative, insightful, and surprisingly simple Free Energy Principle, which Friston has proposed as a kind of unified brain theory. Despite the exciting potential of his ideas, they are notorious for their complexity, difficult mathematical style, and almost-tautological nature, and are also infamous for being understood only by Friston himself and perhaps some other select few around the world:

“At Columbia’s psychiatry department, I recently led a journal club for 15 PET and fMRI researchers, PhDs and MDs all, with well over $10 million in NIH grants between us, and we tried to understand Friston’s 2010 Nature Reviews Neuroscience paper – for an hour and a half. There was a lot of mathematical knowledge in the room: three statisticians, two physicists, a physical chemist, a nuclear physicist, and a large group of neuroimagers – but apparently we didn’t have what it took. I met with a Princeton physicist, a Stanford neurophysiologist, a Cold Springs Harbor neurobiologist to discuss the paper. Again blanks, one and all.” (Ticket to Heaven by Zachary R.J. Strong, PDF version, p 107)

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