On the Informational Essence of Emergence and Evolution:An Analysis of the New Dualistic Approach

Terrence Deacon,Wang Jian

(1.Department of Anthropology,University of California,Berkeley,CA,USA; 2.Department of Philosophy,Xi’an Jiaotong University,Xi’an,Shaanxi 710049)

Ⅰ． Introduction

We are swimming in an ocean of recorded audio and video that can be literally part of one’s apparel and one’s constant companion.We rely on the ability to communicate at a moment’s notice with our friends and acquaintances from almost anywhere in the world and at any time,using a cellular phone.We don’t think twice about our individual power to send thoughts,images,personal opinions,or intimate diary notes to potentially millions of recipients in a few minutes,while sipping coffee in a wifi-equipped café.And we casually take advantage of the capacity to instantly access a large fraction of the written knowledge of the ages — from a digital library that is orders of magnitude larger than all but the largest libraries in the world.

But do we really understand what has happened to us in these few short decades?We now find ourselves scrambling to keep up with the flood of new information technologies that come to the market daily,but are we equally as attentive to the global and personal consequences of their cultural influence?Does anyone have a clear perspective on how this is influencing our cultures,our identities,and our very thinking processes?Yes,there are innumerable new magazines and blogs surveying the rapidly shifting information technology landscape,but in this glut of info-talk is there anyone explaining what it is that is being processed,stored,mined,browsed,and corrupted?

Because information is not merely some tool that we can use or ignore,but is what also constitutes the very fabric of human identity and experience,these new information technologies almost effortlessly integrate into everyday life.Whereas a shovel or automobile remains physically separate from its users,the seemingly non-physical nature of information blends seamlessly into our everyday thoughts,perceptions,and beliefs.The very freedom from any fixed physical instantiation that makes information so fluid and sharable is also what provides it with remarkable stealth and influence.This easily blurred boundary between the churning of the information “out there” and what we imagine that we are and know and want “in here”,gives these technologies the power to remake the very nature of our humanness.

As immersed as we are in this sea of information and its centrality to every facet of contemporary life one might naively assume that we (or someone) must have a pretty clear idea of exactly what information is.Wrong! We seem to know it when we see it,but when asked to define it or explain what it is,even CEOs of major IT companies and professors in philosophy or computer science programs seem to prevaricate.Or worse,they offer a standard technical definition that is hardly even a shadow of the familiar concept,and whose mathematical formalism promises far more insight into the workings of information than it delivers.

So,what is information?And why is it such an enormously difficult question to answer with any clarity and thoroughness?It is an ambitious book that sets out to answer this question,much less present an elaborate theory of how it has morphed into a seemingly independent universe of meanings,rituals,art-forms,values,and technologies since our ancestors first learned to talk.Who would attempt such a challenge?

A generation ago Marshall McLuhan helped a whole culture notice how the nature of the media we use to communicate with can have far more profound social consequences than does the content it conveys.His famous catch-phrase “The medium is the message” inverted what otherwise had seemed like common sense.Unlike his many predecessors McLuhan focused on the ground rather than the figure as he examined the cultural and epistemological influences of the introduction of writing,print,electronic media and other communicative innovations.Not surprisingly,Robert Logan comes by his interest in the deeper aspects of the problem of information〔1〕in large part because of his past collaborations with McLuhan on topics like the nature of number or the origins of writing.As a result,his tendency to notice and explore the non-obvious properties of information can be seen as a natural extension of this approach to communication in general.

Rather than arguing that a given concept of information is accurate or not,he instead begins by showing in which contexts one or another theory of information works or doesn’t work.He then explores these different concepts of information and their wider implications.For Logan information is not one thing and what we call information depends on the context.In this way he attempts to rescue the current technical concept of information and its abandonment of the core defining features of information,by defining a number of higher-order concepts of information that reinstate the roles of meaning and function,and decouple it from specific medium properties.

To attempt to redefine information in a way that retains its functional as well as its logical features Logan turns to an approach suggested by systems thinker Stuart Kauffman.He relies heavily on a paper that he coauthored with Kauffman and others that argues that a fundamental feature of information is that it inevitably involves the propagation of organization.He refers to this paper〔2〕throughout the book with the abbreviation POE.This approach is based on two realizations:first that it takes work to produce constraints and constraints to do work,and second that information is always dependent on constraints.The technical engineering concept of information is based on a statistical understanding of the concept of constraint,and organization can be described in terms of constraint.Ever since James Clerk Maxwell introduced the scientific world to his little imaginary demon who used information about the velocities of individual gas molecules to reverse the Second Law of Thermodynamics people have assumed than in some way or other an increase of information is opposed to an increase in entropy,or disorder.Even though we know that in some sense this must be the case,showing exactly how has bedeviled researchers for the century and a half since then.This is an assumption that,while not completely explained,becomes a critical founding insight for the rest of the book.The remaining chapters offer probes of the implications of his novel way of conceiving information.

Clearly,there are two resources which inspire Logan on his attempt to understand information and its applications in the information age.One is from achievements of Marshall McLuhan.Robert Logan dives into the deeper aspects of the problem of information due to his collaborations with McLuhan on topics like the origins of writing and the nature of medium,etc.It is fair to say that from the general communication approach,Logan starts his exploration into the information issue.And the other is from system theory scholar Stuart Kauffman.The key concept and vital argument element in this paper is the propagation of organization,and how does it show its distinctiveness inthe biosphere,the symbolosphere,the technosphere and the econosphere.And the notion thatinformation is always dependent on constraints is thus promoted on this basis of theory,which also constitutes the foundation of argument for the rest of his book.

Ⅱ.Emergence and Neo-Dualism

Although human symbolic interactions are naturally part of the human biotic system,Loganmakes distinction between the so-called purely biological interactions of biosemiosis and humanlanguage/culture.While in the former process,information is not standing for something else andthe communication of information is instantiated in the biomolecules,and cannot be separated fromthose biomolecules,in the latter process,information is clearly symbolic and is not instantiatedmaterially but is only physically mediated,therefore human language and culture are able to movefrom one medium to another.Based on these,Logan states that the distinction between material andnon-material emergence can be made.The familiar examples of material emergence are regularhexagonal convection cells,weather patterns in the abiotic world and living organism in the biosphere.And for non-material emergence,it could be included into the symbolosphere as Schumann originally introduced,〔3〕which involves the human mind and all the products of themind,like its abstract thoughts and symbolic communication processes such as spoken and writtenlanguage and the other products of the human mind and culture such as music,art,math,scienceand technology.

As Kauffman〔4〕and Clayton〔5〕argue that biology cannot be predicted from or reduced tophysics,the symbolic conceptual non-material aspects of human behavior cannot be reduced to,derived from or predicted from the biology of human brain and the nervous system.Humanlanguage and culture as the symbolic domain is a product of human conceptual thought andrepresent emergent phenomena and propagating organization,symbolic and not materiallyinstantiated.There is an exception of technology,which seems be instantiated in physics,but it is theconcepts and organization that goes in to the creation of physical tools which are emergent andpropagate not the actual physical tools.

The core insight that runs through the book is a synthesis of two ways of conceiving of human thought and communication.

The first insight is the idea that mind — at least human mind — is not a phenomenon that is confined within a brain.The so-called “extended mind” hypothesis argues that what we consider a human mind is seamlessly integrated with the sea of communications it is embedded within.If,as Charles Sanders Peirce recognized over a century ago,cognition is a form of semiosis and each person is additionally engaged in semiotic exchanges with other minds,then in a real sense,no mind is an island.The boundary between your thought processes and mine is permeable,and the thoughts themselves exist in a distributed network that may extend across many individuals separated by thousands of miles and years.

The second insight is that this web of communication in many important respects exists and evolves and exhibits causal dynamics that persist in parallel with the physical-mechanical-biological world.

These two crucialinsights intertwine naturally in Logan’s book and further improve his explorations of information.In addition,Logan suggests an interesting parallel with a Cartesian concept that in other respects he rejects.This is the infamous mind/body dualism that suggest that mental processes take place in a realm without physical substance or extension—res cogitans—and that the physical body is a materially constituted mechanism that is part of the physical world—res extensa.Cartesian dualism argues that the physical world is completely distinct from the realm of mind.Logan and Schumann reject the potential supernatural implications of this split and recognize that the realm of mind is very much part of the physical world.Yet they argue that the symbolic meanings and values generated by language nevertheless have a curious partial independence from any particular physical embodiment.They propose to resolve the Cartesian dilemma concerning how minds influence the physical world,in a practical way by simply identifying the Symbolosphere with Descartes’ res cogitans.Although embodied in extended media,the meaningful contents of any communication are themselves not identical with this extended substrate.They are,as Deacon〔6〕(2012) has noted,both physically absent from this immediate physical medium and yet an essential constituent,without which symbol tokens would be mere inert physical objects.So in this sense Logan and Schuman are prepared to treat the meanings and significance of these symbol tokens as separate from the resextensa.In this respect,this shadowy aspect of symbolic communication is consistent with a variant of Cartesian dualism,which Logan dubs neo-dualism.This provides a sort of compromise between a modern materialistic perspective and the classic mind/body dualism inherited from the Enlightenment.

The notion of neo-dualism was firstly introduced in Logan and Schumann and extended inLogan,〔7〕due to the existence of non-material emergence and the symbolosphere.Different fromthe definition of traditional dualism as in Clayton,〔8〕the non-physical component to humansnamely language,culture and mind is symbolic and conceptual,not necessarily spirit-like ortranscendent.In this neo-dualistic approach of Logan and Schumann,〔9〕all phenomena belong toone or the other of two different domains:the physiosphere,the material world consisting of bothliving and non-living matter and corresponding exactly to Descartes’ res extensa,and thesymbolosphere,involving the human mind and all the symbolic products of the mind andcorresponding to Descartes’ res cogitans minus the notion of God,the soul and spirit.In this way,neo-dualism represents a weak form of dualism,contrasted with the strong dualism of Descartes.

Because the symbolosphere cannot be reduced to the biology of the human brain and thenervous system from which they arise,Logan sticks to the strong emergence position,instead of thatof the weak emergence which confirms the distinction between the higher levels of complexity andlower levels but holds the view that higher level phenomena can ultimately be reduced to physicsonce a deeper understanding of the world is gained.In this case,the strong emergence andneo-dualism/weak dualism are perfectly compatible.

Ⅲ.Informational Nature in the Evolution and Propagation of Symbolosphere

It’s just that in many cases,such as in the symbolic communication provided by language,there is considerable flexibility with respect to this physical embodiment.Thus,the same linguistic meaning can be embodied in many different media,e.g.,sound of voice,manual signs,hand-written scripts,print,or bits and bytes of computer memory.This doesn’t make communication non-physical,just substrate-transferrable.There is always something that is extended in space and time that the communication requires in order to be realized:i.e.a medium.Nevertheless,the purpose of an action,the meaning of a word,the function of a tool,or the value of a work of art are at once dependent on a physical medium and something absent from that embodiment.

It was,of course,the genius of McLuhan to recognize the fundamental role played by the form of this medium.So it might at first appear that Logan has forgotten this essential insight.But despite his neo-Cartesian treatment of the various “spheres” of information processes that humans inhabit in addition to the physiosphere,biosphere,and their own biosemiotic and neurological processes,Logan remains quite solidly rooted in physical processes that for Descartes would have constituted the res extensa.His explorations of information processes in language,culture,technology,economics,and so forth,smoothly meld the meaningful with the physical,and are constantly focusing attention their physical causal influences.

As pointed by Deacon,human beings are symbolic species,elements of the symbolosphere areexactly the behaviors of human race.And it is also the symbolic elements that unite all other elementsin the symbolosphere.The notion of weak dualism or neo-dualism sheds light on our understanding of propagatingorganization and the non-material emergence.The differences lay in that it is the materialgene-based propagating organization in biosphere while it is non-material,extra-somatic,meme-based propagating organization in the symbolosphere.Just as the mechanism for replicationfor living organisms through descent,modification and selection,the same is true of the evolution ofthe symbolosphere.The transmission of meme is its descent,though varied in forms and levels.Atthe same time,because of the transmitting ability of meme differs and modification of memes inminds of various recipients,the selection process occurs along with.Thus,we could see that thepropagating organization of the symbolosphere in nature follows an evolution mechanism ofinformation,and the symbolosphere belongs to the domain of information.

Logan’s interpretation of human culture and society focuses on the emergence and downwardscausal relations.He depicts the mode of propagation and evolution in the symbolosphere.However,the new dualism faces the difficulty to correctly explain the ontological position of thesymbolosphere,while the philosophy of information proposed by Chinese scholar Kun Wu providesa standard solution in its theory of human evolution.〔10〕The evolution of human beings not onlycontains a physiological inheritance pattern,that is,to follow the single evolution path with DNAgenetic characteristics,but also includes psychological activity patterns and behavioral patterns in athree-dimensional way.For human race,the physiological and genetic characteristics will presentthemselves in the postnatal growth,at the same time,the characteristics of psychological andbehavior patterns accumulated in years will also leave “traces” on the inherent genetic vector,whichconstitutes a new congenital genetic features.It is in this interaction and two-way activities ofmutual development and realization between human and nature as well as culture factors that allthe content of physiosphere,biosphere and symbolosphere and their form achieve a completed,essential and unified integration.

It is likely that many readers will conclude that Logan doesn’t exactly answer the question that is asked by the book’s title.Providing a theory of information that formally explains the basis of reference and significance,and demonstrates the relationship between information and physical work remains a complex challenge for future research.To additionally link such an expanded theory of information with a theory of the evolution of language and an analysis of the evolutionary dynamics underlying cultural and technological change makes this an extremely ambitious project.Even if we are not provided with a full reformulation of the concept of information,Logan clearly demonstrates the many serious limitations in our current conceptions of information.The recognition that such a theory will need to be a component of a larger theory of the “propagation of organization’,and not merely the reproduction and transmitting of bits of data,sets the stage for exploring the pragmatic aspects of symbolic communication.This provides him with a springboard for jumping into a far-reaching discussion of the many uniquely human modes of social-semiotic evolution that characterize our current historical era,from science and technology to computation and the internet.

Much of the remainder of the book highlights possibilities and challenges posed by these media and their different but related symbolic evolutionary processes,that only a more fully fleshed out theory of information can provide,Logan have clearly demonstrated that many serious limitations exist in our currentunderstanding of information.His efforts,that information should be perceived in a larger theory ofthe “propagating organization”,rather than the reproduction and transmission of bits of data,pavesthe way to explore pragmatic aspects of symbolic communication of human beings.It will bringinspiring insight to our comprehension and illustration of symbolic evolution of society in digitalage,from science to technology and from computation to Internet.And the philosophy ofinformation,on the other hand,offers us a systematic approach to understand the dual existence ofmatter and information in the ontological sense.

References:

〔1〕Robert K.Logan,What is Information -Propagating Organization in the Biosphere,the Symbolosphere,the Technosphere and the Econosphere.2013.

〔2〕Stuart Kauffman,Robert K.Logan,Propagating Organization:An Enquiry.Biology & Philosophy,2008,23(1),pp.27-45.

〔3〕〔9〕Schumann,J.H.,The evolution of the symbolosphere.In Proceedings of the Great Ideas in the Social.Sciences Lecture,UCLA Center for Governance,Los Angeles,CA,USA,21.November,2003.

〔4〕Kauffman,S.,Investigations;Oxford University Press:Oxford,UK,2000.

〔5〕〔8〕Clayton,P.,Mind and Emergence:From Quantum to Consciousness;Oxford University Press:Oxford,UK,2004.

〔6〕Terrence W.Deacon.,The Evolution of Consciousness.Contemporary Social Science,2012,7(2)，pp.117-138.

〔7〕Robert K.Logan,Neo-dualism and the Bifurcation of the Symbolosphere into the Mediasphere and the HumanMind.Semiotica,2006(160),pp.229-242.

〔10〕Wu,K.,Philosophy of Information:Theory,Method and System,The Commercial Press:Beijing,China,2005.