Abstraction and Informational Mediums

Over time ant colonies have evolved the ability to tend aphids and fungus- agriculture and husbandry not dissimilar to our own. Ants evolved this trait over billions of years. Humans figured it out over the course of tens of thousands. How is that possible? 

Ants took billions of years to get to that point because the length of time it takes to reiterate their information once via reproduction is abysmal. I’m sure there’s math that could be done there as to the rate of informational transformation even possible. It’s a huge bottleneck.

Humans evolved a literal new medium of informational transfer. That’s how we outpaced ants by a few magnitudes. 

What was that medium? We can say speech, or language, or thought- but underpinning all of that is abstraction. Humans were the first species to shape and wield uncertainty, vagueness, entropy. In this I mean that abstract thought is a sort of applied uncertainty: to think about something generically, you must be willing to smudge  any context around the edges. It’s a shitty double edged sword, as anyone who’s been stereotyped can tell you (“I don’t know you but I know people like you”).

 As a medium, abstraction is fast fast fast. It’s not worth it to consider how many thoughts a person can have in an ant’s 60 day lifespan. So there’s a lot of benefit to raw information as a medium that’s not bound by physics. In a way, the human brain is nature’s own shitty jury rigged physics simulator.

Sounds awesome right? What was our last medium? DNA. The thing about DNA is selection. If you accept that selection can happen to information as well, it poses an issue: where’s all the life?

 When we birthed a raw informational medium, we also created a new surface for plaque to form on. 

This blog is about the organisms that we don’t pay attention to. The informational organisms. 

I don’t want you to think of this as informational vs. biological life. I want you to think of this as fast vs slow life. The benefit of slow life is that it is incorruptible. Trillions of years of evolution have forced genetics into a self contained, self checking, self-sufficient lonely road. There’s no trust in the world of pure information.  The benefit of operating on replicator information faster than once a generation comes with the downside of required continuity:

Since informational life is definitionally no longer itself if the information loses coherence, it requires continuity.

So, here are are two requirements for pure informational life to stay alive:

1. Continuity

2. Coherence

If you turn off the computer, the processes die. Sure, you can boot them again from hard copies, but they are different instantiations of the same blueprint in the same way that you and your siblings are different instantiations of the same genetic code. 

The brilliance of the brain is that it freezes all of the interrelations that make up our informational life in goop. Maybe we do indeed “die” in some small way when we go to sleep and find ourselves restored from backup none the wiser that today is actually the only day we get to live. 

I’m not sure I'm completely sold on this paradigm, as it strays into the search for a physical replicator which I don’t believe is possible. What I do believe is possible is pinpointing the moments at which a write occurs. What’s a write? Well, if you are abstract informational life that only exists in your host’s head, then you are going to die the second your host stops thinking about you. In order to “reproduce” you need to be information relevant enough to trigger a write, basically a photo-negative of yourself that exists in physical space. 

Since computers store information as well, they are an informational medium and some measure of selection is occurring in the information we decided to store with them. Same with the mannerisms and manners we use, the references and quotes we make, the journals we keep- information fit enough to “cross over” and achieve a physical write has now passed itself on.