III

PHILONOUS What’s the matter, Hylas? Where are you running to through these gardens?

HYLAS Ah, I was just looking for you. I disproved your argument, Philonous. Don’t be angry. It is so simple, I am surprised I didn’t see it right away.

PHILONOUS Which argument of mine did you disprove?

HYLAS The one about atomic resurrection, your reductio ad absurdum. Everything you were saying about prohibitions providing a path to the discovery of hitherto unknown, new aspects of phenomena or new laws is totally irrelevant because your argument was false. It tricked the mind as a magician’s trick deludes the eyes.

PHILONOUS You don’t say! Very exciting! So you disproved it, eh?

HYLAS I did. I brought down your whole edifice of skepticism. Being a lover of truth, you will surely understand my intentions.

PHILONOUS I don’t take it personally. You will offend me only with poor logic or weak reasoning, never with its strength. So share with me what you found.

HYLAS It was staring me in the face the whole time. We asserted that it is the identity of structure that solely determines the identity of a person, right?

PHILONOUS Yes.

HYLAS But structure independent of matter, or “structure as such,” does not exist in the real world. Focusing on structure and neglecting the material aspect of identity, we came to the absurd. The absurd resulted not from a “prohibition” that pointed to the existence of hitherto unknown aspects of atoms or consciousness but from faulty reasoning.

PHILONOUS And where did the error in our reasoning lie?

HYLAS As I said, we disregarded the material level. If we modify your argument by saying that the identity of the physical particles of the human body joins the structural identity as a necessary condition, then the paradox of one person becoming two in parallel, that is, being simultaneously here and elsewhere, disappears.

PHILONOUS Are you saying that if we accept the identity of the structure as well as the identity of the material of the body as necessary conditions, then the paradox goes away and resurrection is possible?

HYLAS Without a doubt. If you construct a body that is identical to mine in both structure and atoms—that is, the atoms that constitute me now—then I come back to life. And the issue becomes utterly banal and deserving no further analysis.

PHILONOUS You are so sure of your conclusion, but let me tell you a story. Picture two people living on a desert island: you and your atomic copy.

HYLAS And? The copy is not me, because his atoms are of the same kind as mine but not the same as in my body.

PHILONOUS Correct. But bear with me. You are both castaways. There is nothing to eat on the island, and “the other Hylas,” insistent, persuades you to agree to become his food. He devours you completely, bones and all, so that after a while, through metabolism, all the molecules that once made your body become his. I can therefore claim that you have become him not only in the structural but also in the material respect, because his muscles, bones, nerves, and brain now consist of precisely those molecules that previously constituted you. As you can see, the simultaneous identity of structure and matter, which you so much desired, has occurred. Yet you will probably say that you derive no benefit from this in terms of resurrection, because only your copy lives on, burdened by the awareness of being a cannibal. Or do you believe that your copy is now you, and it is you who walks on the island enjoying the ocean sunset? What will you say, Hylas?

HYLAS Only that you have defeated me again. I see clearly now that even when the identity of atoms is added to the identity of structure, such reconstruction does not enable resurrection. Yet, my friend, I can’t accept the idea that our existence is transitory, so I seek, deep in the physical world, a gateway, a chance for us to reawaken after our death, a possibility to re-create the precious quality that is existence aware of itself. The delight of reasoning and perceiving should not be but a single brief flash, a tiny spark quickly extinguished in the dark of nonbeing. If the spinning wheel of material transformation is eternal, why can it not produce my thinking “I” once again, the “I” that is a living, feeling whole, irreducible to any of its parts?

PHILONOUS What again? You think your “I” is a whole that cannot be reduced to its parts? You are definitely mistaken, my friend. It is, of course, an attribute of your living body; but at the same time, it is an abstraction, a generalization, and a resultant.

HYLAS My “I” an abstraction? What are you saying?

PHILONOUS If we followed the history of your “I” back to your childhood, we would come to a point when you did not refer to yourself as “I” but used the third person. All children do that between their second and third year of life. Talking and thinking of oneself as “I” requires the power of abstraction, which young children do not have. Hence an abstraction. Do you recall when you first became self-aware?

HYLAS I do not.

PHILONOUS You don’t because it is impossible. You are you only because you have memory. Without memories, pleasant or sad, life events, worries, and hopes do not exist for you; you do not recognize your parents or friends; and you cannot learn even how to walk or see (as you surely know, newborn babies must learn how to see, that is, to assign shapes, meanings, and spatiotemporal structures to the colors and movements in their field of vision), talk, or think. You would be alive but blind, deaf, mute, and inert, and in no way would the awareness of being emerge in you. It is the memory of events, or rather their generalization, subordinate to the hierarchically highest centers of the psyche, that constitutes your “I.” Hence a generalization and a resultant. A resultant of thousands of phenomena that involved you and in which you participated; of thousands of acts of selection, decision, and planning in response to what happened in the past; of the conflicts, defeats, and victories that affected both body and soul. Through summing all of this, day after day and year after year, your “I” took shape, until at last it assumed the designation of a mature person with full mental powers, that is, you, Hylas. But if we started erasing from your brain all the stored recollections, knowledge, and the automatic behaviors of walking, maintaining balance, seeing, and hearing, your mind would become poorer and poorer, until eventually you would no longer be you. Imperceptibly, you would become nobody, although your body continued to live. And the death of your “I,” its annihilation, would be achieved when all the structural changes in your brain that took place in the past were destroyed. So your “I” can indeed be reduced to many constituents, and there is nothing strange about that.

HYLAS OK. I was so focused on the search for a repeated conscious existence that I overlooked such trivial truths.

PHILONOUS If you are so excited about it, we can have a closer look at the object of your search. Tell me more about it.

HYLAS I tried to be as rigorous as possible in my reasoning, and did come to a few modest conclusions. The question is this: Is it possible to calculate the probability in the future, after my death, of atoms joining and connecting to re-create the structure of my living body? Is not such a calculation similar to that of determining how many casts of n dice are needed to get all sixes?

PHILONOUS There is no such analogy as you have in mind between a series of dice casts and a series of Hylases existing in sequence. Could you be more specific about how you imagine a serial awakening of your consciousness?

HYLAS Last night I sat on the steps of my house and gazed at the stars. There was not a soul around. Facing the infinite, the stars, I felt that I was the only conscious being in the world, and it occurred to me that all the living beings—animals, plants, bacteria—that ever lived on the Earth from its beginning until now represent a microscopically small, negligible fraction of all the matter in the universe, which, in the terrifying vastness of nebulas and galaxies, is dead everywhere we look. How unlikely it is, I thought, for a lump of passive and inert matter, incapable of perception, to be pulled into the realm of life processes and turned into the tissues of a living entity, whereby it becomes the pinnacle of existence—a thinking creature. Yet this incredibly rare event took place precisely with the matter that makes up my body. This is what I was pondering under the starry sky. The matter filling my skull was once dead; for an eternity those phosphorus, carbon, oxygen, and iron atoms circulated in cold cosmic clouds until they found themselves on Earth; and after millions of years they were pulled into the orbit of evolution and ended up being my brain! If that happened once, why cannot such an accident happen again?

PHILONOUS You should have become a poet, Hylas. The lyrical pathos of your words is moving, but I must say, with regret, that they have little cognitive value. I already showed you how your post mortem dust, your cold remains, get pulled again into the orbit of biological processes, as you put it, through your double’s act of cannibalism on that desert island. Yet you conceded that this was no resurrection. Admittedly, the case was somewhat sordid in its details and far from your romantic yearnings under the starry sky, but we are concerned here not with the aesthetic value of phenomena but with their cognitive content, right?

HYLAS You bring me down from the clouds again, my friend. Now sobered, I agree that I was expressing myself with insufficient care. But is it really impossible to calculate the mathematical chance of my renewed existence after death—in a purely materialistic sense, rejecting any metaphysical speculation regarding the soul or other similar fictions?

PHILONOUS The question of your next existence is like asking whether yesterday’s wind will blow tomorrow. You are an unrepeatable phenomenon, dear Hylas.

HYLAS How so?

PHILONOUS Forget the stars, the sense of solitude under them, the longing for immortality, and other lyrical things. The problem is simple. It is indeed possible to calculate the probability of the renewed emergence of a being structurally identical to you.

HYLAS Aha.

PHILONOUS Wait. Your body could arise, in some cooling nebula through an especially auspicious grouping of the same atoms as those that make up your body, but they all would have to meet and combine into the right organic molecules. Tell me, is it possible that in a bed of iron ore in a mine people discover a modern car formed by a chance ordering of the iron atoms into the chassis, the engine with pistons, transmission, wheels, and wires?

HYLAS No, that’s not possible.

PHILONOUS Why? If you asked a physicist, he would say that his science does not rule out events that have low probability. The second law of thermodynamics, which claims that the most probable states occur most often, comes to the rescue. We can calculate that if people diligently comb through the iron ore deposits on 100 trillion planets of the galaxy for the next 70 quintillion years, they will find the car. But the spontaneous formation of a car from iron ore is far, far more likely than the spontaneous formation of a human body through a confluence of 80 trillion atoms. Let us say that the chance of such an event is one in a centillion. If the universe lasts forever, we have enough time, and this event, which appears to be so important to you, will eventually take place. What then? It turns out that you gain absolutely nothing from this “jackpot in the cosmic lottery,” simply because “the next Hylas” has no connection to you, and there is no continuity between you and him. He may already exist as we speak in a quiet corner of the Canes Venatici nebula.1 Yet it is he who is taking a pleasant stroll through its turbulences, not you, because every Hylas is a Hylas of his own. There is no memory link, no causal bond, between one Hylas and another.

That we have spent too much time on this banality is owing to your obstinacy in pursuing the phantom of the “atomic resurrection.” The argument is mathematically sound, but talking about the universe in a hundred quintillion years from now is ridiculous and totally baseless. Please abandon these vacuous exercises of the mind in the attempts to grasp renewed life. There is another path.

HYLAS Another path?

PHILONOUS But it is long and arduous. To set out on it, we first need to consider many issues. Are you ready for that?

HYLAS I am.

PHILONOUS All right, then. I begin by drawing you a picture we will need later. We have said that the adult brain is shaped by storing everything that the person has experienced and learned in his life. All the memories, opinions, prejudices, knowledge, and skills are stored in specific transformations of its structure. Now imagine that just as one electrically charged molecule can transfer its charge to another, one brain can, through some kind of contact, transfer its full memory “charge” to another. Imagine that in this way two brains can totally exchange their structural features (which constitute individuality). Person A meets person B, this exchange takes place, then they separate, and all the personal characteristics of A—his temperament, talents, idiosyncrasies, habits, hobbies, addictions, and so on, along with the complete memory of all his experiences—now inhabit the brain of person B. The individual personality, we conclude, can jump from one physical body into another. Such a world contains no logical contradictions. We could even simulate it in real life by setting up a group of automata with brains designed so that during an encounter, one automaton would transfer to the other, through a series of electrical impulses, the complete pattern of its memory. Through this process, the first would become like a blank page of paper or a newborn baby and thus be ready to accept the charge of a different memory. As you notice, two features of human existence that in our world are inseparable are separate in this hypothetical world: the physical individuality and mental individuality of an organism. In our hypothetical world, a person, without changing his body, may occasionally become the carrier of a totally different mind. Curious romantic dramas could take place; for example, a Romeo might suffer from a predicament that to us is alien and incomprehensible—being unable to find the psyche of his Juliet after it took up residence in another body . . .

HYLAS Now you are the one who is waxing poetic when we were supposed to address philosophical problems.

PHILONOUS Sorry. I got carried away a little.

HYLAS What is the outcome of this dramatic performance of yours in a cognitive sense?

PHILONOUS We have come closer to understanding what personality really is or, more precisely, to understanding which physical aspects it can be reduced to. Namely, let us identify what it was that the brains in our example exchanged, what exactly was the phenomenon that we called the “memory charge.” Well, it was the sum of the structural changes that the brain had undergone throughout its existence, in other words it was a set of certain pieces of information. With the word information we arrive at a crucial point in our thinking. It is information—its nature, origin, accumulation, storage, and utilization—that lies at the heart of cybernetics and at the same time is the key to the mysteries of systems like our brains.

HYLAS What is so special about information?

PHILONOUS It is something exceptional: it is a real thing yet it is neither energy nor matter. It cannot be a material object because the latter exists only in one place at one time, but the same information can be in many locations simultaneously (for example, in many copies of the same book). It can be measured with the methods of physics. It can be transmitted by material means. It needs a material substrate to exist but is not identical with that substrate. Matter is subject to a law of conservation: it cannot be destroyed, only transformed into energy,2 but information can be irreversibly destroyed.

HYLAS So can it be another kind of energy?

PHILONOUS No, because as you are well aware, energy, too, cannot be destroyed. One kind of energy, for example, radiation, can be converted into another, for example, heat.

HYLAS Strange. What, then, is information?

PHILONOUS The importance of cybernetics lies in its answer to this question. Metaphorically, information is a child of thermodynamics turned upside down, as it is the opposite of entropy. Entropy is a physical measure of disorganization, disorder, or chaos in material systems. To explain the term without the use of mathematics, we must resort to examples and analogies.

In all processes that take place in nature, with no exception, in stars as well as in atoms, we observe an increase in disorder, an increase in the dispersal of energy.3 A meteor possesses a certain internal order in that all its particles are moving in the same direction. When it falls into a bathtub filled with water, the ordered, unidirectional energy of its movement turns into a chaotic motion of particles, which manifests itself in the boiling of the water. We say that the ordered kinetic energy has been converted into the energy of disordered thermal motion. Fundamental in this phenomenon is its irreversibility. The opposite process—for the boiling bathtub water to suddenly cool and simultaneously cast the meteor back up into the sky—is impossible. Once condemned to the state of chaotic thermal motion, particles can no longer transform their energy back to the organized energy of the unidirectional motion of the meteor. The measure of this gradual energy disorganization and an increase in disorder, observed throughout nature, is entropy. A glass dropped on the floor breaks: the “ordered” energy of the fall descends to a lower level of organization. Something irreversible has taken place because the shards, left to themselves, will never join to form the glass again. The second law of thermodynamics generalizes phenomena like this and states that the entropy of an isolated system can spontaneously only increase but never decrease. This means that an increase in chaos and energy dispersal is the most probable and the most natural course, which is why only irreversible processes occur spontaneously. Gas under pressure in a container immediately expands and effuses when we open the valve, thereby decreasing the order in the energy of its particles. Warm bodies cool, because greater heat means a higher energy order in the system.4 In nature the path leads from order and organization to chaos and disorganization. But information, to return to cybernetics from thermodynamics, is the opposite of entropy. It is the measure of order. If entropy points to the most probable outcome, information points to the less probable. In any closed system, information cannot spontaneously increase. It can only be destroyed, and once it is destroyed, we cannot re-create it in that system.

HYLAS Why not? If we collect the necessary data again . . .

PHILONOUS I said: in a closed system. It is a different matter if the system is in contact with its surroundings. Left to itself, cut off from any outside influence, whether it is a planet, mountain, or nebula, it exhibits an incessant increase in molecular disorder over time, a decay of structure, and the end of this process is the total disorder of energy and matter, a whirlpool of completely randomized atoms. Eroded rocks do not rise from the scree and solidify again on their own, meteors do not shoot back to the stars from which they came, and a broken crystal cannot fuse without an input of external energy (e.g., from the sun). The spontaneous increase in entropy has been confirmed in nebulas and stars, in the heavens and on Earth, and yet there exist systems that seem exempt from this universal rule.

HYLAS You mean our bodies?

PHILONOUS Exactly. The fertilized egg cell (a zygote) has a lower organization than the adult organism that develops from it. It seems as if the phenomena of life went “against the stream” of all natural processes. Beyond the sphere of the living systems, we observe only an increase in disorder, decay, destruction, and the simplification of structures, whereas the entire course of biological evolution is the opposite, an incessant decrease in entropy, a progression in complexity from parent forms to descendant forms.

HYLAS But life does not violate the second law of thermodynamics, Philonous. We know that living systems are not closed; on the contrary, they live thanks precisely to their surroundings, as they grow and develop at the cost of the consumed meals, whose organization is lowered in the process of digestion. Animals live on plants, and plants in turn support the synthesis of their tissues by using the radiant energy of the sun, which thereby undergoes disorganization. The overall thermodynamic balance still shows an increase in entropy.

PHILONOUS You are right, except that this overall balance, which confirms the validity of the second law of thermodynamics, does not in the least explain the phenomenon of life. Consider: a device or machine can only make something that is (structurally) simpler than itself. A machine for making shoes is more complex than a shoe and a machine that makes nails is more complex than a nail.

HYLAS Must the maker always be more complex? Cannot the maker and the made be equal? Take, for example, a casting machine and what emerges from its die.

PHILONOUS The machine is always more complex, my friend.

HYLAS Wait. A lathe, which is a relatively simple tool, can produce a very complicated object.

PHILONOUS Only if a person runs the lathe, and then you have the machine plus the human brain with a structure whose complexity has no match in the universe.

HYLAS How about a computer calculating an extremely difficult problem? Cannot the assignment be structurally more complex than the machine used to solve it? Not that I have any idea how to measure differences in complexity . . .

PHILONOUS The complexity or “complicatedness” of a structure is, in our cybernetic approach, simply the amount of information it contains. A computer can perform a task that is structurally more complex than itself only if we provide it with appropriate instruction. But the instruction also is a kind of structure or, more precisely, information. So the computer plus the instruction outweighs the product—the solution—in complexity. To explain, let us take your casting machine. It produces, say, human masks from a mold, that is, the mold transmits to the clay a specific amount of information. But in practice the mold’s tiniest details gradually erode, and each next mask will be less and less complex or detailed (poorer in information) than the original mold. This is a manifestation of a universal principle that says that in a transmission process, information decreases or loses quality, but can never spontaneously increase. As you see, this is a “reverse,” cybernetic version of the second law of thermodynamics, which rules out a spontaneous increase in entropy. But let us return to our mask casting. If we proceed with casting a new mask from a mold produced from the previous mask, eventually we will end up with a mask that bears little resemblance to the original and contains no facial subtleties. Note that this degenerative tendency is not present in the reproduction of living organisms. Otherwise children would always be organizationally poorer than their parents, and after a certain number of generations their systems would become too disorganized to support life.

HYLAS So the rules of information transfer do not apply to living creatures? Or it is not only the information contained in the egg cell that creates the organism that develops from it?

PHILONOUS The laws of the circulation and transfer of information, just like the laws of thermodynamics, hold universally, in all systems, whether living or not. But something special happens in evolution that prevents the degenerative tendency from manifesting itself. This something, absent in inanimate nature, is the crossing of the minimum complexity threshold. What does this threshold mean? All systems below it are incapable of producing other systems whose complexity matches theirs. Above it, the creative apparatus can produce systems as complex as itself.

HYLAS But wait. In evolution, simpler organisms give rise to more complex ones. So in certain circumstances, less information may give rise to more. If that is true, then the cybernetic law saying that information cannot increase during transfer does not apply to evolution. What do you say to that?

PHILONOUS The cybernetic law is not violated by evolution. An organism, when producing offspring more complex than itself, does not “create” the information out of nothing but draws it from the environment, just as it takes food from its surroundings to prevent the increase of internal entropy, the food’s energy disorganization through metabolism balancing its thermodynamic bill. How does the organism draw information from the environment? There are two ways. First, its nervous system takes in information, a gain for the organism but not for its offspring, because, as you know, an individual’s memories of experiences are not transmitted genetically. Second, information is drawn from outside by the process of reproduction and the succession of generations.

HYLAS I don’t understand. Can you explain?

PHILONOUS We need to introduce here the second fundamental concept of cybernetics, namely, feedback. Feedback means that information about how an organism’s actions affect its surroundings is fed back to the organism so that it can modify its future behavior. It is the mechanism whereby a system becomes self-regulating because it can continually correct its subsequent actions to attain a goal. When I put out my hand to pick this leaf from the ground, information about the effects of my movement runs by feedback through my eyes to my brain, so that if I am reaching too far or not far enough, the visual image lets me know, and I can immediately make the appropriate muscular adjustments.

HYLAS That is clear.

PHILONOUS Feedback operates in evolution as well, except that it goes not to the same organism but to the next generation. The organism “acts on the surroundings” by producing offspring. If that act was “on target” (like my success in picking up the leaf), then the offspring will survive in the world and reproduce, providing future generations. But if the act is “not on target” (my hand missing the leaf), then the environment, acting as a filter, does not let the offspring pass through and “introduces a correction”—the offspring does not survive. Hence feedback in evolution operates through the cycle of generations. The evolutionary adaptation of organisms is equivalent to a change in the information contained in the reproductive cells. This information increases via genetic mutation. Most mutations do not add useful information and therefore are eliminated by the environmental filter. Only those that prove useful, that increase the ability to survive, pass through.

It is a very slow process: a single feedback-regulated act of an individual is in evolution equivalent to the lifetime of an entire generation. But evolution has time—on the order of two billion years. What is the source of the new information that accumulates generation after generation in the chromosomes of the reproductive cells of the organisms that pass through the filter? The information increases at the expense of the disorganization of the photons from the sun, which ultimately enables the existence and development of life on Earth. Is this cybernetic interpretation of the evolutionary process clear to you now?

HYLAS Not at all. I particularly dislike the idea that the reproductive cells (gametes) gain information thanks to the random, blind hits that are mutations. I read somewhere that the amount of information in the gametes’ genes is roughly equivalent to the amount of information contained in the Encyclopedia Britannica. How likely is it that those forty thick tomes could be printed by tossing the pieces of type on the floor, reading the random result, and removing the meaningless combinations of letters? It seems to me that even if we repeated this process for billions of years, we would not end up with the encyclopedia. This is how I view the cybernetic picture of evolution. Also, we should be able to calculate the probability of that information accumulating in the human gamete after two billion years of evolutionary feedback operating in the system of blind mutations and the environment’s selection filter. If the probability turns out to be negligible, which I expect, then we will have to conclude that acquired traits are heritable, no?

PHILONOUS The matter is more complicated than that, Hylas. In the statistical sense and also in terms of the amount of information there indeed exists a similarity between an encyclopedia and the gamete, as both are carriers of information. But in the dynamics and internal rules of their systems they cannot be compared. Printing an encyclopedia from random pieces of type has nothing to do with the operation of the evolutionary feedback links that determine the mutation genotype distribution of a population.

HYLAS Why not? Doesn’t population genetics use the same statistics that gives the probability of assembling an encyclopedia by tossing pieces of type on the floor?

PHILONOUS Except that the “selection filter” of the environment acts only on organisms that have been already born. Therefore, a new factor enters the picture: the phase of embryonic development, that is, the dynamic expression of the information in the genes, the process that turns the given store of biological structure into a living offspring. An encyclopedia is a catalog of information packaged side by side, and no entry in that catalog has any effect on any other entry. Whereas in the cell, a change in the information (a gene mutation) often has far-reaching consequences on the development of the entire embryo. It is precisely because of the internal cohesion and interaction among the elements that the gamete and an encyclopedia are not equivalent and therefore cannot be studied with the same methods.

HYLAS What do you mean by “internal cohesion of information” in the gamete? That the information is “dedicated,” as it were, to the task of creating or constructing an organism, while the information in the encyclopedia has no such unidirectional purpose? In that case, let us replace the encyclopedia with a thick volume describing, for example, how to build an atomic power plant. The analogy then will work, as in both cases we have information dedicated to a single issue.

PHILONOUS Not at all. The manual will not build the atomic power plant by itself, whereas the zygote makes the descendant organism on its own. The zygote is much more than merely a “blueprint for construction”; it is at the same time a set of feedback links enacting the actual process of construction. In the embryo, thanks to internal feedback, the circulation of information regulates its development. If you built an electronic brain capable of transforming instructions into actions but tore the last twenty pages from the manual, the brain would not have sufficient information to succeed. But an embryo, even when damaged (provided the damage is not too extensive), can compensate for the missing information and still produce a healthy, normal offspring.

HYLAS Why can the embryo compensate for the damage when the electronic brain is unable to fill the gap in the instructions?

PHILONOUS One could construct an electronic brain that would have the ability to fill a gap in its instructions autonomously (e.g., it could complete the data with results from its own, independently conducted experiments). But such a machine would be far more complex than one that does no more than faithfully and blindly follow instructions. The difference between the two is the capacity to learn. Because the zygote corresponds to this more complex brain, we arrive at the surprising conclusion that the zygote can learn. Which is indeed the case, as the mature organism represents a structure far richer in information than the embryo. The embryo accumulates the new information during its development thanks to the internal feedback links. Mutual adaptations of forms, chemistries, and functions continually enrich it in information.

HYLAS This is a little hard to believe. An embryo can learn? And enrich itself in information? How does that happen?

PHILONOUS It happens thanks to the universal ability to react, which every living tissue, including (or, perhaps, above all) embryonic tissue, exhibits, in conjunction with the interconnectedness or integration of this reactivity through system-wide feedback. All tissues and organs learn their functions in the course of their development. The heart of the embryo has barely formed but already is beating; as the blood of the embryo circulates, it strengthens the walls of the vessels. In a word, the set of genes in a chromosome activates gradients of development instead of imposing a strict timetable; chemical reactions influence each other to shape the organs, cells, and tissues while they are already functioning. Hence the zygote is “a set of building instructions that is able to learn,” that is, to absorb additional information that regulates its development. A mutation is a change in that set that can affect the entire process of the construction work, not just one trait. That is one reason why it is so difficult to analyze the whole phenomenon mathematically.

HYLAS You said nothing about the zygote crossing the threshold of the minimum complexity. Could that be another difference between an encyclopedia and the reproductive cell?

PHILONOUS Absolutely. The hypothesis of the threshold of complexity explains many things. It explains, first, why living beings are systems so exceedingly complex and why there cannot be a living organism with a complexity on the order of that of a conventional machine or mechanism. It is because a simpler structure, subject to degenerative tendencies, would die out after a few generations. Second, the threshold of the minimum complexity represents a well-defined, physically measurable border between the world of mechanisms in the classical sense (machines) and the world of organisms. Note that I do not say “the world of living organisms.” Here, “life” is a narrower term; “organization” is broader, better. This new division suggests the possibility that there may be organisms or systems constructed from inanimate elements or parts that behave like the living systems made of proteins. A “nonliving organism,” in this sense, does not denote a corpse but rather a system made of some inorganic material, such as glass, silver, or nickel, but so complex that it has passed the threshold and acquired the ability to self-reproduce, self-repair, store, and utilize information collected during its existence, and, finally, strive to accomplish goals. Do you follow?

HYLAS I don’t really see the point of a nonliving organism. What does it have to do with our discussion?

PHILONOUS I will try to explain that—but not today. In the time that separates us from our next meeting, please familiarize yourself with the fundamental notions of information, entropy, and the complexity threshold, because it is on these pillars that we will erect the magnificent edifice of cybernetics.