WHEN, NOT WHERE, WILL TELL US WHAT INFORMATION IS: LIFE AND THE NANOPULSE
I would like to begin with what I think is a commonly shared intuition. We recognize that information is not what the information produces. DNA is not a fox or a cabbage. Nor is the information the program or other store, which is only an order or array or preserved potential of instructions, data, waiting in time to be applied for the production of a certain result. DNA is 3 billion letters, not a plan.
With this intuition, I’ve come to think that we should not ask where information is. In fact, that is an unanswerable question, I think. Rather we should ask when information is. Information is between the program and the product, it is the interim (“intervening time,” the “meanwhile”) between the instruction-set and the outcome of applying the instruction-set; it is “there” in that unfolding, in a periodic catalysis.
Note that this means that the information can be any “where,” if “where” actually matters, on any device, in any repository, in any store, from which it might be applied. The same information can be on 10,000,000 computers over the face of the earth; in this sense, it is nowhere because it is everywhere. But when the information is, is an entirely different question.
When the information can actually be said to “exist” is when it is applied to yield a product, whether it is DNA pre-forming a blastula in a recently fertilized egg, or a word-processing program providing designs and steps for somebody to write and format an essay. This is the question we can answer. And answering this question we can come closer to answering the question what exactly information is—periodic catalysis accelerating transformation after which it remains information.
Information is an in-between of relationships, participants in which, themselves, do exist in space—and thus it is technically possible to say that the information exists in space when it is operant between two or more entities, say a program and a resulting paper. But it is imperative to notice that this “space,” this “where,” is extraordinarily temp-orary, actually evanescent—is this not why we call it “virtual”?—and is much more like a time, a “when,” than it is a place—like time it can’t be touched. In time, information can be identified, used, understood, worked on, improved, corrected, etc., and the resulting stream of instructions then returned to a program or some other external store of preserved potential for later unfolding in time, all virtual.
This in-between-ness of information is both what makes it so very powerful and at the same time so difficult to understand since we must not and should not think of a thing but of an event, an action of some duration in time.
To say what information is, is to say that it is an interim event and in no way a thing that can be picked up or handled or deposited or stuffed in a sack. The instruction sets can be manipulated, yes, the data, that is, but they are not the information; the information is the ensemble of instructions unfolding in time flowing together to yield a product or result or outcome once the information has been invoked and applied. The interim event in between the code of information and the result that the code produces is the mystery of information which, as can clearly be seen from this argument, can be stored in, say, nanometers of cellular processes that nevertheless produce complexities as vast and staggering as the human body with its trillions of cells.
When information is, is when the relationship has initiated—when a sperm penetrates an egg, say. The insight I want to develop here is the relationality implicit in an informing (an event) of a thing, material object, or another event, an orbit, say. I want to sound, in multiple senses, the word form inside the word information. Naïve perception may balk since it ordinarily assumes form to be a spatial thing: if X informs Y, somehow X puts form, a thing, in Y. But this is naïve. Y does not receive a thing; it receives instructions for a thing, which it then generates in time—the form tells Y how to develop in time, catalyzes its development. Information is existentially temporal. It is not a stencil, though information will have produced some stencil or other. It is an occasion, a folding together of multiple events precipitating subsequent occasions resulting in a determinate (id)entity. Some occasions are autocatalytic and recursive, e.g., a cell dividing into two daughter cells, entities self-identical and thus in some sense knowing themselves (this is my personal understanding of life uniting-by-dividing to preserve itself—a cell knows what it’s “about,” copying itself, whether consciously or not is irrelevant).
Let’s pause to imagine an oversimplified event of information. Say, I buy a tool for working in my garden (I happen to grow roses). The tool requires assembly. An information sheet accompanies the tool which explains (unfolds) how to assemble the tool. Who and what are the agents in this event? I, the purchaser = P; the tool = T; the manufacturer = M; the manufacturer’s employee who designed and tested the instructions = E. The ensemble: T.E.M.P.
Grossly oversimplified as it may be, this instance demonstrates the inescapable relationality of the information event in time. Any biophysicist will tell us that an entity in complete equilibrium with its environment is dead. Life, on the contrary, is disequilibrium, dynamic. And so is information. When I assemble the tool, numerous disequilibria are in play within a microcosm of relationality. This is how I was informed to assemble my new tool.
But no form was “put inside” me. Rather, exchanges between P (me) and E occurring over elapsing time constituted cooperation which issued in an opus, or piece of work (work, the meaning of Latin opus). The work, the tool, is a co-opera, a result of catalytic relationality.
Here we easily understand why information is not knowledge. Information is the interim event in which knowledge unfolds and flows into being: I now know how the tool for my garden is assembled—I have assimilated the information which I (my brain) was able to process into knowledge (“know-how”). (At this point, many would name knowledge insight: suddenly I “see” what the information is teaching me—"I get it”—and the catalyst exits unchanged). And this outcome depends upon cooperation among several agents in an interim event unfolding in time according to instructions stored as information in some preserved potential.
Relationality may not be simple, but it is straightforward. It presumes openly the participation of many different agents or agencies cooperating to generate results from information in some preserved potential, call it archive (with the emphasis on the arche [arkhé] or the Greek for “beginning,” in time). As straightforward as it is, however, relationality in this description immediately belies any assumption of simplicity. All these participants will have their own agendas, and it is difficult to guarantee cooperation among them. Mistakes will happen. Some would shrug and say, the human condition.
I admit there may not be any response to this resignation that would command consensus let alone unity. But I want to continue my argument, even so, maintaining as much non-technical vocabulary and reasoning as I can, to work out an understanding of time itself that may be thought to arise from my argument so far.
Among the many amazing findings of 20th-century physics, one of the most significant as well as mindboggling, is the discovery of spacetime as the elementary condition of our universe. In particular, we do not think any longer of gravity as a force, rather we understand that gravity is a result of time: a clock far above the earth ticks faster than a clock on the surface of the earth because time follows a less constraining warp far above the earth—less “pull” of “gravity” on the hands, so to speak. The huge mass of the earth warps spacetime so that all the straight lines of spacetime curve toward the earth in geodesics. The clock like all objects in the universe follows a straight line, but the straight line near a massive body is warped by the curvature of spacetime near that body—the earth-bound clock ticks more slowly on its curve. Thus, a different example, the moon is always falling “down” to the earth, but, because it follows a different geodesic in spacetime curvature over the earth, its fall turns into an orbit, a straight line that remains straight on the curve. Or, the apple falls because the time on the tree is faster than the time on the earth.
In effect, we know now there is no where without a when, no space without a time (in given inertial coordinates). I would like to propose from these admittedly gross oversimplifications that the only place information is, is when information is, restating this, my thesis, now as a function of spacetime.
In the interim when information has been invoked (by energy), the exceedingly small but nonetheless real (measurable) warp of spacetime generates a vanishingly small where which is the spacetime “where” information exists. I call this the nanopulse, a space that exists only as a measure of time. In this interim—in this wherewhen—invoked information provokes a cascade of instructions that transpire wherewhen the outcome or result is relevant: proteins, e. g., are processed and folded in the cell for a particular, i. e., an informed, function. If we watch an animation of this process, we are utterly stunned by the images, yes, but we are overwhelmed by the complexity realized in so “brief” a “time” (click on Protein synthesis in real time — Bing video). We cannot “see” what is happening, it is so very small. We need astoundingly complex and sophisticated machines to “see” the information in its wherewhen. But what we “see” with these machines—a billionth of a meter small, a nanometer—is a temporal process of the nanopulse of exchanges which yield change, a new protein, a co-opera of micro-cellular cooperation in which the only where is when. Or, turn off the when (the pulse)—let the organism die—and there is no where. (Other organic processes take over and transpire in their own wherewhen following different codes of information.)
But this is still “space,” someone may object, a “place,” or position. This frustration results from the tyranny of the macro-scale over the micro-scale. We undergo experience in the macro-scale, where the table is over there and will bark my shins if I collide with it. Many simply assume that the macro-scale is the only scale and ignore everything else; they call it reality, and that’s that. (For contrast, consider a physicist’s view of the world— https://abstrusegoose.com/275).
But life exists on the micro-scale. Life is not experience. Experience is an epiphenomenon of life, emergent from micro-scalar events most of which we cannot see and many of which we never feel (unless we fall ill)—I call these the nanopulses of life. Experience, as we all know, can be very deceptive. Life, on the other hand, is “nothing but an electron looking for a place to rest” (Hungarian Nobel Laureate Albert Szent-Györgyi). Life is energy out of equilibrium with its environment constantly pulsating to turn over fuel to overturn death. To learn to think and imagine and conceive on the micro-scale is exceedingly difficult. Hence the grave problem of explaining quantum mechanics to the general public, which, to so many people, seems gibberish (one “thing” in two “places” at once!? a particle that is also and at the same time a wave!? tunnelling through impenetrable barriers to support solar fusion of hydrogen into helium so the sun will shine!?). But it is imperative that we do learn. If only because quantum computers will soon be all around us.
I think my argument so far can be helpful although I understand that here there are severe limits to understanding. A nanometer (nm) is one-billionth of a meter, or 1/1,000,000,000, a very small space. A eukaryotic cell of 10 nm is exceedingly small; yet the DNA in a eukaryotic cell unwound from the double helix and stretched out is 2.2 meters long! Ask yourself, just for communication’s sake, how can something 2.2 meters long “fit inside” something ten billionths of a meter, 10/1,000,000,000 meters, long? The question, as we say, blows the mind.
But the question is also nonsense. Clearly, “fit inside” is a useless locution at this point. Not that it is “wrong,” just that it is useless—it doesn’t tell us anything we can usefully apply to understanding. Here and now, words like “fit” and “inside” and “contain” and “space,” etc., are, at best, sledgehammers. They need to be replaced with radical miniaturizations. But are such miniaturizations possible?
In one sense, yes, easily, say, Atomic Force Microscopes, which can “see” objects more than 1000 times more accurately than optical microscopes (where photons or the light actually interfere with the seeing!). We need Atomic Force Miniaturizations. But, still, miniaturization is not limitless. At some point, in space and time, we have to ask is imagining the micro-scale possible? Can language reach this far “down” or “inward” or “through” all the way to the nanopulse?
For many scientific minds, brilliant ones at that, the question is irrelevant or, worse, a waste of time. Shut up and calculate (the universal mantra of the quantum physicists). Obviously, there is much to be said for this. We cannot experience the micro-scale, we cannot reach the nanopulse, so why even try? I am not unsympathetic to this attitude.
But as a poet who serves language in every way he can out of a conviction that language is as important as mathematics, though obviously different, I feel a deep urge to pursue how far “down” language can reach. I want to know if language can empower me to imagine the micro-scale in a way that, as we say, makes sense, even as we acknowledge that sense is severely limited, being an experience in and of macro-scale processes. And, finally, here, at least, I want to ask if an account of information such as I have proposed can help in the project.
The wherewhen of information, I have proposed, is relationality, the nanopulse between. How if relationality should be spacetime? Ultimate in-betweenness? Not a place, not a container, not a thing, but an event of spacetime? Or, to run the line out to maximum risk, how if information is itself the event of spacetime? Scale ceases at once to perturb understanding. Whether in the universe’s vastness or the eukaryotic cell’s smallness, information is always spacetime, structuring spacetime according to location, motion and function. More exactly, information flows and transpires over spacetime in an interim event unfolding—I will say, falling (together with)—according to instructions stored in some preserved potential (again, we may call it an archive if we stress the meaning of Greek arkhé, “beginning,” “origin,” the temporal). And we can now say that these instructions and instruction sets in preserved potential are information invocable as spacetime, spatio-temporal relationality in any given wherewhen of the nanopulse—catalyzing a star here, a kidney there, a black hole yonder, a sockeye salmon swimming upstream to spawn….
CODA If spacetime is relationality, the co-opera of incalculably vast arrays of information unfolding in interim events, during the nanopulse, it is easy to see the uncircumscribable power of randomness in conjunction with orderliness in the universe. Indeed, in retrospect, my argument has simply been a restatement of the Second Law of Thermodynamics—the entropy of the universe is always increasing into ever greater disorder, the consequence of heat. An event of information invoked depends on so many relations (variables, as they are called), moving forward, that error and correction of error and failure of correction during the nanopulse(s) are inevitable, generating disorder in the forward movement (the “Arrow of Time,” so called? the mystery of causality?) which expands into ever more spacetime, more (mis)information, leading inexorably to the heat death of the universe, an unimaginable and immeasurable density of information that has consumed all heat, leaving eternal stasis, the doom of uninterrupted equilibrium.