Information as Lifeform

Information as Lifeform– A Bit of Phildickian Fun. The Palm Tree Garden

Information as Lifeform– A Bit of Phildickian Fun

Here’s a little thought experiment, just for fun.

When we think of Information, we tend to think of it as an abstraction, as words and concepts that are delivered via communication between the self and the other. For this reason, one of the most difficult Phildickian concepts for some to come to terms with is the idea of the plasmate, a kind of divine, living information that exists within Being and can “bond” with humans, resulting in what we often refer to as gnosis. As says Dick in Tractates Cryptica Scriptura, 22-26 (Warning: this copy of TCS hosted on a website of questionable purview):

22. I term the Immortal One a plasmate, because it is a form of energy; it is living information. It replicates itself—not through information or in information—but as information.

23. The plasmate can crossbond with a human, creating what I call a homoplasmate. This annexes the mortal human permanently to the plasmate. We know this as the “birth from above” or “birth from the Spirit.” It was initiated by Christ, but the Empire destroyed all the homoplasmates before they could replicate.

24. In dormant seed form, the plasmate slumbered in the buried library of codices at Chenoboskion until 1945 C.E. This is what Jesus meant when he spoke elliptically of the “mustard seed” which, he said, “would grow into a tree large enough for birds to roost in.” He foresaw not only his own death but that of all homoplasmates. He foresaw the codices unearthed, read, and the plasmate seeking out new human hosts to crossbond with; but he foresaw the absence of the plasmate for almost two thousand years.

25. As living information, the plasmate travels up the optic nerve of a human to the pineal body. It uses the human brain as a female host in which to replicate itself into its active form. This is an interspecies symbiosis. The Hermetic alchemists knew of it in theory from ancient texts, but could not duplicate it, since they could not locate the dormant, buried plasmate. Bruno suspected that the plasmate had been destroyed by the Empire; for hinting at this he was burned. “The Empire never ended.”

26. It must be realized that when all the homoplasmates were killed in 70 C.E. real time ceased; more important, it must be realized that the plasmate has now returned and is creating new homoplasmates, by which it has destroyed the Empire and started up real time. We call the plasmate “the Holy Spirit,” which is why the R. C. Brotherhood wrote, “Per spiritum sanctum reviviscimus.”

Information Theorist Charles Seife, however, tosses ice water on the idea that information lives only in the world of ideas:

“Information is physical. Information is not just an abstract concept, and it is not just facts or figures, dates or names. It is a concrete property of matter and energy which is quantifiable and measurable. It is every bit as real as the weight of a chunk of lead or the energy stored in an atomic warhead, and just like mass and energy, information is subject to a set of physical laws that dictate how it can behave.”

Essentially, information has physical properties which can be measured. You and I are most likely already familiar with physical units of information, which are bits and bytes. The smallest physical unit used to measure information is the bit, which is either yes or no, one or zero (although I might argue that room exists for a smaller unit of information which could represent unity in a nonbinary state, but that’s a topic for another post). If you have 10GB worth of stuff on your hard drive, you have 85,899,345,920 units of physical information (8 bits per byte).

When we realize that information is an actual physical substance, we’ve crossed a major threshold when considering the idea of a plasmate. However, information’s physicality doesn’t automatically mean it’s alive in a biological sense. To look at information as a living entity, we must ask ourselves questions about its substance, behavior and function.

Although we’ve all most likely had the biological definition of life hammered into us in school, let’s take another look and see whether or not it applies to information itself. Granted, there is no real “official” definition, but according to Science-with-a-capital-S, life exhibits the following properties: organization, growth, adaptation, response to stimuli, reproduction and metabolism. Can we apply these measures of analysis to information?

1. Organization. This basically means that living things consist of organized units. Obviously, information also exists of organized units, whether you prefer to call them bits or bytes or memes or what have you.

2. Growth. Anyone who doesn’t believe that information grows has never owned an Ipod. Seriously, though, information tends to grow as more information becomes available. Someone studying information as mathematics who learns the multiplication table will soon see this information grow via the application of said table to formulas, etc.

3. & 4. Adaptation & Response to stimuli. Living beings adapt to their surroundings. This one’s almost too obvious; information– for instance, the temperature on a thermometer– changes based on external stimuli, in this case the prevailing weather patterns. The information within one’s computer responds to the stimuli of the mouse or keyboard, and adapts accordingly.

5. Reproduction. Information reproduces via various media of transference. Whenever I tell you something, information has been reproduced.

6. Metabolism. Life maintains itself and its organization via the transformation of external ‘matter’ into ‘energy.’ We eat food, we stay healthy. Information maintains itself and its organization via the transformation of external data into additional “motion.” A unit of information absorbs another unit of information and becomes more “sticky;” a theory stays alive as long as it maintains its ability to take in new data and incorporate said data into itself.

Now, surely these charactaristics of life can also be applied to many other phenomenon (fire, for one), but we’re concerned with metaphysics, here, so, with a little creativity, we can indeed apply the biological definition of life to information. Let’s refer to the biological definition of life as applied to information the Logozoic Definition of Information. Logozoology will be the study of information as a living process.

Now, the biological definition of life isn’t the only way to define life. We might also look at the systemic definition of life, which states that living things are self-organizing and self-reproductive. This, of course, raises the question of “self”-ness, and even adds consciousness to the mix. To succeed, Logozoology must address the idea of self-direction. If information is “alive,” does it contain a “self” or consciousness?

This is where we start to get into serious weirdness, so buckle your seatbelts. When we question the definition of living things, or attempt to alter our ideas about what “life” consists of, we often fall victim to the Star Trek Alien fallacy, that on any given alien planet, the entire population will consist of a single race of aliens who all share an identical set of ridges on their foreheads/noses. We fail to take into account the idea that life is actually a process, a series of stages on both the macro- and microcosmic levels, and that within any given biological system, life exists at various stages of diversity.

How, then, do we avoid falling into this trap when discussing logozoology? We recognize that, just as biological life begins on a monocellular level and eventually progresses towards greater complexity, logozoic life undergoes a similar drive towards complexity. So, we have the most basic unit of information, the bit, 1/0, yes/no, yin/yang. By constantly undergoing logozoic processes, this basic unit adapts to its surroundings over time, eventually producing exceedingly complex systems which may display characteristics similar to those of complex biological organisms.

So, just as biological organisms display the characteristics of the Biological and Systemic definitions of life in different ways depending upon their level of complexity, logozoic organisms display the characteristics of the logozoic definition of life depending upon their complexity. Just as biological organisms need to adapt in order to successfully survive, so do logozoic organisms need to maintain a level of complexity that best benefits their interaction with their surroundings. Just as some biological organisms display a developed and complex sense of “self,” so do some logozoic organisms display a similar sense of “self” and “consciousness.”

(Now, keep in mind that what we call “evolution” is not hierarchical. For instance, human civilization isn’t “more highly evolved” than your average ant colony; in fact, we might argue that we’re less evolved than an ant colony, hierarchically speaking, as we’re less able to maintain a healthy stasis with our environment and are more likely to destroy it.)

Some of this may sound similar to memetics, or the study of information-as-virus. However, logozoology actually goes further than memetics. We might consider memes as some of the simpler forms of logozoic life, just as viruses are simpler forms of biological life (which aren’t even considered “life” in many mainstream scientific circles).

So what would supercomplex logozoic organisms look like? I submit that they could appear as the drips and drabs of information we often associate with the paranormal: EVPs, Ghosts, Ghoulies, Things That Go Bump In The Night, which typically appear as unconnected globbets of information sans reference points. This doesn’t mean they’re all logozoic organisms, but they certainly display characteristics one might predict in such entities.

When considering logozoic entities via scale, perhaps we might consider them in degrees; some logozoic entities might be considered “vegetable-like,” some “animal-like,” some “human-like.”
And, of course, the most highly evolved logozoic organisms might indeed exist as our plasmates, residing within spiritual teachings and bonding with certain humans. We might even posit that biological and logozoic entities were supposed to evolve together but somehow became seperated from one another, and the process of gnosis or enlightenment is the reunification of the logozoic and biological system into a single, cohesive whole.

Anyhow, that’s one possibility.

Author Bro. JVP 2011