…INFORMED…
Camino 2015 / Stage 69 / Saturday 4 July / From Mansilla de las Mulas to León / 19 km
Reinvigorated by the concern of my foreign walking companions, I succeeded in reaching a comfortable hostel yesterday. My gastric problems are finished. There only remains a last short bit of the desert plain to be covered. I’m going to arrive in the city of León where I anticipate with some concern the urban animation far noisier than what I’ve known these last days. Here is my last chance to reflect calmly on the border between material and immaterial, between the something and the nothingness from which it springs.
Why not take again the lovely image of the school of flying-fish suggested by the author of D.I.E.U. sauveguide? (which means G.O.D. saveguides?, but has not been translated into English) The immaterial is sort of how the marine universe looks to an observer perched on the bridge of a ship crossing a warm sea: the agitated surface of the water prevents seeing what is below. But then suddenly a school of flying fish leap out!
Coming out of a fishy universe (where the concept of flying belongs to the virtual domain), they become for a moment real flyers! Our “exocets” (that’s the French scientific name for flying fish) leap through the surface and float in the visible Right Side of the observer’s universe. It would be necessary for our observer to dive to the other side of the surface he sees, in the Reverse side of the watery mirror alone visible from the bridge, to see these same flying creatures in their “fish” state. And even then, will he be lucky enough to see them? If so, this too will indeed be fleeting, since these exocets are in the water at certain moments, and out of the water at others!
At what moment are these strange creatures still fish, and at what moments are they volatile? For someone unprepared on the bridge of a ship, their exit from the water can make him believe in a spontaneous appearance of birds capable of soaring over several dozens, even hundreds of meters. It is the real surging from the unreal, something which astonishes you there where you are expecting nothing. It’s like a spark that surges from nothing onto something!
This image permits us to imagine the position of the quantum physicist unable to discern the origin of matter. He is troubled by the appearance of particles sprung out of an energy field where he had foreseen only the immaterial. So, must our scientist invoke an original order already installed in this apparition, a pre-existing entity from which would emanate a creative capacity? Would this informed scholar return to question a divine will allowing creation? Such a question would indeed prove his admission of ignorance “wisely” disguised!
Such an explanation that the material surges from nothing leads again to the plausibility of a “creator God.” Could such a creative will emanate otherwise than from an entity capable of will, like a person? Here I am again in a dilemma, since I have already refused God this quality of “God person” in Stage 35. What other plausible candidate can I find, capable of such a behavior? Material candidate? Immaterial candidate? Either one can be considered. Perhaps neither one, or even both at the same time, as in a reasoning that some call “tetravalent”: true, false, true and false, neither true nor false! Am I finally going to find this ancestor of the chicken and the egg who is both the same and different?
This is what Guy Trainar mischievously proposes in his book cited above: this mysterious candidate would take the name “information.” It is not strictly material: the more one shares, the more one is enriched. But it isn’t afraid of material support to allow sharing! As for the energy necessary for sharing, it goes from considerable (imagine the efforts made by businessmen, publicists, propagandists and ideologues) to very, very little (like the note you find on the corner of the table in the hostel that the coffee is “nearby”, uh, I mean “ready.”) In the name of information, yes, I can conceive the chicken, the egg, and even more the cock (chicken) and l’œuf à la coque (boiled egg); everything surges from nothing but indeed saying something the same and different simultaneously!
Information is one, for it in-forms (un-forms?), it specifies in a material way in giving form to the material: egg, chicken, cock. In an immaterial way, it gives “one” sense to the thought: precede, engender; and also to the sound: cackle, crow. In a ternary way, it is also material and immaterial: the genetic code (visible in DNS) will insure that the chicken cackles and the cock crows! But the information also knows how to be dual, specifically in its material version the entropy coding deteriorates, and has a tendency to crumble into disorder: by dint of laying eggs, the hen multiplies the errors of the genetic code up to the time when she can no longer lay.
In its immaterial version, from time to time, one of these errors in the genetic code goes in the right direction, produces a mutation, and a new race of chickens evolves laying more eggs per year! One mutation delves into the disorder to increase the order! In both cases and in any case, there is no doubt about the continuity between order and disorder, whether one goes from the former to the latter or vice versa!
I cannot resist giving another example of information deteriorating in an entropic way: “You can’t make an omelet without breaking eggs!” From order to disorder, that’s for sure: don’t even think of trying to crack an omelet in order to reconstitute the white and yolk of the egg! Even if these are peacock eggs! … Well, well, here is León! León! (the cry of the peacock—in French—of course!)
