Concepts of information in biology, (speculative) physics & cosmology

0:00 I'm sorry I didn't mean to interrupt you. I'm literally going right now. You really were. I don't want to feel very guilted by it. The thing was that I was in the Hiley Library. I sent you a note saying couldn't find it anywhere. It wasn't even the British Library.

2:30 And you said well it's in the Hiley Library. So now you have it back. I've got it back. Leave it back to you. Yes that's a very interesting, that's a very good set of notes actually. I learnt a lot. The lectures are really good. Yeah, but I... I made them. Really? Well thank you. I enjoyed reading them. It's fifty quid. Oh no kidding. Yeah. Well, I pushed the boat out and bought an order of coffee. Well, once I've got it, I mean, once I've finished reading it, I'm more than happy to donate it to the library. I'm so sorry, I didn't mean to interrupt. You've missed everything that was important. It's been a piece of handball of you. You have to read some biology now. Have you got all the Rosen stuff? Anyway, I'll go. See you next week. Well, let's talk about this. Well, kind of ideas of, kind of like, things that, you know, I think Dawkins, and I'm leaving the rainbow. Dawkins! Oh no, I'm leaving! Just so I can knock it down. I didn't expect you would somehow. What is your favourite clock?

5:00 Thank you for your attention. Because he's actually listened to what you've said and absorbed it. Go ahead. I'm so sorry. I have something to say about information. I get the feeling that the schema that you took, it's all... The name of the guy, he's from Belgium. He almost originated movement which has to do with information and quantum physics and... If I just try and get through, I mean this is what I think they think. So this is the idea that information is something out there in the environment, the organism gathers and kind of internalizes. Maybe through, this is through the experience of many generations. So what Dawkins was saying is that the genome, or the gene pool, is some kind of representation of past environments. So it's the environments through which that population has lived. So this is the kind of genetic toolkit that it's used to kind of get through all that past history. It seems that you have this idea that information is a kind of stuff out there in the environment, something external to organisms.

7:30 And then the other half is that, of course, that genes are the instructions for creating the body through which that organism interacts with the environment. So, two very odd ideas, very teleological and... It depends, if they all turn into some sort of a mechanical, you know, mechanical, it's very strange. Well, this is the thing, you see, because it's always put across as being very materialistic, and of course it's just the weather, organs and survival, they don't. But then, when you get down to what he's really talking about, the information, you've got these two very odd concepts. It's kind of brought in here, so it's this kind of... But that means he knows what information is. He's trying to materialize information in a way. And that's the second step. And again, yeah, in a way that we've got, ah, well, genetics is just talking about DNA, it's purely physical, chemical, but there are instructions in it. Instructions to do what? It seems to me that the problem here is the problem which... You know, so much popular talk about information, which is that they don't distinguish, there is Shannon, who put it back in his original paper back in 1948, and a lot of it was Spanish, but he did distinguish it a bit. This talk about instructions is already introducing, really implicitly, a semantics. And the point is that the code is not, there's absolutely no semantic content in Shannon's information. That's right. It's purely, it's capacity, purely algorithmic capacity. Pure algorithmic capacity and there doesn't have to be any any meaning at all. When you start talking about instructions because yeah exactly you're introducing the notion of implicitly semantic content meaning and you're ignoring the distinction between a code in general that contains international states that need to discriminate between and the language with the semantics which is considerably more

10:00 And then you sort of justify it all by using entropy. It seems to be tying up quite different levels of conceptual... Because I think you're trying to smuggle in a very teleological, a very semantic concept with material genes. Yes, exactly. It's being founded on a kind of contradiction. I agree, the way that Dawkins writes, he does. Well, I don't think there are examples like this, and I think it's very common. What about Paul Sponier? Do you know his book, Sponier? You know, three books, right? About information, information, meaning, information. He's a brat. Keith has mentioned him. What? Because I mentioned him. Because I came across his work, and I suggested Owen looks at it, but Owen didn't. I mean, I don't think... It's not very good. It's not very good. I bought all these new books. Last time, he was still there, the guy from Switzerland, because he was trying to point out, he was saying that we don't have any sort of that proper theory of information. He was giving a talk on that. And in this context, he was mentioning... He was trying to... The field and theory of information, which would be, in a sense, all-inclusive, all those others are, you know, but he wasn't very successful, I mean, I believe, but this is why I invested into all three books. They're expensive. Yeah, they're not good. Pity, because I hear it was so good, international.

12:30 We sounded good, but then it wasn't actually carried through. Because also biological information was there. Kind of all embracing. Attempting. Just because I don't like it doesn't mean you might not get something from the speaker. Can you actually give us the title of any of these books? I'm not going to let this guy have it. One of them is information and meaning. And that was very tempting because if someone's got information and they need to go, I'm interested in what he's saying. Yes, but like so many of these wonderful sounding times, it turns out to be more sales and shit than substance. But I don't know, his master's thesis as well, wasn't it? His master's thesis was on information and meaning. I kind of wonder if there's any contrast with that, this kind of rather muddled way of, people like Maturana Grelo, this idea of structural coupling, the example that comes to my mind is like in a conversation, am I conveying information to you or you to me, is that what understanding means, or is it simply the fact that... I say something and you can say something and then I know how to respond. Is there simply a coupling so that means that there is what we're saying to one another? So information actually comes out of that coupling. Where does the structure come in? Is the structure, information is structure? What information is the structure that comes out of that interaction? It is the structure. I know people rave about it. Some people I know rave about them. I mean... Google is a positive sense. Yes, yes, in a positive sense. Yeah, yeah. I sit here perhaps.

15:00 It's very hard. I cannot understand it. But Daniel Lu has also written a paper with me, hasn't he? Yeah. Which is actually a good paper. This I remember. Because we do wrote it. The kind of information comes out of the interaction between organism and environment, not the organism kind of finding information in the environment or information in the organism creating... So how is this different from Gaia? It has lots in common. Okay. So I'm... I mean, so... Daisy World. Have you been through Daisy World? Oh, is he coming? When's he coming to the back door? Oh, it's in Cambridge. Did he do Daisy Watt, John Conway? I don't know if he did that. I mean, he did the original one. He did the Game of Life. He did the Game of Life. I wrote the paperback. Everybody knows that one. Yeah. What did he do? Is he making something? He did the Mathematician's Liberation Movement as well. Is he making something? No, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no. The structure that the organism takes up in the environment is through this this coupling of so in a way it's not they were kind of so is this a dynamic you see because the first one you've got is sort of information whatever that is coming in this is more a dynamic process the information emerges out of it do you need information for this in this context the information seems to be being defined in terms of the process

17:30 We do see, we can talk about, the organism taking up a particular role in the environment or taking a particular role. But you can do that purely dynamically just by bumping against the boundary conditions, if I can put it. And I'm just saying, is that what... That's what I'm trying to distinguish between a biology which is sort of a super-duper billiard table. Okay, I mean, you've got to bring complexity into it. You've got to have things which are plastic in some sense. You've got to have a sort of a floppy structure. I mean, solid billiard balls won't work, but you've got a sort of complexity in there where there's, I forget how you put it, where there's plasticity. Well, it's got to be adaptive structure. Some sort of adaptive structure. Adaptive and anticipatory, in fact, in the case of the biological organism. Yeah, but then you said we've also got to have a microtubule to give it some energy. Ah, well, no, that's, you know, quite a different level. I mean, now you're talking about the level of, you know, the hardware that's underpinning all this, I mean, which is... I thought in this context we're just trying to decide where information as a category kind of fits into the... But I'm trying to maintain that there is no need for information in this last process. That's what I'm trying to suggest. I don't know whether I'm right or wrong. Are you talking about how they understand information by law? We're just worrying. I mean, we started with worrying about what the hell information meant. Then we had Dawkins's biological information. Then we had Majorano's structural company. And now we, I think this came from Daisy World, didn't it? Or is it? Or is this? Or is this structural coupling still? Yeah, that's what I mean. Okay, then I'm saying structural coupling may in fact just be dynamical processes governed by physical law, did I say that after all we've been talking about? But obviously in this context they're highly non-equilibrium. Yes, but you don't need information to discuss it. The question is, as a category, is information just something that's completely supervenient that emerges? As we look at it in a sense that, you know, or is it something dynamic, fundamental. That's what I'm trying to get. Yeah, how fundamental is the category of information in this case.

20:00 But you know we have, you know, Bohm and I have written about, you know, something very fundamental. And obviously other people at Olsen might be absolutely fundamental. I think that's a kind of foundational principle. Zeilinger, yeah, but Zeilinger, we didn't have a Zeilinger. Take your thing back one stage, Zeilinger's. Oh, he's already talked about it. I talked about Wheeler, but Wheeler and Zeilinger's got another take on that. The only thing is that Zeilinger's criticism of Shannon information is not a very strange business of this idea that the most elementary entity must be the one about which the most elementary property matters. Well, I'm so puzzled about what we mean by information. With Maurice de Gausson's work there and with my work with Melvin Browne on non-communicative geometry, I'm not as sure about information as I was, and I'm going to take your bone here so I can bounce these things off. I mean, I want to talk about Ancestry as well. I'm sort of tossing out these things. He has two... What does he know? Come across him. No, is he okay? He's come across him. He had a paper in that big proceedings for the Dirac, the big Dirac question that came out of Johannes 30 years ago.

22:30 There's a long paper in there. I've seen the name, but I don't know what the hell he's saying. It's a philosophy of biology and contract systems theory. It's one of the only paper in philosophy of biology. Okay, two kinds of information. Right, good. What are they? What I read is a reflection of some of the theory of organisms. And he's talking about homogenous and heterogeneous information, and I'm going to try and build this up a bit. All my information is heterogeneous. Sorry, so this is making up jokes and laughing at my own jokes, which is the poorest taste. So this obeys Chan's laws, this doesn't. Oh, well now we're getting somewhere, now we've got clear terms on what's distinguishing. So, this is replicated, this is stored, as he says it's reproduced, and it's not stored, so this is a memory. Or if it is, it's something very much like short-term circulating memory, perhaps. Interesting. What's the difference between a stored and memory? I thought it was memory without storage. Like so-called short-term circulating memories, you know, the things that you're supposed to be able to just recall for a very limited amount of time, and if you don't internalize it, they don't, you know, they don't need to get there. Like short-term memories? Yeah, that's actually what I'm saying, short-term circulating memories, I think that's what you're saying. Short-term memories? That means, you know, let time is, you know, a long-term memory, like I know there's short-term... Anyway, so please explain to us what you're talking about. Well, if you... I don't know what you mean. Well, that's what we're... Well, one of us is this most famous thing. We are a puzzle. We are. So... So, where? So, Stephen is here. He's talking about...

25:00 There's only places, dunes on this side. Oh, that's fair enough. And then the actual forms. So... Well, you know, you never tell before long. And... And then... And then... And then... And then... And then... And then... And then... Well, he says take the example of a cell. Think of how many atoms there are in a cell. Is that a two-client information? Yes, that's the claim. Two-client? He says they're quite different. Genes are homogeneous information and forms are heterogeneous information. So genes are stored in material form, they're replicated, they obey challenge law. So the information is particulate and therefore can degrade according to chance or forms or holes. They're not consistent of the material. They sound awfully like, this sounds very Aristotelian, this notion. It sounds very much like the idea of substantial forms. So you get formal causality down there and material causality down there. Yes, it sounds a very Aspartilian notion. They don't degrade, they're not discrete. He says think of a cell, 10 to the 12th, think of the number of possible configurations that you've got. Sorry, the number of? Possible configurations. Possible configurations of the shell. So that's going to be greater than 10 to the 100th. An immense number is what he calls it. Then think of the number of cells that we've ever had on the, in the history of the Earth. And that's, the actual number is actually sort of more than 10 to the 10 and less than,

27:30 certainly nowhere near as big as this. A large number but not an immense number. So how can any particular cell take up the form that it does, since it's a selection among an immense possible number? He calls that a creative selection, and it's a selection that is conservative in that cells of a particular kind will give rise to similar cells. The actual number of what? Sorry, what is the actual number of all the cells that have ever been in all the organisms that have ever lived? 10 to the 100th cell. Well, yes, we were saying much less than 10 to the 100th. Yeah, 10 to the 79th. It would be much smaller. Keith should be here, one of Eddington's magic numbers, 10 to the 79th. Yes, well, 10 to the 80th is supposed to be the number of all the elementary particles in the universe. Well, no, he's saying that this 10 to the 100 is the number of all the possible configurations. I still don't understand what the definition of a possible configuration is. In one cell, yes. So if we imagine that all possible configurations take place, There are many orders of magnitude, by about 30 orders of magnitude, well, 20 orders of magnitude. Yes, I don't understand what the definition of a possible configuration of the cell is in this context. Well, how you cycle them, perhaps, together. Oh, I mean, so this has been defined at the sort of atomic level. The possible configurations, well, that's a complete description of the state of the cell in the quantum space.

30:00 Pick the first one in 10 to the 79, you pick the second one in 10, and then you slowly get bigger and bigger and bigger. It's not very surprising. No, it's not. I'm still quite unclear as to what the configurations, in the case of these possible configurations of the cell, are configurations of, and at what level of description. That's the structure we're doing. Okay. Structure of the molecule. Okay. That's what I wasn't clear about. What level of description are we in? What kind of level of structure of systems are we? We're at the atomic level. Well, he's talking about atoms because he said you could go into atoms. Fine. Okay. You didn't actually... I'm so sorry. I hadn't actually spotted you. I got it. You did say. So, so, possible configurations is immense. The actual number is large, but not immense. So, what we've actually got is... What he calls order about heterogeneity. We actually have many more possible combinations than we actually see. So, it seems... Darwin's, Darwin's actually. Well... You know what I mean by that? Not this bit of cell. He wouldn't say that, would he? What Alsace was trying to say is that the cell actually determines which configuration is assumed out of this total possible number. Why can't, as Bob was saying earlier, just solve Schrodinger's equation and find minimum energy and that's it? But then how many minimum energy solutions are you going to have? Well, we don't know enough about that. Since we can't solve the Schrodinger equation for simple molecular, It has been done in quantum chemistry, but obviously not for anything of the level of complexity of a set of protein molecules. Has it actually been done in quantum chemistry? And they have actually, just by sheer brute force, actually solved the Turing equation for the electrostructures complex of the proton module.

32:30 So they still face the problem where you have many, many minima. ... energy solutions for... But until we solve the protein-folding problem, we're not going to know what the minima are. Well, I think it's the actual kind of electron structure, the way the electrons are deposited around the molecule, because they want regions in which things can interact, you know, get radicals attracted to these sort of concentrations of electronic charge and things. Not as much energy then. And this is all, you know, on the protein-folding problem, isn't it? I mean, that's not been solved. No, of course it's not been solved. I think we should try to find ways of making jobs to make money, for instance. It's probably setting our models. Look, Galaxum, a bit like that, you know, they're investing lots of money in this sort of thing. We've got experts downstairs in the department we belong to. Well, you know, I mean, crystallography could do a bit of the same work. Yeah, it's not. I mean, part of politics is doing the same thing. Take it in another level. Alcester talks about, say... I mean, it's quite fun. Some chemical constituents will say how the various studies that show the variety of human beings in the concentrations are different and it's not that they vary by a few percent, it's like the concentration in one individual can be ten times that in another, but still we've got something which we recognise that maybe the bone has the same function, the same kind of structure Right, is this level of structural description, as it were, is he just as it were reinforcing the analogy with the distinction between what's on the left hand side in the case of the left to the right hand side in the case of the right to the left hand side in the case of the left to the left hand side in the case of the left to the right hand side in the case of the left to the left hand side in the case of the left to the right hand side in the case of the left to the left hand side in the case of the left to the left hand side in the case of the left to the right hand side in the case of the left to the left hand side in the case of the left to the left hand side in the case of the left to the left hand side in the case of the left to the left hand side in the case of the left to the left hand side in the case of the left to the left hand side in the case of the left to the left hand side in the case of the left to the left hand side in the case

35:00 You'll find that there's a huge variety between different people, that there's a kind of level of form, an order, above... How about, is he talking about a mutual particle, let's say, you know, because he's talking about like two electrons which don't make finger things. Hmm, so you're talking about electrons that would be on this, would be homogeneous, and the homogeneity is a kind of... This is a very interesting idea. So matter at a certain level is actually characterized, at least one level of description of matter is singled out by the fact that it does have this emulsion, which is as it were intrinsically digital. And then the thing on the other side is the suggestion that one might actually have different mathematical structures. The reason there's an echo of that going way, way back in the historical point is that there is an actual echo of that idea in Cantor, way, way back. One of the reasons, one of the motives that Cantor had in introducing the transfinite elements, he actually believed that the transfinite elements would actually turn out to be needed for... Counting the number of atoms of the universe? I'm not exactly sure of the background. It's a very interesting, purely historical remark. It's an aside in Baudrillard's paper on Cantor, which I was reading the other day. It's part of the general sort of background of Cantor's ideas, which is mostly ties that have been lost, side by side.

37:30 That he did actually believe that the trans-finite would actually turn out to have applications in physics precisely for the description of continuous matter or description of the ether. No, he didn't commit suicide, he didn't have a breakdown, he did indeed end up in a lunatic asylum at Harvard the last year, he had a series of breakdowns. No, he had absolutely nothing to do, his breakdown had nothing to do with the reception of his work. That's a myth which was put around by Russell in one of the most vicious and catty and irresponsible pieces of character assassination that even Russell ever went into. Which is saying something. And I mean, it's quite like I said, Cantor was a plant-bredder than Michael Hall. And it's just a bit vicious. So you're saying they just gossiped about him? It was just vicious gossip. If you read, there are two excellent books, scholarly books on Cantor, and one is Michael Hall's, which is an excellent book. And the other is Jeffrey Daubens, and if you read either of those, I mean, Michael Hallett's is, I suppose, a bit more detailed. Yeah, it's quite one of those professional good historians of mathematics, and they're both excellent. But he did have this idea that, as it were, arithmetic might be intrinsically tied to a rather limited level of description of the structure of matter, of what he called arithmemorphic matter. Well, it wasn't the interview, it was the finite versus the trans-finite. And of course, from Campbell's definition, that included the rational numbers as well. But this is just simply an echo, a very, very, just a deco of what appears to be Alsace's idea. I would have thought you would have been a great fan of Cantor's ideas, because of course he also did use this theory of the Alephs leading up to what he called the absolute infinite. Well, no, but I heard that you are a fan of Cantor.

40:00 Are you a fan of Cantor? I'm sorry, I thought, I just said I thought you might be interested. I thought, what is this? I just said I thought you might be. Okay. Thank you. Do you know anything about quantum? You do? Okay, that's great. I was a mathematician. I was a mathematician. I was a mathematician. I was a mathematician. I was a He did end in a nut house, it's true, but not for the reasons that he did receive an awful lot of opposition. Actually, a lot less opposition, because in fact, by the early 1900s, or even by the late 1890s, we should have accepted, yeah, I don't know, because we've got to figure out, just heterogeneous, the idea that heterogeneous information, it was a structural analogy with this distinction between the kind of mathematical structure which naturally goes with the heterogeneous information on the one hand, and that which would go... ...homogeneous information than the other, and it was just an echo of an idea that... I'm sorry, I'll shut up for the next year or so. I'm sorry, I'm sorry. Well, can you go and tell us a bit more about Alsace? No, I want to approach Alsace from another angle. I'll start from the difference I can end up back where I was. Hopefully that might clarify... We'll all go round in ever decreasing circles until we disappear. First in Vienna circles to go in. We went down in Vienna circles as first in the circle, wasn't we? If we talk about the hand of man, the foot of man...

42:30 Darwin asked the question, isn't it strange that the hand of man and the foot of the mole and the wing of the bat are all based on the same bones and in the same positions? Same relative positions. Same form, because it's in the same position. If you want a close analogy, it would have to be something like a piece of an ophthalm. You can actually say a humorous bone. Now, so what Darwin said was, well, this is clear what this means. It's the ancestor of all of these. So that's clearly the explanation. So we have some continuity. So we have some kind of continuity of... Actually, I think according to Stephen Jay Gilded, what's the name of that little slug-like creature that was the only... Pikaia. Pikaia, that's right. Survived the Pikaian extinction. This is all very well, because you can imagine how Darwin came up with this. But then we actually know a bit more, because, I mean, how do genes fit in with this? Is it true that all these pairs, for example, they're all essentially five? That's interesting, yeah. That was kind of the the dogma was that all androids have five fingers,

45:00 but they've actually found early androids that they had six or seven. So it's not fluctuating? Well, maybe it was early heterogeneity followed by... What we know, what genetics tells us, is that we only have continuity of genes. We don't actually have continuity of, yeah that's what we're talking about. So that's, this is biological homology that's what we're talking about. Yeah, I mean, biology is... This should get exciting. Not really because homology in this sense is... Well it's got absolutely nothing to do with it. I think there is an interesting connection but I don't think it's not of this sort of need. Now we have to know what homology might be. In this case homology is much like substantial forms. So, what people said was, oh, what homology means, the fact that all these are structurally the same, is that, well, what it must mean is that they're controlled by the same genes, so it must mean the same genes, mustn't it? In other words, that you'd be able to get this down to the level of the Shannon information, the structure in the genetic code, the codes for... The reductionist idea, basically. You know, you'll still get this kind of thing going around at the moment, but I was just talking this way, but then it's the same ratio, same proportion, so that's not necessarily, I mean, well, not our homology, Betty Cruz. No, no, not in that sense, no. This just means functional. Well, it's functional. Yes, well, it's functional.

47:30 The meaning of the continuity of the genes. What is the definition then? Time, Continuity, Generation, Relation. In this case, sameness of function and function. Well, I mean, this is the same structure under every variety of function. But don't we have the same genes as, like, fruit plants as well? I mean, how is this biologically? It's a real question, not a joke. Because how do they distinguish whether we have the same genes or not? So I'm asking... I'm thinking about the continuity about the, for example, what about the discontinuity? Well, that's because we're not, sorry. Well, because, you know, so we're reading about quantum mechanics. Mm-hmm. So, yeah, but these, so what about this company? Yeah, what does it mean? Because actually this was the same behind my question about fruit fly genes, whether, what does this mean? Well, I think the conventional, that's why I was going to answer it. It's quite a speciation, isn't it? It's one lineage branches from another, and so the genes get their own thing and get switched on and switched off, and we do share a certain proportion of our genes with the free fly, but not the ones that go, I mean, I'm just saying what the conventional answer, I think, would be, but not the ones which go for these particular homologies. What sort of structures are we having fun with the moles and bats and things? It's a straightforward enough answer for the conventional thing. I mean, but there are cases that are known quite early in the history of genetics. Like in 1929, Thomas Hunt Morgan did experiments with the eyeless mutation in Indrosophila, the fruit plant.

50:00 The workforce of... Yeah, indeed. So, you know, very familiar to lots of geneticists. So you start reading from eyeless mutants. At the beginning, yes, they have no eyes, they keep breathing, and then you end up with flies that have eyes again, so that somehow you've come up with the same structure, the eye, but you're obviously going through a different genetic pathway, so you're using different genes to create the same structure. Why do you need that structure? So what this is pointing to is that contrary to the standard dogma of biology, that phenotype is not coded, there isn't, the mapping from genotype to phenotype is not coded. Genomes, Genomes, Genomes, Genomes, Genomes, Genomes, Genomes, Genomes, Genomes, Genomes, Genomes, Genomes, Genomes, Genomes, Genomes, Well, they think that, I don't understand it, the kind of standard dogma is that they will find a way around it, that sooner or later when all of the information is in, they'll understand the way that genes get. So I imagine that the standard answer to the Morgan objectives, to the Morgan examples and prequels, I don't know, you're the biologist, I would imagine, the more I know about the standard dogma, that the answer is that there are all sorts of other genes that are suppressed and that when those are activated they can... They activate structures which functionally operate as proto-eyes. But why do the eyes come back again? Well, do the eyes come back again in a very strong sense? I mean, do these things actually... Is the structure of the optical system in these fruit flies, when it's not prejudging it, but as the standards would say, re-expressed, exactly like that? Structurally indistinguishable from the alliance of idiots is it? In that case, that's on the face of it, seems to be a very, very strong objection to the net of the central dogma.

52:30 I mean, I've got a slight objection to the standard of the central dogma, which is, I think, much more deep-rooted than that, which is to do with the nature of phenotypes and genotypes at the level of, you know, complexity theory, at the level of general systems theory. That's the objection that Robert Brodin made, you know, long ago, that, you know, is... But I think that just at the level of the detail of existing theory, yeah, it seems to be a huge objection. So how do they answer it? I mean, these people... Well, you start thinking, okay, it must be the same developmental pathway. Let's try now. So now we've introduced something new. Yeah. Well, the developmental pathway seems to be more of a label for a problem than an explanation. Well, it's Waddington, isn't it? That's the chip. Is that the kind of creole that Warren talks about, do you think, or not? No, I don't think it is, because even in this context, it's the standard, what I call the digital geneticists, the ones who believe that all information can be gotten from the left-hand side of the column, all of this apparently... All of this apparently heterogeneous information to do with substantial forms can in fact be coded for and is ultimately reducible to the homogenous, to the digitalized, for Turing. Shannon's information, that it can all be got onto that side. They're the people who would introduce this notion of different developmental pathways, they just say that it's executing a different algorithm but with the same outcome. So there's a little mini computer going down there. Yeah, the computer's gone down. I mean, when Morgan Lee, whatever it was he did to these unfortunate fruit flies, he caused the classical systems to crash, but he didn't actually lose everything that was in the hard drive. And when it was booted up again, it was actually able to execute an algorithm which didn't actually have, wasn't structurally the same as the one that resulted in the flies originalized, but which did nonetheless give the same output. Structurally. I assume that's the answer. Why didn't it do it straight away? Why did it take such a long time to do it? Oh, I'm not saying I don't, I hope it's fairly obvious, I don't think that the central, I'm not sitting out to defend the central doctrine, I'm just saying I think they might answer.

55:00 But then there's analogies of brain cells, because the same is going on in the part of the brain and other cells. Is your brain really necessary? Well, there's astonishing evidence, isn't there, of idiot savants who have been severely brain damaged. Yes, I did indeed. I did indeed. I mean, I was one of the strongest pieces of them. The idea of anecdotal evidence for everything in this area is more or less anecdotal, because it's got such a whole collection of metaphors in search of a theory. This is one of the strongest arguments for the telegraphic account of the brain and idea of the brain. Is your brain really necessary? On this side it would be kind of action of brain cells, and on the other it would be kind of, you know, higher power support. Because it also takes time with brain cells. Right, because it's quite a loser, isn't it? Well, there are some parts that are vital, but there are other parts which you can lose quite freely. You mean off the brain? You can be as brilliant as you normally are, Bob, with a micro. I've seen this, but the thing is, it's like the hologram, you take a lot of it away and you still can see. But the trouble is there are so many different levels of description. We were saying the other day in the brain sciences there's just a whole collection of metaphors in search of a theory and there are obviously some aspects of brain function for which the bottom-up picture does seem to account for a good deal. And it does appear to be well established in the metaphysiology that if you lose certain parts of your brain that regulate key functions then... It's the cortex, it's mainly the cortex. They do also seem to be, e.g. the holographic approach, seems to work very much better. So it's not playing up the DNA structures, maybe, maybe that's sort of quite the same thing. But is it? You lose bits of it, and then you can do it again. May I recommend, since you may not have heard, we do, I'll bring one along next week,

57:30 we do read some of Robert Rose's stuff. Very interesting. Carl Brebrun? Very interesting. Holographic. Holographic. Yeah. Essays on life itself. Essays on theoretical biology and about, he died sadly about 24 years ago. Robert Rosen. I think he did have some dealings with you and David, didn't he? Not with me, but with David, yeah. Before I got in trouble, yeah. Very bright guy. He also... Was writing those letters, you stated, or at the same time? No, this is right. This is a biology gentleman. I've had quite a lot of correspondence with his widow, in fact. With his daughter, actually. First with his widow, and then with his daughter. And actually, for his work, just in passing, he also published a couple of essays on the philosophy of mathematics, which I think are amongst the best things I've ever read on the philosophy of mathematics. Produced by a non-mathematician, produced within a biology department. He was at Dalhousie in Halifax and lived for many, many years, but he was a colleague of Bill's and I think it's just one of his conversations with Bill that he got a lot of his ideas in a few conversations. It probably is actually. It's named for the same character, I imagine. He was probably governor general of that part of India, I think. Could anybody answer me, see, if brain is not necessary, why people die when you grab their head? We just explained that. It certainly is necessary for some function. You are still alive. Look, this is a Hungarian. A guy who's adopted British citizenship but he's from Hungary and you can't expect anything else from Hungarians. May have a plan in Britain. The thing about saying developmental pathways, I mean, de Beer raised a problem with this in 1938. So he's talking about an experiment that I think may have been carried out a long time earlier. Two closely related species of frog. The lens or the eye develops very differently. So, details, I think it's more in the kind of experiments where you, if you remove the lens, then the structures from which it will grow are quite different and a bit of the iris remains in the skin and the liver, so they're quite different tissue that we're talking about.

1:00:00 Famous quotation from Einstein, it is only by considering living systems that we can begin to appreciate how highly primitive the universe is. So, theory of everything. So, I hope this maybe makes you feel that in living organisms there might be some kind of holistic memory that's maintained without storage. It's not such a strange idea because we do have... This homology, or at least not the way that we think in terms of the genes. Certainly not stored in digital form, in Turing, in the form of... In DNA. Yes, or in any other form that would be... Yeah, I mean everybody goes for DNA. Give me the DNA and I know what character you're... I can, yes, I can create an organism from the... I'm not going to say what I think, but I think I knew what I was thinking. Is that okay what you just said? No, it's more about the storing in whole. No, he's sort of saying he's got information, but without any idea. So, yeah, the lesson that Alsace will draw from this is that...

1:02:30 So the idea that you have a continuity of structure through a form of holistic memory without storage in the genes or any kind of material replicated homogeneous information. I'm sure it's better the first time. I can barely recall. I mean, people, when they do that to me, it occurs to me, you never know. Michael's saying we all remember short-term memory. Well, except not for long, that's not the point. So this notion of, well, let's call it, could we even call it phenotype-specific memories? That's what we're dealing with on the SpriteBand site. Well, you must say something more than that. It's not just a phenotype, is it? That there is something out there. Is that not what you're saying? This information is real information and it's stored holistically in some way which we haven't got a hold of. But in some way, which in this context is related to the way that these substantial forms get realized, I mean, in the case of these biological homologies, specific, the idea that, so it begins to sound a little bit like the book that we were told was the greatest candidate for burning since... In the sense that, you know, actually what they are saying is that the whole information is not there, in the sense that there are those cases, but they are not typical cases. You see, if you have an embryo or something before embryo, you remove half of the genes or before you don't get the full, let's say, human being. Well, I don't know whether it's a good example or it's not, but what I... You see... Actually, I understood in the case of embryology, that up to a certain point in the division of the fibroblasts, you didn't... You did take over, yeah. It's only after a certain point... You see, you are not saying that all what people talk about genes and this and that it is a memory or an abstraction, that this is wrong. You are not saying that, I think.

1:05:00 Approximately, it's okay what people believe, but only approximately, this is what we are saying, giving those examples. Well, I mean, I'll say that that picture doesn't really explain what we've got here. So, he's saying this picture breaks down, isn't he? Totally. No, no, no, he can speak for himself, but in the case of the science in general, that's a bigger and more, that's a more expansive and equal and more interesting claim, but let's just stick with it. Aha, this picture does not cover the fact that it's almost like a statistics before, yeah. Okay, make a new list. If you were in a car crash in the police, you wouldn't use quantum mechanics to analyze the skid marks. Actually, Rosen again has a whole passage about this in his writings about the nature of mechanisms from the point of view of... Just a lot of systems theory. He's saying that all of physics, certainly since the growth of modern understanding of dynamics and kinematics in the 17th century, is essentially dealt with systems where you can make an absolutely clear division between the state of the system and the dynamical laws governing. The evolution of space. And that that's in fact within the space of all systems. That's a very restricted class of systems. It's extremely non-generic. But there are systems of which biological organisms are the most striking instance. But he actually suggests that the universe as a whole has to involve taking on board this distinction. There are systems which you cannot in principle make that division. And he's got a... ...about the ramifications of this idea for our understanding of mathematics, particularly for our understanding of the relationship between arithmetic and geometry, I think are very fascinating.

1:07:30 From what I understand, he did actually know a great deal about embryology and environmental biology, as well as having his work as kind of purely formal properties of models of systems. He also, and you probably know more about this, Basil, but he also has quite some very interesting stuff about the land-of-vials forces in chemistry. About the behaviour of reagents in the theory of the theory of the chemical reactions, they suggest again that the problem of what shows up in the form of no-go theorems and the intractability is the breakdown of that relationship between the constraint space and the series space that you have in the case of mechanism. It's interesting. Yeah, it raises the idea of constraint. I wonder what does constraint mean to you? Hopefully we can come back to link up with... What were you saying about it? Well, no. Well, constraints in the norm... Well, one of the constraints is coming from initial boundary conditions. Yeah, some sort of boundary condition. Some sort of initial boundary condition. Playing on the... Something dynamic is going on. Which will typically involve, of course, an idealization of the structure of the system in order to make it... I know. Well, that would be an example. It means that the state space of your bank account will work off zero, yeah, it's zilch, isn't it? Well, it's arrived at three of them now, but it's negative. I mean, the way you live is with a negative bank account. Well, isn't that beyond your means, like, off the wall? It could be invented, but I don't know. We sort of, should be sort of winding up now, actually, because...

1:10:00 Okay, so initially I don't know the difference. I think what, yeah, I suppose, okay. Stephen Jay Gould talks about constraints in... You know, you can always come and talk next week again, if you understand what we're talking about. He talks about constraints. So he's talking about the kind of matter that living things are made out of, and poses certain constraints on the way they can... Stuart Cuthbert used the immediate... you must know him. Stuart Cuthbert. You expand into the immediate adjacent, and you try to get time out of that. Do you all know that? Am I using the right phrase? In other words, this is like fabricational, because it means there's only certain, in evolution, there's only certain possible things that can take place because of the constraints, essentially. Because, Stephen Jay Gould took it in this kind of way. ...assumes that these are kind of fixed for all time, in a way that... ...stewards are certainly not fixed for all time. Hmm, so that's a little more interesting. I think in our universe we're living in a kind of expanding universe from a big bang. It's kind of assumed that in the context of life or the duration of life, the universe... Well, and also, I mean, my feeling would be that... It's the constraints themselves that can change. It's actually what's interesting in evolution. Because obviously, again, in the standard, in the context of the kind of standard central problem of biology, the constraints just thought of as given by physics in a hand-waving way, but certainly is determined and fixed and determined in advance.

1:12:30 I mean I think the relationship between biology and physics is a very deep and fascinating topic which again brings me back to Calvin but not at that level I think so much as what would a possible change in development of biology would be. Not at the Star Trek level of that. But at the level of whether a notion of system sufficiently rich and to do justice to the characteristics of biological systems would actually lead us to think of our models of physical systems as we have had them for the two, in particular mechanisms, as something not highly non-generic, as something fitting within, as it were, the space of all possible, as just filling in a tiny corner, a fragment of a much richer. And I suspect this is where it ties up with these ideas that Rosen has done. The last time I heard Stuart, he's actually got a definition of life. Well, almost all biologists have got something like that, haven't they? So unrealistic, it's unbelievable. He was ranting all the time. But all biologists are asked to come up with a definition of life, aren't they? We really need to know. Yeah, but they were more astray, Stuart, really. Ah, what is this? Our virtues. He just gave a very simple example, said think of a phenotypic structure which varies, what he was saying is that what you'd actually find in nature is constrained into particular and you might have other areas which are possible but aren't actually found in nature and they'd be selected against and you could breed these two and try and get that one. So he's talking about the forms that we see are discontinuous.

1:15:00 And that's a way of expressing constraints. So it's not that we see we have those phenotypic structures and how there's kind of constraints imposed on them. Constraints are the structures. Mm, the constraints are the structures. That's interesting. Or constraints are the homology, in a way. The homology from the constraints. So some of those are the more deeper structures. What are the constraints? I was thinking, when you first said that, that there's an idea here, a bit akin to the idea that some people have, that symmetry principles are more fundamental than laws in physics, that the notion of a symmetry principle gives rise to laws, and that, of course, there were, in terms of really deep structural explanation, where the action is. Yeah, I'm not saying that that's an idea I shared, it's one which I've... Because symmetry means nothing's happening, you know, everything's symmetrical, it's going to be a very dull and old world. It's actually the breaks in the symmetry, it's the breaks in the symmetry that actually leads to creativity I'm going to make really stigmatic. Yeah, what I'm saying is that... Well, so what I wanted to say was that, so Darwin was talking about homologies, shared structures, continuity of structure. What I want to say is that homologies share constraints, so you have a common inheritance of constraints from generation to generation. This now does begin to sound remarkably like Sheldrake. Don't say jumping on it, it's not because of that. Just because people jumped on Sheldrake with three big clubs and tried to silence him by... Yeah, just because they tried to silence him with... I think he must have reached the might as well hang for cheap as a lamb stage by the time he wrote that, I didn't realise he'd written a book about an angel.

1:17:30 But you mustn't judge what the content is. No, no, no. Besides I think he's a very, he's an original thinker, a bold and original thinker. I certainly don't think that anything in his book, I mean I'm not persuaded, I'm absolutely un-persuaded by his book, but I certainly don't think he deserves the sort of virtuosic abuse and maddox and people saying that it should be burned, which is not the sort of thing that any science author is going to let you ever say about it, and you could say that it was a thoroughly bad idea. And then you have to use reasons for saying that. It's just, but to that kind of argument from, you know, I don't know, it's shocking intellectual, disgraceful, you know, anti-intellectual behaviour on the quantum mechanics. Look, Stephen, we've got to, I've got to get back to the sub-suburbia. Sorry, man. I'm sorry, that's my fault for keeping you there. No, no, no, I'm just saying what I was going to say. Well, yes. Can you just finish up? Well, I'm not sure there is... I would rather you came next week and finish in time and relax, you know, take up from the shoot-on. Yeah, and in a sense put some focus because you really wanted to say something and we are interested. Yeah, we are interested. I'm getting tired mentally and physically. And I don't want you to rush. And if you think you can sort of know, I mean, you don't have to talk for three hours. Or you could talk for half an hour, as you want. But it would be nice to come back and just sort of finish it off, you know, just sort of, you could take the flip charts and just quickly summarize it, because Keith, I know, wants to hear it. and maybe he'll be here next Thursday, we just flip through it again and then we'll take out, is that right Mike, are you going to be here next Thursday? I don't know at the moment, I hope so. I really do, I would like to. Well thanks anyway Stephen, I'm sorry to cut it short but... Because up to now, you know, it would be a joke because we're dispatching to all the Thailand, you know. Well no, I mean, I chose this format so he wouldn't disturb us. Yeah, well he wanted disturbance in his email to me. There's a paper, thank you very much for the thing of the people review.

1:20:00 There's one thing which is not in your library, which I noticed, referenced in, I think actually, in Parvo's book, which I've still got, by the way, I'm going to bring that back next. I've still got your copy of Jan Anden's book, and Parvo's book. There's a paper that you wrote with Parvo. No, it's not in your list of published papers. You've done even more than you realize. Where the hell is it? I've got another missing bloody book. Oh, here it is. I'm displaced. Forms of representation. Okay, why don't I just borrow that, just go with that. That's excellent. That's an interesting word. Oh, that's an interesting word, but this one about is your brain really necessary comes from the nature of reality. And Brian Goodwood was there, I was there. What is this? A conference, yeah. The book, the paper you wrote with Melvin about non-commitativity, is that on the... It's on the net. It's on the net. It's on the net. It's on the net. It's on the net. It's on the net. It's on the net. It's on the net. It's on the net. It's on the net. It's on the net. It's on the net. It's on the net. It's on the net. It's on the net. It's on the net. It's on the net. It's on the net. It's on the net. It's on the net. It's on the net. It's on the net. It's on the net. It's on the net. It's on the net. It's on the net. It's on the net. It's on the net. It's on the net. It's on the net. It's on the net. It's on the net. It's on the net. It's on the net. And the other thing that I'm not scared of you, sorry to interrupt you, but do you know anything about that? I don't know. I mean, you don't even have to read English. It's all there in Japanese. I don't know! We get this Christmas card every year.

1:22:30 For the youth to vote. Oh! Can somebody else realise that he's... This one is too? Every year. But nobody knows. Nobody here knows him. Somebody must know him. Very, very good question. I've got some, I might have someone with me for about an hour, that's between three and four, I wouldn't mind being disturbed after that, I wanted to ask you about the, um, the scripting work. The twistor and the Clifton algebraic approach to the twistor and all those notes, as you were basically writing, I think, part of it. Yes, I mean, they're all... I'd really like to have a look at those, so I was going to put out that thing right now. Right, thanks for that. I hope you got something from it. I liked it. Right, I did like your email. Your very sped up email. When you sent your emails to the TTIP, I tried to make a connection with a series of articles, if your brain is necessary, there was a meeting in... Take it, take it. Is your brain strictly necessary? Marco Dufresne, New Paradigm, myself, Brian, there was also this one, he was a real wag, and I can't remember the name of it. Your English is fine. Well, then I would say it's fine. It's a great way to get my Japanese work in. He's Hungarian, with a wicked sense of humour, and I'm afraid I'd probably do without realising it. And he was going through these people who suffered from... Thank you for your attention. No, I haven't.

1:25:00 I was asked a question a year ago, and somebody was going to give me one, and I never did get one. And just where you've just got a thin layer of cortex, about one centimeter, and the guy was doing A-levels. And he had, you know, that kind of thing. Yes, and he doesn't feel it. It was incredible, he was doing it. He actually graduated. This guy. Well, I don't know that he graduated. The story that I heard was that he'd done A-levels. But I don't know, you know, I think the story, this is a very interesting thing was that to go, it's an extremely rare condition. Subtitles by the Amara.org community It's partly going in the telling. I thought he had done his A-levels, but I was right to think he was certainly done his A-levels. That's even more interesting. I was wondering why I didn't speak with you earlier. So really, the reason for that is because of the cameras. You know the X-ray cameras? Yeah. Yeah, we were about to go see you again, aren't you? No, no, no. Oh yeah, I was listening to something about that on one of the Radio 4 science programmes about six months ago. Yeah, using proton spin resonance in the pen. I mean, it's quite amazing. I mean, why wouldn't you use x-rays? They're using magnetic fields which don't harm you so much. As a matter of fact, they don't harm you at all, I doubt that very much, but it's definitely not as bad as x-rays. It's certainly not as much as x-rays. It's not just one x-ray, it's taken a series of x-rays. I mean, I don't know how many they do, but it's quite a large number. Isn't it absolutely extraordinary, when we were children, in shoe shops you used to have X-ray machines.

1:27:30 Yes, in shoe shops you'd be able to use them. They're expensive, aren't they? They're a surprise. Surely they were. X-ray machines cost tens of thousands of pounds. They might have been a very simple form of... Surely they were... Or was it a live picture? I don't know, more than 40 years ago. I mean, surely they had sort of field experience, I mean, not all of them, but I remember them very well as a child, and I'm certainly, that's not false memory syndrome, because I've been referred to quite frequently in popular literature saying, isn't it incredible how naive people were about the dangers of radiation? That could be, that could be. I'm certainly exposing, you were certainly exposing the different speakers to, not really, not massive vectors, but quite substantial, significant vectors. Well, that's the problem. There's a kind of research in Canada that would detect a CCD for x-rays, and a CCD in the back of video cameras. Yeah, I know, I know, I don't know exactly how they work, but I don't know. Well, basically, it's a kind of two-dimensional sensor. Well, it hasn't been a single-point sensor, it's a two-dimensional margin-point sensor. So when you've been talking about some of these things, you've actually got all these centres and all the information's passed along, and basically you've got an array of cells, like on a computer screen, and if it's like a one megabyte, it'd be a thousand by a thousand array, and this guy's declared them essentially x-rays, which gives you a really high-definition x-ray, which is, but it sounds to me... Well, what's interesting is that this is something that happened in the Shots in the 50s, whatever. That's been way ahead. Well, it's clear what they're making of this case. It's that, obviously. But I think it did happen in the Shoe Shots.

1:30:00 I remember it very clearly, you know. I think they've already gone out of it. I think they were all working together, they were. That's really how it happens, you know, it's a very bad thing that's over. My memories go back to the late 20th century, to my earliest, kind of clear, positive attitude.