A systems view of biological health

Section 2: Theory

13 : A vast ocean of information

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All living organisms exist within a vast ocean of information.

Raw data is relatively useless, and all sensory information is pre-processed into symbolic form that also carries useful contextual meaning.

All living organisms exist within a vast ocean of information – that constantly passes into, through, around, inside, and out of them (back into the containing ecosystem/environment). This information has many different modes, that include mechanical, chemical, neurological, vascular, quantum (entangled photons), EKG pulsations, electromagnetic activity, membrane potentials, signalling proteins (etc. etc.) [1]

After experimenting with psychedelics, Aldous Huxley used the term "Mind at Large" to describe everything we are subliminally aware of in any one moment, and recognised this was too much information to use in the day-to-day necessities of surviving:

" To make biological survival possible, Mind at Large has to be funnelled through the reducing valve of the brain and nervous system. What comes out at the other end is a measly trickle of the kind of consciousness which will help us to stay alive on the surface of this particular planet."

Jung’s principles of archetypes and symbols is relevant to the biological body because meaning for the biological body is inherently metaphorical and symbolic. Symbolic representation is a an edited and abridged but also densely compacted summation that can be passed to whatever level of our being – biological, cognitive – might make use of it. It must be this way, because no single part of the body or mind can embrace or meaningfully use all of the unimaginable amount of information in its raw form. In exactly the same way, we do not directly inspect a binary image file (as is stored in a digital camera), but rely on an interpreting layer of software to convert it into a visual image on the screen. The binary 0,1 of the digital photograph image file is a symbolic representation of just one tiny facet of reality of whatever the camera was pointed at, at one particular microsecond of time, occupying the particular wavelength sensitivity and pixel-definition of the camera photoreceptors. The image on the screen is likewise a symbolic representation of the stored binary data. This interpretative metaphorical way of seeing an image in a computer screen – as if you are looking at the real 3-D thing (in real time) - is also the way that your entire visual sense operates, except that your visual system also highlights points of particular interest.

Art is similarly an accurate metaphor for the senses – which is why it is capable of having such a profound effect. The choice if colour or line or shape or any other representational form, and the qualities of that form (so a "simple" line may be ink or pencil, any colour, many different textures, variations in thickness and contrast, straight curved, and in different relationships to everything else on the page) are a perfect analogy for the choice of sense, how those senses are engaged, and what is focussed on. The world may be seen as lines, or it may be seen in some other way – and the drawing or picture allows us to have a condensed and focussed view that may not be the one we usually adopt. The work of art is a physical form of memory, re-presenting the symbolic meaning-making of the artist to our own symbolic meaning-making processes. Up to abut the middle ages it was implicitly understood that art is representational, and as such can invoke a response as if we are being (re-)presented with the real thing. So a painting of Jesus or the Madonna might be prayed to because it provided a means by which a qualitative experience might be re-presented. One could call it a somatic experiential aide-de-memoir . It is still possible to "see" art in this way, but that requires a shift in attentional focus of a type that is not widely recognised in our culture.

Leonardo da Vinci was the first person known to stand in a public square and realise that light was travelling continuously and simultaneously, illuminating and reflecting along every possible ray path between every seen and unseen object. In order to grasp this enormity and "make sense" of it so that the information is usable, it’s necessary to be unaware of this literally infinite and unimaginable level of information complexity - by reducing it to a filtered and symbolic representation, as part of the process of sensing and meaning-making. So if you were to stand in the Piazza della Signoria in Florence as da Vinci might have done, you would "see" – not an infinity of rays of light, but - representations of people, flagstones, buildings, pigeons, clouds.

This information then has to be passed through the complex of a living organism in a way that makes best use of that information. Living systems have common attributes, because these attributes have been tried and tested to destruction many millions of times and proven to be the most suited to the continuation of Life. The large scale networks of communication (and therefore also control) that organise physiology and homeostasis on all scales from single cell to human have a common pattern [ii] (a "scale-free network"), with

• more functionality for the same organism size being provided by more connectivity

• the degree of connectivity is directly related to the information throughflow

• consequently there are information "hubs" though which most information flows and is organised – such as the thoracic and abdominal plexi and the hindbrain.

The fact that this organisational arrangement occurs in living systems that do not posses a nervous system shows that the nervous system is merely a way of scaling up information processes that were already present.

This idea of representational information – that very little of our sensory system ever passes exactly what it received, but also combines it, filters it, prioritises (and de-prioritises) it, transduces it into different forms, and carries out vast amounts of pre-processing before we are even aware something has happened – raises all kinds of questions. One of the most important being - what determines what we do and do not receive into our conscious awareness? But it also somewhat dismisses the question of - how does conscious activity such as will or expectation or thoughts or attention affect the body, the body-mind, physical tissues, the midbrain and hindbrains and the autonomic nervous system? Because once we have a lower level of symbolic processing that feeds the cognitive level, that symbolic layer would be perfectly happy with similarly symbolic information from anywhere else. The symbolic "language" must remain the same, but the language is the form and function of the body – its capacities, adaptations, senses, metabolism, capacities to move and respond, and its communication networks.

If you just take two cells jostling against each other on the wall of the intestine, each emits infrared and detects those emissions, the centriole detecting their 3-D within a few degrees[iii]. The infrared signal may itself be modulated to carry information[iv]. The exoskeletons of adjacent cells communicate via mechanotransduction of cell movements through the actin/microtubule cytoskeleton [v] – a form of communication that is continuous throughout the connective tissue matrix to every corner of the body[vi]. Mechanical forces transfer systemically down to a cellular level (rather than from a cellular level up to a systemic one) due to the viscous, thixotropic, quasi-elastic nature of connective tissue. To this very physical and already complex system, we can add cell membrane charge interactions, and biochemical signalling molecules passing through the cell membranes; the cell responding to and contributing to the total information load of the extracellular fluid matrix. For intestinal cells, this will also include information about the intestinal environment and the rich biochemistry associated with the gut microbiome. Each cell is also cognisant of the electrical clock of the cardiac pulse (EKG) and its moment-by-moment variability; and perhaps also the pulsatility of fluid and blood through the capillary bed. The two cells will respond to their internal metabolic needs plus information from intercellular fluids [vii] to decide when and how to allow passage of digested material into the fluid surrounding the capillary bed. They respond to each other’s presence and that of the other immediately adjacent cells – which give them a "sense" of how they fit into their immediate environment. They also receive systemic information through neural synapses, membrane charge polarities, biochemical, biomechanical, high frequency electromagnetic signalling (EMG), biophotons (etc.?), which provides a local, organ-level, and global sense of their adapted role and place within a complex organism.

A healthy society is also rich with information and supports a free flow of money, goods, people, ideas [viii] – which is all degraded in times of conflict. The example of a societal level of symbiosis gives a feel for how symbiotic communication increases order while simultaneously increasing the complexity and richness of relationships in other living ecosystems. It is, therefore, necessary to discriminate between organically structured, creative, relational chaos instead of the destructive chaos that degrades inter-relationality. This is not conceptualised very well in modern culture, and we take individual death (a life coming to its normal conclusion as the dissolution phase of creative chaos) far too personally[ix]. Generally speaking we do not relate well to the necessary shimmer of underlying chaos (that includes individual death) that prevents stagnation and supports the creative exuberance of Life-as-a-whole - the single organism that Lovelock termed "Gaia".