Oliver Morton (Speech at the Doors of Perception 3 Conference)

Table of Contents:
Summary
Introduction
Other World as an Idea
Information
Reading DNA in Life
Reading DNA in the Lab
Fiction
Understanding the Information and Biological World

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Summary
Cyberspace has become the focus of great expectations. Many hope that dematerialization and the reduction of human impact on the earth's eco-systems can be achieved in part by displacing destructive physical behaviour to this immaterial realm. Other world seems to be a constant part of the way we talk about ideas, according to Oliver Morton, science journalist and editor-in-chief of Wired, UK. But is cyberspace (which Morton finds very similar to long-standing Platonic and Christian `other worlds') what we really mean when we speak of the `world of information?' Morton uses the example of DNA, one of the most complex information systems known, to illustrate the shortcomings of a simplistic view of the world of information. Rejecting the concept of DNA as both a formal and a final cause -- a so-called `blueprint of life' -- he examines two ways in which DNA is read: in life, and in the lab. Using examples from genetic research -- the mapping and isolation of genes believed to cause specific traits and illnesses -- he illustrates the still-enormous gap in our knowledge of how this informational cyberspace world of sequences affects the material world of the body. The shortcomings outlined in these examples clearly show that simply possessing a catalogue of information cannot explain this complex interaction, any more than a dictionary alone makes up a language. In conclusion, Morton says that the key to understanding how information permeates material is more to be found in the strategies of experimental than evolutionary biology: we must concentrate on better understanding of the information world we ourselves are making. This means using the realm of information as a medium for the ongoing creation of other worlds in other contexts.

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Introduction
I want to talk in general about other-worldliness. Other-worldliness has been on my mind a lot recently, because I have been involved in a probably the biggest design feature you could imagine -- designing a planet, in particular, designing a habitable and inhabited planet Mars. This gave rise to a lot of thought about how and why one might think about other worlds. Some of these things might be of interest to you.

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Other World as an Idea
Other world seems to be a constant part of the way we talk about ideas. This is not surprising for me, coming from a Christian background with a smattering of philosophy and mathematics; automatically, in our culture, that makes you aware of Plato and Platonism. Of course, everybody also dreams and we use dreaming as a metaphor for all sorts of information processing by the imagination.

I was thinking that these other worlds we create increasingly don't seem to cut it. We don't use them in the intellectual ways that we used to. Christian belief functions more partially now and I think more rarely than it used to. Platonism is something which is extraordinary when you meet it. I once did. I met a mathematician who clearly had a belief in Platonism. He believed that he had access to a universe of forms of pure mathematics that was just as real as the pub that we were sitting in.

But most of us do not believe it. We do not believe that forms and patterns for what we have and what we see around us come from another place. And nor do we believe in the world of dreaming. We now see dreaming as personal and analytical, rather than anything grander.

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Information
However, I think there is one place where we do see another world and rightfully so: that is when we talk about information and the information revolution.

However, I think that the sort of world we talk about when we talk about a world of information, bears closer examination. To even start talking about information as a world of its own without talking about William Gibson is silly. Gibson's cyberspace, the creation of the world itself, but also the imagery he gives us of it in three novels, particularly in the first one, is very much the sort of other world I have just been talking about.

Like the other world of Christianity, it is a place of purity. The people who inhabit cyberspace despise the meat of the people and of their own bodies that exist outside cyberspace. It is a place where the resurrection of the dead is quite routine. It is a place which is like dreaming. Repeatedly, Gibson points out that it is a consensual dream. It is also a place that is very Platonic. It is a place of straight lines and flat surfaces; a place of form not made flesh, but realised in and of itself. Gibson says that he came up with the idea of cyberspace looking at video games in Seattle in the early nineteen-eighties (that is why it looks Platonic -- video games now would inspire a very different image.)

His invention has undoubtedly infected our thinking. I found out how much when I was doing work on manufacturing technology. Once, I was looking at a very modern machine tool, situated inside a hexagonal pod. It was kept stable by four different arms moving in four different, independent directions, giving it full three-dimensional mobility. Things that had never been seen on the planet before except on video screens and computer monitors were made by this cutting edge.

That gave me the experience of being right back in the Platonic world. There was another world of information out there, which was impacting on ours through this hexapod, as they called it, or through any machine tool. As I thought about that, I thought about the fact that people have been an information resource for themselves. I also considered that we now have information resources which are very impersonal. You used to only know things by asking people or by being told them, unsolicited, or by going out and finding them out by kicking matter around and seeing what happened.

Now you don't. Now, there are other ways and things that are recorded without volition, which we can inspect. I find that the fundamentally intriguing thing about the information revolution. I think that the fact that this happens is one of the reasons we are justified in talking about a world of information. But that does not mean that I am talking about cyberspace.

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Reading DNA in Life
To make the distinction clear, I want to take one biological example: DNA. DNA is matter, organised in a very precise way. It is telling that DNA is the creation not of traditional biology, but of physicists. Without the early quantum-mechanical work of this century, the theory of the chemical bond and the understanding of the diffraction of x-rays, which have all been the work of physicists, there would be no understanding of the structure of DNA. These were the generation of physicists that came back from the Second World War. Very consciously having become, in the words of Morris Wilkins, who received the Nobel prize, the instruments of death, they wanted to find the science of life. They therefore used their physics to uncover DNA at the same time that other physicists who had returned from the war, notably Claude Shannon, were developing a theory of information, communication and meaning. These things come together spectacularly in the physicists' world view, first with a model of DNA, which is called the self-replicating molecule -- it is evidently not a self-replicating molecule, but that is what it is called, because that serves the view well -- and further with the un-coding of DNA. It is true that DNA is a remarkable thing, because it carries digital information, digital in the sense that it has discrete absences and presences. It is not binary, but quaternary, but that is immaterial. But it is undoubtedly an information source, in any classical theory of information.

There are two ways of reading DNA. One is the way that is going on hundreds of billions of times in all of us at the moment. It is a continuous process that is happening in every part of you and me and anything else purporting to life and building. That is the troteins, the long strands of DNA in which we have a long sequence of nuclear tides which carries this information curled round, so the nuclear tides face each other twisting into that iconic double helix. Proteins stick to this helix and prise it open. Other proteins come in and make copies. The information is transcribed into another related molecule, RNA. That RNA then interacts with itself and with other RNA and other proteins. (If you ever want to make a computer out of DNA or RNA, this is the place to look. This is the place where the activity really goes on.) The RNA is translated, decoded and recoded as a protein, polypeptide; amino-acids are added together in the steps described by the nuclear tides in the DNA. So you have a sequence of DNA and a sequence that makes up a protein and the two are directly mapped, one to one.

However, from then on, the world inside yourself gets very complicated. The proteins interact with each other on the basis of first come, first serve. You have no idea what proteins are going to do because you don't know exactly what the micro-environment for this will be. The proteins send messages to each other. They affect each other in ways that we are only beginning to understand, but they pass what appear to be messages from one to another and indeed come back to influence the choice of which bits of DNA are transcribed and thus end up having an effect.

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Reading DNA in the Lab
That is the way that DNA is read all around us at the moment. The way that DNA is read in bio-tech labs is very different. Put simply, you take a piece of DNA and put it in something that looks in every practical respect like a kind of desk with screens. You turn it on and see letters on screens: A's, C's, P's and G's. This is the genetic sequence of that piece of DNA.

In life, the process of reading makes an endlessly more complicated thing out of the DNA information. In the lab, we simplify it. We take a material piece of DNA and we turn it into an immaterial sequence of letters. The intellectual leap that is made in modern biology is that somehow you have something of supreme significance, so you try and get the DNA sequences of every gene and everything between the genes. And eventually you end up with a genome. And you hear serious, sober and decent biologists say that this is the blueprint of life -- that this is in some way causal of life, the thing that makes us the way we are. In fact, it would seem to be causal in two ways: in the sense that it is a blueprint or pattern, but also, because this is the evolutionary record, it is the final and not only the formal cause.

This is a very strong claim that we make about DNA and a very hard one to actually stomach when you look at what is going on. DNA and genes are related to human characteristics. There is no denying that. However, take a few example. If you take phenoketone urea, which is a genetically ordained inability to make a particular protein, you will find that the textbook says that this gives you various physical and mental problems. Yet, it is there in the DNA.

However, nowadays very few people have any problem with this in the developed world, because this is a problem that can be screened for. If you make a little change in the environment -- and amino-acids supplement of one type-- there is basically very little problem. So there is no causal role of the genes that you can express outside the context of the environment.

Another example is the endless problem of genes being ascribed the names of characteristics that they purportedly cause. For instance, there is a gene in mice which makes them diabetic. But they are not, if you feed them right. What the diabetic gene is actually doing is misleading the mouse, as it were, about the correct way of eating. And there is a movement at the moment to try and pull back the genetic discourse from gross bodily characteristics to fine-tuned biochemical discussions, but even there we run into other problems.

Look at the cystic fibrosis gene. People are very interested in screening for the cystic fibrosis gene. This would certainly have some useful applications. But if you look at the gene, it turns out not to be just a case of it being there or being wrong. There are something like three hundred different versions of the cystic fibrosis gene now mapped by the people who have made tests. Some of them account for people who don't actually seem to have cystic fibrosis but have other things, as for instance a closure of the vas deferens, making men sterile, but in no way account for anything like people who have cystic fibrosis. So there are problems with the mapping when it comes to the connection between this informational cyberspace world of sequences and the real material world of the body. Thus, there is a problem with saying that it is a formal cause.

What about saying it is a final cause? That it is what makes us what we are? There, you run into the problem that the information obviously, patently, clearly does not do that. If you are trying to make a creature, you can have as much information as you like. You can have every last jot and tittle of its genetic code, but if you don't have that creature's egg, then you won't have the creature. There is just no way around that. And the only way to make the egg is to make the creature first. You have a real problem there.

So we have to look at a different way of understanding. I am not denying that DNA is incredibly important and that the implications of DNA technology are going to be with all of us in many ways for the rest of our lives. But we have to actually find a better way to think about what the cyberspace world of the sequence means. What I propose, although it is trite and well known, is that you have to understand it by analogy.

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Fiction
Gregory Bateson, one of the early cyberneticists, once recounted the experience of developing a whole theory of language by analogy. He said that if you start out with the atoms of language, the nouns, verbs and adverbs, and put them together into the molecules of sentences and then arrange the molecules into more complex structures of paragraphs, this is actually an example of how complicated structures are. If you then consider what a long way you have to go from a sentence to a novel, you get an impression of how complicated a matter it actually is.

He thought that the highest refinement in this system, the highest level possible, was the very subtle distinctions that mark out different sorts of full text. The example he chose was fiction. The difference between a non-fiction or a fiction book represents a very high level of distinction. Then he went to a zoo and watched the monkeys in the cage playing. It looked like fighting, but they all knew it was not fighting. They were playing. He realised that fiction, which he had taken for the top end, was in fact the bottom end and that the words were the superstructure -- and that what he had taken for the superstructure was in fact the bottom line.

When you take DNA as a dictionary, you have all the words in it. If you want to do any sort of work with words, it is good to have a dictionary. But that does not mean that dictionaries make language. It does not mean that dictionaries even make a given language, let alone the whole form of language. It just means they are dictionaries -- tools.

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Understanding the Information and Biological World
So where does this leave us with the notion of what the information world is? I don't think it is a cause in the formal or the final sense. I think that what is important here (we have heard this already twice this afternoon) is the process. Another of Bateson's dictums was that information is the difference that makes the difference. It is the making of the difference that actually matters. It is the process by which the DNA does what it does, which is in fact the intermingling of the real, the material and the informational world. The join between those things is not some sort of celestial membrane; they're not nested spheres. There is not a nice flat surface between them. They interpenetrate the information world and the material world right down to the level of these very molecules. They are utterly interrelated, interdependent and co-evolutionary.

But this presents us with a problem. What was the reason why we want formal cause and final cause? The answer is: to know what is controlling what. You want to know what is going on. And the answer I have just given is not a very satisfactory one. It is a very illustrative metaphor, but it is not an answer to what is in control. I think that evolutionary biology can give you some answer to what is in control, when you look at organisms as processes involving genetic information, but that certainly is not going to explain what is happening in eco-systems. I don't think evolutionary biology is really up to that.

I think experimental biology might be. The main point is that we are making the information world. It is not existing like Platonic forms around us. It is right there being made by us. I think that if we actually want to understand how the information world within us, that one that is running through us all the time, is working, one of the best ways will be to find out the best ways of making our own information world work -- to make that information permeate throughout the material, rather than see it as though it is some realm of the demi-urge of God. I think that that in fact may be the best hope we have for understanding the biological world, which is clearly flowing with information, where differences are being made all the time. Maybe the clearest way we have of understanding that is by creating things like it, for example, informational ecologies. Like the ones that I began to become aware of while at work in factories.

And that, in an odd way, takes us back to the Mars problem. Because it actually will be a lot easier to find out how the world works by making those sort of systems work in other contexts, than by actually going out there and creating another world physically, with thousands of terrawatts. But one way or another, if you want to understand it, you are going to have to do one of these two things.

On the late Richard Feynman's blackboard after he died (along with a lot of equations which I do not understand) was one piece of plain text: If you don't know how to make it, you don't understand it. And that is what I think about the world of information: you have to make one to understand it.