1 . Stringing Prague by Mallory Ferland^
2 . Ode to the Violin by Mallory Ferland^
I yield: music passes information both emotional and concrete. Behold then, in all chagrin, that unremitting molester of words, expression. Note: not all expression is created equal. Take for example the creation of rap; yes sound, yes communication of…something. Even the sound of one’s own teeth grinding following a listen is communicating information—spleened and piqued. Furthermore, information communicated by music is transferable among all human beings, for whereas language barriers stump the stranded traveler and confuse the wary message carrier, there is nothing between the English speaking musician and her French accompanist aside from air space. The bow is a baguette, a whole is a ronde, and a quarter is a noir—though under their own guise, nothing remains hidden. French music reads as English music does, though Dutch—well I am not so sure. Therefore all sound in general communicates information, whether a singular fact, an emotion, the gaiety or despair of a fleeting or enduring moment, or a mere signal to perform an action. Music has relayed information since the making of the first vibration. Whether that was Madonna, God, Apollo, or Amadeus himself I am no authority, but I am prepared to argue that the most resplendent, intricate, reliable, true—in other words best––audible communicator of information is the violin.
Simply put, your trumpet hurts my head.
Skill is needed to make all forms of musical instruments work. But… Concert pianist: strike simply C, now charlatan passerby: strike the same ivory—revelation! It’s the same sound. The violin is my Merlot to your sticky Riesling of a clarinet. John Corgliano, composer, professor and possibly a liked guy, crooned, “If you take a violin, you can make it sound fifty different ways. If you take an oboe and play it, there’s about one way you can make it sound: like an oboe.” The note of a violin depends at every moment and with each playing on the irreproducible touch of its player. Thus the sound is his own to convey to his listeners what he will. Is the violinist plagued by an emotion? You will be informed of it on the first strike. For this reason, the information relayed in violin song is always only of the moment, organic and composed of a variant meaning on every production. The violin is the only instrument in which each note can transfer news of joy, melancholy, romance, excitement and fear depending on how it is played and how one listens to it. Tremolo, pizzicato, salto, sordine. Find the mood. The simple scale is here increased tenfold.
There will be no concession to woodwinds. No brass. No cellos, guitars or violas. The only match is the human voice. Noncompliance? I look forward to your article on mystical tambourine stylings. I concede they are all beautiful, but not as beautiful. All information stored in the violinist passes through the bow at each and every stroke. Evidence is the attention to the left and to the right; the violin will lay bare and vulnerable all information you are willing to receive. Biased? Yes. Opinionated and pretentious? Of course. Wrong? Ab-so-lu-te-ment non. There is nothing greater than an assembled symphony, but there is always a great among the assembled. The violin is the one object created most in the image of man—pitch, tone, perhaps even appearance. A violinist cannot betray truth in either his bowing or stopping. Listen. The violin is the courier and will pass to you all you need to know. The violin will always be there to speak to you when others will not. So why not listen to the information?
3 . by Eric CunninghamThe Omega Point: When Information Becomes Eternity^
If these theories of the Omega point are telling us that the historical world will come to some kind of transformational end in the radical unleashing of “stored information,” we may well wonder what the information is going to then reveal. What could possibly be the purpose of encoding and compressing all of this information into matter? Why does God (or even some detached natural process) need to pour all of this information into the tissues of the body, the chemicals of the brain—into the bread and wine of the Eucharist—into mythologies and books, electrical circuits and microchips; into DNA, subatomic particles and galaxies? It seems clear that the plenum of reality is so mind-bendingly vast that even if we had a glimpse of the contextualized knowledge this will all become someday, “we” would have no means of apprehending it. End Notes
For Teilhard, cosmic noogenesis is directly related to the historical development of technology and information, and he accepts the various alienations (man and nature, matter and spirit, etc.), brought on by increased technology as part and parcel of the grand process of consciousness evolution:
We are, at this very moment, passing through an age of transition. The age of industry; the age of oil, electricity and the atom; the age of the machine, of huge collectivities and of science––the future will decide what is the best name to describe the era we are entering. The word matters little. What does matter is that we should be told that, at the cost of what we are enduring, life is taking a step, and a decisive step, in us and in our environment. After the long maturation that has been steadily going on during the apparent immobility of the agricultural centuries, the hour has come at last, characterised (sic) by the birth pangs inevitable in another change of state. There were the first men—those who witnessed our origin. There are others who will witness the great scenes of the end. To us, in our brief span of life, falls the honour and good fortune of coinciding with a critical change of the noosphere.5
Most of Teilhard’s theories on the evolution of cosmos and consciousness were written in the 1920s, and he was, to say the very least, a man ahead of his time. Because Church officials feared that his writings might encourage the faithful to embrace Darwinian evolution or even its opposite, pantheism, and to question the doctrines of grace, free will and original sin, his works were condemned, and he was ordered not to publish. By the time his reputation was restored, somewhat, by the 1980s, his radical ideas on consciousness had already been widely accepted by a wide range of scholars, clerics, New Agers and even psychedelic visionaries.
For psychedelic researcher Terence McKenna, the Omega Point was the eschaton itself, i.e., the end of the historical world, and the moment of arrival for an overmind he called the “transcendental object at the end of history.” McKenna’s transcendental object, like Teilhard’s “God-Omega” was equated to Logos, the Christ, the Great Attractor; the “overmind” that informs the creative activity of the world and stands outside of history beckoning humanity toward its evolutionary fulfillment from spirit, through matter, and back into spirit. Like Teilhard, McKenna felt that technology had a crucial role in this evolution:
I believe this is what technology pushes toward. There is no contradiction between ecological balance and space migration, between hypertechnology and radical ecology. These issues are red herrings; the real historical entity that is becoming imminent is the human soul. The monkey body has served to carry us to this moment of release, and it will always serve as a focus of self-image, but we are coming more and more to exist in a world made by the human imagination. This is what is meant by the return to the Father, the transcendence of physis, the rising out of the Gnostic universal prison of iron that traps the light; nothing less than the transformation of our species.6
I find it fascinating that a Jesuit scientist (even one whose reputation is still under something of a cloud) and a psychedelic mushroom guru should write with so much resonant overlap concerning the nature of spiritual evolution. More fascinating perhaps, is the degree to which the ideas of Teilhard are almost “old hat” to the present generation of researchers into the phenomenology of consciousness and consciousness evolution. The reason for this seems to be that more recent researchers have been able to take Teilhard’s vocabulary of consciousness and turn it into a vocabulary of “information.” Tulane University professor Frank Tipler, has made the notion of Omega point the core of his own research on cosmic evolution. Pointing to a “multiverse singularity” that should occur in the far distant future as something like a “Big Crunch,” he shares Teilhard’s view that this moment will represent the consummation of a Christo-centric world evolution. Where Tipler’s theory seems to differ from, or perhaps expand upon Teilhard’s, is in its articulation of the role of information. The Omega point, for Tipler, is a moment of infinite information, a phenomenon that has an evolutionary autonomy distinct from, but related to, matter.
Independent Cornell researcher John A. Gowan also writes of Teilhard’s Omega point in terms of information. In a paper entitled “Teilhard de Chardin, Prophet of the Information Age,” Gowan argues that:
Chardin sees human consciousness as the current individual pinnacle of information evolution, and he makes the argument that any attribute we see in the Cosmos today must, due to a principle of “unitarity,” have an expression of some sort at every organizational level in the Universe.7
This suggests that humanity, spirit, cosmos and the material world itself are all fractally related through the human consciousness that “informs” them all. In this sense the word “information” refers not only to “data,” but also consciousness as an informing quality of reality.
It might be useful here to at least think about the difference between “data,” (bits of fact), “information,” (interpreted data) and “knowledge” (socially and historically contextualized information). The words are often used interchangeably, but the current age of cyber-, quantum- and nano-technology have redefined the meaning of information, giving it a certain value that distinguishes it from other forms of epistemological units. Teilhard died before the Information Age, but it is likely that he would have found new understandings of information to be very much in keeping with his own theory of evolving consciousness.
McKenna too saw the arrival of the Omega point as being radically hastened by computers and the rapidly expanding ability of humans to manipulate information:
All information is everywhere. Information that is not here is nowhere. Information stands outside of historical time in a kind of eternity […] It is eternity. We are not primarily biological, with mind emerging as a kind of iridescence, a kind of epiphenomenon at the higher levels of organization of biology. We are hyperspatial objects of some sort that cast a shadow into matter. The shadow in matter is the physical organism.8
In view and appreciation for all of this, it seems at least prudent to look at each of our acts and thoughts as contributing something absolutely vital for the proper unfolding of this vast informational network—to take the acquisition of our knowledge very seriously and to treat the likely possibility that we are all parts of a great and complex whole with the reverence that it deserves.
1. Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, The Phenomenon of Man, translated by Bernard Wall (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1959)
2. Chardin, Phenomenon of Man, 258
3. Ibid., 259
4. Ibid., 260
5. Ibid, 214
6. Terence McKenna, “New Maps of Hyperspace” in The Archaic Revival (San Francisco: Harper, 1991), 95.
7. John A. Gowan, “Teilhard de Chardin: Prophet of the Information Age,” (July 2005), accessed at http://people.cornell.edu/pages/jag8/chardin.html
8. McKenna “New Maps of Hyperspace,” 91.
4 . Tabula Rasa by Chris Sparks^
In formation.
Forms—in.
You are what you eat.
You are what you…read?
Think?
See?
Act?
You…are?
You are becoming.
You are becoming…what?
Where are we going?
What lies ahead?
What truth ahead?
What in our head?
My head?
Information.
So we are shaped by it. We are molded by it. The principle of TANSTAAFL holds—There Ain’t No Such Thing As A Free Lunch. Shaped, changed—you are what you eat.
You eat a lot, and voilà! There is a lot of you.
You read a lot, and voilà! A lot to read in you.
Think a lot, and voilà! A lot to think of you.
Watch TV a lot, and voilà! You are a spectacle.
Information—in shaping, in training, in becoming, in changing, in shifting…
“It’s just entertainment. It doesn’t affect people.”
Troubling thought. Our entertainment…meaningless? Stories without purpose, great art with no possibility of uplift or ennobling capacity, great movies without inspiration, great words crafted with great care to cause great might to meet great times…without power? Impotent? Nonformation?
What would Uncle Tom’s Cabin have been if it was just entertainment?
“No, no, wasn’t affected by it at all. Slavery? Whips and chains, shattering of families, wailing babes in arms, desperate dashes across frozen rivers to freedom? Just entertainment.”
Information—a whole society bathed in information, deformation, transformation, reformation, preformation…
Formation. Touched, turned, made new, made old, made free, made whole, made gleaming glitterings in the gloaming—merest possibilities called to life out of darkness by the light of the screen, the glare of the half formed thought spread out across the deeply dreaming night by interwoven webs of wires, drunkenness poured out on display, intoxication with the might bes, the maybes, the ares and ises, the strange realities of the world and the strange thoughts that someday…
Information—superhighway! With its maps and chains, its strings of logic bridging the gaps between people, between minds, between souls.
In formation. Laid out in structured magnificence of might, the old tales, the new things, all the realm of Morpheus on the great, broad, bandwidth road, magic meeting science, right brain meeting left brain, the two halves, Satan and Ahriman, bridging the gap, breaking the world in two by the terrors and glories made possible, shattering the world into a million, billion crystalline fragments, trillions of individual chips, shards of glass, glow screens, slow screens, the computers and TVs and HDTVs and I-Pods and camera-phones and palantir of the future, breaking the world up into individual worlds. Multiple world theory enacted while the scientists scratch their heads—“Could it be? Might it be? Maybe somewhere…but hey, at lunch, I have to show you, this great new gadget, three movies at once, uh huh, really great…but the multiverse…hmm…”
And somewhere Henlein is cackling in his grave. “Friday, when will the plague come? Friday?”
In formation. Trawl the many worlds, climb aboard the Gay Deceiver, give Friday a good wireless hook up and enough hours in the day, and call her, late at night, when Morpheus rules her in-formation, when the lines and cruels of logic, the rules of daylight logic leave, and tidbits mate in dreams, spawning strange children, strange falling off cliffs to eternal bliss in the arms of a beetle, a Volkswagen Beetle, a pink cotton candy car that stands under water and falls into oyster lit dreams of the sea. Call to her, call her out of the depths, the depths of the Sandman’s Land, and ask her, “Plague for three? World War Three? Greenwitch, serve the Lords of Light Three?”
A child may ask where angels fear to tread their way diplomatically. In-formation leaves more room for error than fully-formed, finally-formed, futureless fallenness into deepings of darkness sans dreams, than fully committed to Lords of Light, Lord of Light over all that is. A time still of testing, of change and of forging, before all decisions made, all bridges burnt, all bonds of fellowship broken.
In-formation. Father Adrian Van Kaam, meet your predecessors—your Wonka mates, the snozzberries.
“We are the Music Makers…and We are the Dreamers of the Dreams.” Formation science has been an art for long ages of man, long ages of sleeping in the Dreamtime, long ages of a potsherd here, a stone wall there. Dreams in the long drugged stasis of humanity, an Odyssey, an Iliad, a Genesis and an Apocalypse...drugged long ago in a Garden, made Assassin, made forebears of Cain and Abel, made forebears of All-Mother and All-Brother, All-Saver…
In-formation all our lives, in-between heaven and hell, in Middle Earth moving, not choosing our times, but choosing what to do in the time that is given us. Twisted by Ring, twisting Ring, turning in the wind, the great winds of this world age, twisting and turning on a tree.
Once deformed, the only cure is…deformation. Reformation, to what we were to be, ought to be, might yet become. Knotted—cut. Twisted—untwisted. Curled up—broken wide. Selfish—die to self. Reformation can be information. Reform can inform, conform.
Form in Good, True, Beauty, Being, Love. Inform with Good, True, Beauty, Being, Love. Conform to Good, True, Beauty, Being, Love. Reform to Good, True, Beauty, Being, Love. Deform towards Good, True, Beauty, Being, Love.
In other words, pick up your Cross, follow the guy who knows what he’s talking about and probably made the blessed thing, carry it on the way, the straight and narrow way, plant your standard in the ground, and let your wound be lanced good and proper. Break yourself on that standard of uttermost love. Break, like bread, like rock before thirst, like flesh and bone. Break, and fast. Information only comes when the antenna’s up and someone’s listening.
5 . The Shannon Model of Information by Aaron Brown^
“Information” is a word that gets bandied about with abandon these days. We live in the “Information Age” having gone through the “Information Revolution,” we have to guard our “Personal Information” very carefully and many of us are pursuing careers in “Information Technology.” But not many people are clear on what, exactly, information really is. End Notes
Technically speaking, information is a measure of certainty. The more information one has about something, the more certain one is regarding that thing. This definition arises out of the work of engineer and mathematician Claude Shannon. Shannon, in a ground-breaking paper published in 1948, created a formal theory of information.1 Shannon’s theory revolves around the idea of a message being sent across a channel and received at the far end. While this may seem, at first, to cover only a very small category of information, such a model turns out to be remarkably flexible and robust.
It is intuitive how this model may apply to an e-mail or a book. For instance, I have on my desk a copy of John McGregor’s If Nobody Speaks of Remarkable Things. This novel can be understood as the medium for a message (the story that it details), with John McGregor as the sender and the reader as the receiver. The contents of the book are the information that it conveys.
So far so good; this all seems fairly intuitive. But take the slightly more esoteric example of a non-verbal demonstration: one person watching another fold a paper crane, for instance. The information being conveyed is the technique for creating an origami crane. The sender is the demonstrator, and the receiver is the student. The channel is simply vision. Shannon’s model applies to this example fairly readily as well.
But Shannon’s work was not simply limited to creating a model of information flow. Shannon also modeled the notion of “noise,” which might interfere with the transmission, and “redundancy,” which might allow the receiver to restore any information lost to the noise of the channel.
Take, for instance, my copy of McGregor’s book. The phrase “...in the slow grey light of morning...” (to take one at random)2 is, in my copy, entirely intact. But say, due to a publishing error, that some of the letters had been misprinted, so that it read “...in the slcw grey iight of morning...” These errors in the message might cause me, as the receiver of the message, some problems, as neither “slcw” nor “iight” are words that mean anything to me. These printing errors have introduced “noise” into the system, and as a result part of the message has been marred.
In the case of a novel no redundancy is provided, and while I could probably make some reasonable guesses as to what McGregor meant, I’d have no way of knowing. Due to a loss of information, I’d be less certain as to what message McGregor was sending.3 Put another way, in the absence of all the information in the message, I’m left with some uncertainty as to what the total message is. Shannon came up with several schemes by which a message could be reconstructed if part of it were lost in the course of transmission. Generally speaking, these are known as ECCs or Error Correcting Codes.
Beyond simply defining information, Shannon also devised a unit of measure for the amount of information contained in a message: the bit. In essence, each bit that is received halves the amount of uncertainty that the receiver has regarding the final contents of the message.4 Once all the bits of a message have been received, the receiver has complete certainty regarding what the sent message was.
This model of information as a measure of certainty regarding a message being sent across a noisy channel has been nothing short of revolutionary. Shannon’s work spawned the new mathematical discipline of Information Theory, which has been integral in the creation of computers, the Internet and modern communications infrastructures. He created the notion of a bit (short for Binary digIT) and laid most of the groundwork for the development of digital communications systems. It isn’t hyperbole to say that modern society owes its existence, in many ways, to Claude Shannon and his quest to technically define information.
1. Shannon, Claude. “A Mathematical Theory of Communication.” Bell Systems Technical Journal, vol. 27. pp.379-423, 623-656. July, October, 1948.
2. McGregor, Jon. If Nobody Speaks of Remarkable Things. London: Bloomsbury Publishing, 2003. pg. 125
3. A comparable example of noise in the paper crane example might involve an obscured line of sight so that the audience can only see part of what the demonstrator is doing.
4. Technically, it actually cuts in half the set of messages of which the actual message must be a member.
6 . When My Computer Understands Me by Adrian Pauw^
One of the most compelling aspects of the science fiction genre revolves around artificial intelligence. Whether a story paints sentient machines as friend or foe is beside the point; humans are fascinated with the idea of a computer that can understand––a computer that does not merely store information, but that can comprehend, critique and even purposefully create new information. In essence, we are talking about the automation of meaning. No matter how lofty or remote such a reality may seem to us in the present day, it’s clear that there is one technological advancement coming down the pike that will be an essential building block of such a future: the Semantic Web. Problem One: Metadata In order for any adaptive system to work well, it must be highly complex. Without complexity, there is too much potential for the system to be abused by competitors. The immune system is a biological system, and populations of biological organisms have the ability to adapt to their surroundings over time through the process of natural selection. In addition, the immune system itself (as a population of cells) does adapt within an individual biological organism, depending upon the environment that it is exposed to. Information systems can also be adaptive systems, with similar selective pressures. For instance, in order for one database to sell enough subscriptions to remain financially solvent, it must have higher quality search capabilities than its competitors. There is always pressure to increase relevancy, precision and recall in information systems, just as there is always pressure to optimize the immune response and ensure survival. Syntax is one of the major linguistic roots of meaning. An understandable syntax structure with predictable rules is essential to sense-making in any system where information is exchanged. If, for example, I were to say, “the dog caught the cat,” English language speakers would see “dog” as the subject, “caught the cat” as the predicate, and “cat” as the object. In other words, the sentence would be about the dog, and what the dog did (she caught the cat). However, what if the standard syntax rules dictated that the subject of the sentence came after the predicate (with an optional object as part of the predicate)? Then “the dog caught the cat,” would actually be a sentence about the cat, and what he did to the dog (he caught her). Without syntax, any kind of semantic work is extremely difficult, if not impossible. where the subject is the antigen encountered by the antibody and the predicate is the associated set of germline signals. A germline signal is information present innately in the cells of the individual organism which can, among other things, help the immune system discriminate between dangerous and benign antigens. In this way, the immune system assigns meaning to informational events because “the antigen is like a noun serving as the subject (or address) of the immune sentence, while the germline signals are like predicates that dictate the choice of response.”13 So, under the immune system’s syntactical rules, information would be “read” and given meaning in this way: The syntactical rules of the English language define the subject of the sentence most often by what comes first in the sentence (putting aside the more nuanced rules of English grammar). The immune system does something very similar; the information architecture of the immune system prescribes that the type of cell that sees the antigen first determines whether there is an immune response. So, if an antigen is first encountered by cells on the periphery of the body (where pathogens are most likely to be found), that cell will initiate an immune response. If, however, an antigen is first encountered by cells in locations where pathogen entry is unlikely, the antigen will be categorized as self, and no immune response will begin.14 In this way, the concept of order of operations is essential to immunological syntax. So a machine-understandable sentence would have syntactical structure like: The universal adoption of standards such as RDF will be essential to a full realization of the Semantic Web. Without adherence to a set of common syntactical rules, there is no potential for automated sense-making. Problem Three: Disambiguation Disambiguation refers to the act of distinguishing between two very similar pieces of information, and is essential to proper sense-making in any information system. Because of the attempts of pathogens to disguise their metadata, disambiguation is a huge problem for the immune system. If molecular mimicry is convincing enough, a pathogen could actually cause an autoimmune reaction; the immune system would begin attacking self cells as well as the non-self pathogen. This is because the immune system would have trouble knowing the difference between self and non-self in the case of the mimicking epitope. The Immune System as a Fully Realized Semantic Web You are not conscious of your immune system. You cannot consciously deploy extra lymphocytes to certain areas of the body to fight infection, and you cannot consciously tell your immune system to stand down just because you suspect a dangerous autoimmune reaction like rheumatic heart disease is taking place. Your immune system chugs away, supplying meaning and interpreting context completely without your conscious effort. In this way, your immune system is the ultimate Semantic Web: completely automated. End Notes
At the moment on the World Wide Web, information is presented in such a way as to be understood by humans, while being machine-readable. The Semantic Web will transform the nature of information on the World Wide Web, and render it machine-understandable.1 The difference between machine-readable and machine-understandable is fairly straightforward: machine-readable information allows computers to “adeptly parse Web pages for layout and routine processing,” while machine-understandable information enables computers to actually make sense of information.2 This distinction is the difference between knowing that the series of letters “surprise” goes in the upper left-hand corner of the screen, and knowing what the word “surprise” means in the context of the information presented with it.
While it will take many years to develop and implement, such a system has already begun to emerge.3 There will be many profound challenges in the effort to enable computers to understand information. However, the processes of evolution have already produced incredibly complex “semantic webs” in the natural world. One of them, the immune system, is used here to showcase just three of the multitude of problems we must surmount to achieve the Semantic Web of information.
One particularly apt example of the results of selection on an information system is in the area of metadata. While appropriate metadata is useful (even essential) for information systems, architecture and retrieval, there are plenty of instances where the metadata system has been abused. One of the main metadata abuses that can occur, especially in an adaptive system, can be summed up in one phrase: “People lie.”4 As Doctorow observes, “[m]eta-utopia is a world of reliable metadata. When poisoning the well confers benefits to the poisoners, the meta-waters get awfully toxic in short order.”5 If it is of benefit to someone to provide inaccurate or misleading metadata for a web document, then it’s likely that some people will abuse the system. That’s why information systems must increase in complexity over time in order to continue to provide reliable search results. It’s an arms race, with words as weapons.
The immune system deals with the same types of metadata problems in a similar arms race and has ever since the first primitive immune system existed. At the current level of complexity exhibited by the human immune system, a number of interesting parallels to information systems can be observed. The main metadata currency for the immune system is called an epitope. An epitope is a very small part of an antigen, a molecule that presents a potential threat to the organism.6 An antibody is a molecule that has been selected by the immune system to recognize one particular type of epitope.7
Naturally, this kind of system produces a plethora of antibodies, each selected to recognize only one small portion of one type of molecule. Also naturally, this kind of system produces a plethora of antigens that attempt to disguise themselves and their metadata (epitopes) in order to continue unimpeded by the immune systems of the organisms they attack. If people lie to get more money, pathogens lie because their survival depends upon it. The immune system must judge the trustworthiness of its information on potential pathogens based on a very small portion of the pathogen. Remember, an epitope is a sample of an antigen, which in turn could be a sample of a larger pathogen. As Atlan and Cohen put it, “Can one depend on a sample of a sample?”8
To ask the question from another angle, does the existence of untrustworthy immunological metadata mean that epitopes aren’t useful? Doctorow asks a similar question when he posits, “[d]o we throw out metadata, then?”9 The answer to both is, of course, “no.” Metadata, in epitope form or not, “can be quite useful, if taken with a sufficiently large pinch of salt”10
The epitope provides information to the immune system about the potential threat. But how? What is the “pinch of salt” needed to put the immunological information in context? Doctorow cites Google’s ability to verify the reliability of websites (in spite of any existing misleading metadata provided by the authors of websites) through a survey of site linkages. If outside sources believe that the site is “important enough to link to,” then that website is considered to be reputable.11 While Google uses these linkage statistics to quantitatively measure the reliability of websites, a very similar mechanism is used by the immune system to determine if potential threats are real and dangerous.
The immune system is capable of qualitative and quantitative evaluations of these potential threats. The immune system qualitatively evaluates foreignness by recognizing conserved elements of pathogen structure (which will be discussed later). It also quantitatively measures the “non-selfness” of an epitope by deconstructing the associated information into manageable pieces (comparable to words or phrases) and evaluates each piece individually in order to inform the degree of the response. The difference between the qualities of “foreignness” and “non-selfness” in this instance are quite subtle but important; “non-selfness” is judged by the process of elimination (that doesn’t look like me, therefore it must be non-self), while “foreignness” is determined by positively identifying something that is actually known to be hazardous. Both types of information provide the context required for the immune system to respond appropriately to threats. Whether in information systems or immune systems, statistics are used as a way of tempering the bias that could exist in metadata.
Problem Two: Syntax
Thus, if the immune system is to assign meaning to any of the information it encounters, it must have syntactical rules to follow. Here is the basic syntax format followed by the immune system:12
If machines are going to be able to apply meaning to information (in other words, if machines are going to perceive information), then they will also need predictable syntax. The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) developed a standard known as the Resource Description Framework (RDF), which provides syntax for machines. RDF uses specific rules for proper grammar (here I am referring only to the subject-predicate relationship) in order to supply a formula for machine interpretation of information. A diagrammed sentence in RDF would be in this generic format:15
Subject --> Object
http://informationr.net/ir/7-4/paper136.html --> “T. A. Brooks”
This very problem often happens in some cases of strep throat. Strep throat is caused by the bacteria Streptococcus pneumoniae (S. pneumoniae). Because of the selective pressures of the adaptive immune system, an epitope for S. pneumoniae is identical to that of an epitope found in the human heart.16 As a consequence, the antibodies activated to attack S. pneumoniae also attack the heart of the organism they are trying to protect. In this way, advanced strep throat can progress to rheumatic fever or rheumatic heart disease as a secondary autoimmune consequence to the original S. pneumoniae infection.
How does the immune prevent damage to self when parts of a pathogen have epitopes similar to self? The immune system must disambiguate using information that comes from a source other than the epitope. Fortunately for people with strep throat infections, S. pneumoniae can’t cover all its tracks. Many pathogens have elements called Pathogen Associated Molecular Patterns (PAMPs) as a part of their regular structure.17 Indeed, PAMPs are highly conserved elements of the basic structure of the pathogen in question. The immune system selects PAMPs based on structures that the pathogen has had for millions of generations and cannot get along without. Therefore, the pathogen population cannot easily circumvent PAMP detection by altering or deleting the PAMP through natural selection. The presence of PAMPs is therefore a huge red flag and, in association with an immune response to S. pneumoniae, indicates to the immune system that a more measured and easily terminated immune response is best to minimize the potential damage from an autoimmune response.18 In other contexts where there is no problem with disambiguation (when the epitope of the pathogen does not mimic the structure of a self epitope), the presence of PAMPs might actually strengthen the immune response. In this way, the immune system has an advanced method for contextualizing the information it encounters.
Disambiguation is also a challenge in information science. For example, in the field of music cataloging, disambiguation is a unique problem because of the multitude of works titled “Sonata.”19 If only the last name of a composer is known, seekers of musical information could also need some assistance in determining whether a work by “Bach” is by J. S. Bach, C. P. E. Bach, J. C. Bach, J. C. F. Bach, W. F. Bach, or P. D. Q. Bach. However, if one were to combine the two levels of ambiguity and search for “Sonata AND Bach,” the picture would actually become clearer (if only slightly in this case). Disambiguation is usually most needed when contextual clues are thin.
To fight ambiguity, catalogers must agree upon an unvarying entry protocol by using a series of standards called authority files. This ensures that a hypothetical entry for “Bach, C. P. E.” always refers to the Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach who was a German composer, and not Carol Penelope Evangeline Bach (whom I just made up and who is most likely not a German composer). In some cases, birth and death dates and other distinguishing suffixes are incorporated into the official authority name file, to reduce ambiguity even further.
There are many different international cataloging standards, and each is used depending on the type of information being cataloged. Each of these standards deals with the problem of disambiguation. However, there has been a movement recently to enhance these cataloging standards to aid in the development of the Semantic Web.20 In order for a machine to make sense of the seemingly infinite world of digital information (where there are far more Bachs than described in this paper), this kind of universally-applied authority file would be indispensible.
If information is real, and not just an amorphous phantom of our human brains, then it can be dealt with outside of the context of the human brain, as well. If humans don’t need to consciously interact with information in order for it to exist, then perhaps a level of meaning can also be assigned without the conscious intervention of a human brain, using the combination of the information’s realness and its context (as happens constantly in the immune system). If this is the case, then there exists the possibility of a successful Semantic Web where machines can express the meaning of information.21
Since the Semantic Web and the immune system face such similar problems, it certainly seems possible that we might be able to use similar solutions. For example, one vision of the Semantic Web, where “[c]lever programs could roam this meaning space discovering useful, unanticipated information,” is decidedly similar to the way lymphocytes roam the body, searching out opportunistic invaders.22 In order for a Semantic Web to replicate the dynamic, adaptive nature and appropriate interpretation of information showcased by the immune system, there would have to be an unprecedented level of automation and self-direction in machine-to-machine interaction. I do not believe I will see any such Semantic Web in my lifetime. However, I have no doubt that just as humans have evolved a fully functioning immune system, there will always be the potential for a fully realized Semantic Web because of the material reality of information. In many, many years, the Semantic Web may well be regarded as the precursor to artificial intelligence. I just hope the computers turn out to be friendly.
1. Berners-Lee, T., Hendler, J., & Lassila, O. (May 17, 2001). The semantic web: A new form of web content that is meaningful to computers will unleash a revolution of new possibilities. Scientific American, Retrieved October 31, 2007, from http://courses.washington.edu/d540a07/Readings/BernersLeeSemWeb.htm
2. Ibid.
3. Feigenbaum, L., Herman, I., Hongsermeier, T., Neumann, E., & Stephens, S. (2007). The semantic web in action. Scientific American, 297(6), 90-97.
4. Doctorow, C. (2001, August 26). Metacrap: Putting a torch to the seven straw-men of the meta-utopia. Retrieved November 17, 2007, from LIS 540 Information Systems, Architectures and Retrieval Web site: http://courses.washington.edu/dlis540t/Readings/Metacrap.htm
5. Doctorow, 2002.
6. Kuby, J., Kindt, T. J., Goldsby, R. A., & Osborne, B. A. (2007). Immunology. New York: W. H. Freeman and Company.
7. Ibid.
8. Atlan, H., & Cohen, I. (1998). Immune information, self-organization and meaning. International Immunology. 10(6), Retrieved October 31, 2007, from http://intimm.oxfordjournals.org/cgi/reprint/10/6/711
9. Doctorow, 2001.
10. Doctorow, 2001.
11. Ibid.
12. Atlan and Cohen.
13. Ibid.
14. Kuby, et al.
15. Ogbuji, U. (December 1, 2000). An introduction to RDF. Retrieved November 12, 2007, from developerWorks: IBM’s resource for developers Web site: http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/library/w-rdf/
16. Guilherme, L., Ramasawmy, R., & Kalil, J. (2007). Rheumatic fever and rheumatic heart disease: Genetics and pathogenesis. Scandanavian Journal of Immunology, 66(2-3), 199-207.
17. Kuby et al.
18. Ibid.
19. Gentili-Tedeschi, M. (2004). Authority control in the field of music: Names and titles. Cataloging & Classification Quarterly, 39(1/2), 399-412.
20. Tillett, B. (2003). AACR2 and Metadata: Library Opportunities in the Global Semantic Web. Cataloging & Classification Quarterly 36(3/4), 101–19.
21. Berners-Lee et al.
22. Brooks, T. (2002). The Semantic Web, universalist ambition and some lessons from librarianship. Information Research, 7(4), Retrieved October 31, 2007, from http://informationr.net/ir/7-4/paper136.html
7 . Hold Me, Touch Me, Make Me a Complex Organism by Elizabeth Miller^
Using this chemical language, cells of the developing animal can communicate with each other to carve out forms like legs, heads and brains, which, as you might guess, are kind of important things for adult animals to have. But wait a minute, what’s all this stuff about chemistry if our task at hand is supposedly to learn about contact-dependent signaling? Well here’s the thing: for cells a signal alone does not equal a response, even if the signal involves contact. Think back to our story. In order for your friend to respond to your hand on his shoulder, he first needed to recognize the contact, interpret it as a signal to stop and turn and then actually turn to face you. Even within the first step of this list a multitude of smaller steps can be identified that turn the physical movement of his shoulder tissue into an electrical message that can be understood by his brain as contact. Likewise, a “signal” received by an individual cell typically causes some conformational change in another molecule which activates another molecule which changes something about another molecule and so on and so forth until about 200 molecules later the cell says, “Oh, free sugar in the blood stream? Sweet!” So even if a signaling pathway is triggered by some direct cell on cell action, in order to get a response, information-bearing intermediate molecules must be used.2 Therefore I get to talk about chemistry and some other general signaling ideas before busting out the contact stuff. End Notes
So while that may have been a fun story, and perhaps a highly-relatable one to boot, I bet your wondering why I’ve begun an essay in “Gonzaga University’s premier journal of scholarship and opinion” with such a tale. Well let’s review:
Q: What kind of message were you trying to convey to your friend?
A: “Wait up, we need to talk.”
Q: Why couldn’t your friend hear or understand your “wait up” message?
A: He was distracted by his Ipod.
Q: What did you do to remedy this problem?
A: You made contact.
DING DING DING there it is, you made contact! If you think about it, there are a number of cases where much more can be said through contact: a pat on the back from a proud father to his beaming son, a well placed hand during a high school slow dance or a punch straight to the face of that guy at the bar who you just can’t stand anymore. Well guess what, this kind of strategy for conveying messages, like the “wait up” from our story or the “shut up” from your fist to that guy’s face, is employed by the cells that make up complex organisms like you and me. For cells, contact is similarly used to relate a variety of information to one another. Where and when cells make contact can mean a number of different things, and this kind of cellular communication––contact-dependent signaling, particularly during development––will be the general focus of this essay.
Your cells love to talk. I mean, your cells really, really, really love to talk. If the molecules that your cells use as messages were converted at any one moment into sounds that, individually, were only barely audible to our ears, the noise would be deafening. But the chatter of your cells is obviously not created with sounds; it’s created through chemistry. As Debra Niehoff puts it:
Chemical signals, and the machinery that cells evolved to detect and interpret them, became life’s parts of speech…This language, based on molecules rather than sounds… is, in a sense, a pattern language, featuring design elements crafted from carbon and hydrogen rather than wood, stone, or brick, which represent solutions to the problems encountered by cells as they evolved mechanisms to collect and transmit information about the outside world.1
From the moment male and female gametes meet and the initial cell begins dividing into multiple cells, a developmental agenda is created. Through precisely regulated signaling mechanisms, the agenda is carried out to make the new organism. Early on these cellular conversations include everyone––all cells present are told what to do by the same signals from the same “organizers.”1 At this stage, cells aren’t ready to form hearts or brains. They must first get their bearings within the growing mass of cells and define the front from back, top from bottom, inside from outside. This process of patterning is carried out largely through the creation of chemical gradients, where the distance between a cell and the source of the chemical signal will define its role in the emerging body plan. One side of the mass yells “be the head!” while the opposite end replies, “no, be the tail,” and those closest to these signals follow their orders––those in between can’t decide who to believe and become an undifferentiated middle.3 But when there is need for a bit more privacy in the conversations of cells, the virtual shouting of information through a gradient becomes unproductive. To remedy this, new signals are sent out locally to define sub-compartments of the body: “let’s be the chest,” “let’s be the skin” or even “let’s be the gut.” If the conversation needs to get even more personal, cells can practically build themselves a secret clubhouse and invite only their closest of friends to join in the fun. No lame cells allowed, only the “cool cats” are getting in this club. In these situations, “organizing” cells can use contact-dependent mechanisms to define and extend membership to their neighbors. A great example of this kind of conversation can be found in the induction of equally suited “proneural” cells into the super-secret-society of neural precursors.1,4
For proneural cells to be considered for a role in the developing nervous system, the cells must respond to their interview questions with two membrane-bound molecules, named Notch and Delta, that require contact with each other on the cell surface to be activated. These two molecules interact in such a way that when Delta binds to Notch (with each located on the outside of two separate cells), Notch gets its extracellular “head” chopped off leaving its intracellular “tail.” This tail sends a message telling the cell’s nucleus to stop trying to be a neural precursor––a major blow to the Notch-producing cell’s self-esteem. After several rounds of Notch beheadings some of the cells in the proneural field gain an advantage against their neighbors and express lots of Delta and very little Notch. This way, there are no Notch tails running around playing Debbie Downer and telling the cell to abandon its dreams. For the cells left expressing a lot of Notch and very little Delta, the genes necessary for becoming a neural cell shut off, and the cell must sulk out of its interview and take a job in the epidermis, a much less glamorous line of work.1,4,5 In this example, Notch serves as the receptor for Delta, but Notch can recognize other molecules as well, allowing for this same kind of contact to relay different information to the cells involved. Because of this, the Notch receptor and the Notch signaling pathway can be amended and revamped for use in several other developmental tasks. In the development of the fruit fly, Notch signaling has been found regulating the process pretty much everywhere: eyes, hearts, wing discs and muscles, to name a few.5 This recycling program lessens the amount of time and energy it takes for cells to remain hip and happening with the new words or phrases they need to get their message across whenever evolution presents them with new problems they must discuss with their neighbors–-a good feature to have when the survivors of natural selection are typically the energetically thrifty ones.1
The second contact-dependent pathway for cell-to-cell communication I’d like to describe here is contact inhibition. Though experimental evidence of this pathway constitutes a smaller portion of the literature regarding contact-dependent signaling when compared with the Notch pathway, contact inhibition is a very interesting hypothesis that could explain a commonly observed phenomenon. This phenomenon has been observed in countless cell culture dishes ever since cell culture dishes started being filled with cell cultures. When the space in the dish allotted for culture growth (the coverslip) is filled with a layer of cells, proliferation stops and cell number within the tissue layer becomes fixed.2 To put it another way, as cells proliferate via mitosis, eventually they run out of places to put their newly created progeny, so they stop making them. To explain this, contact inhibition provides a signaling mechanism where cells “sense” this overcrowding by sensing the multiple contacts made with the surrounding cells as space gets tight, and interpreting this as the signal to turn off the processes that had them multiplying. Basically, one cell says, “You’re all up in my grill yo’!” The other replies, “Well you’re all up in mine!” Then they both agree to stop dividing and wait until room is created––usually by the death of other cells. Once space is found, cells can begin multiplying again. This process has been implicated in wound healing and tumor suppression––though not exclusively so.4,2,6 The problem is that while contact inhibition explains the experimental observation in these systems, so would a number of other hypotheses based on nutrient depletion and other such “extracellular” signaling paths, in which contact isn’t the one driving mitotic shut-down. While some stand behind contact inhibition as the best hypothesis, the jury is still out. But again, it’s an interesting hypothesis.
So while I could spend about ten more pages describing the specifics of some other contact-dependent pathways and days trying to include descriptions of all the ways cells can communicate, I think I’ll stop here. Hopefully I’ve provided you with a decent enough analogy between what contact means between people and, on a considerably smaller level, between cells. Just remember, punches can be felt on both faces and plasma membranes, and that’s pretty neat.
1. The Language of Life: How Cells Communicate in Health and Disease. Debra Niehoff. Published by Joseph Henry Press: Washington DC (2005).
2. Molecular Biology of the Cell 5th ed. B. Alberts, A. Johnson, J. Lewis, M. Raff, K. Roberts, P. Walter. Published by Garland Science: New York (2008).
3. Principles of Development 3rd ed. L. Wolpert, T. Jessell, P. Lawrence, E. Meyerowitz, E. Robertson, J. Smith. Published by Oxford University Press: New York (2007).
4. Francois Fagotto and Barry M. Gumbiner. 1996. “Cell Contact-Dependent Signaling.” Published in Developmental Biology 180: 445-454.
5. S. Artavanis-Tsakonas, M. Rand, and R. Lake. 1999. “Notch Signalling: Cell Fate Control and Signal Integration in Development.” Published in Science 284: 770-776.
6. M. Zegers, M.A. Forget, J. Charnoff, K. Mostov, M. Beest, S. Hansen. 2003. “Pak1 and PIX regulate contact inhibition during epithelial wound healing.” Published in The EMBO Journal 22-16: 4155-4165.
8 . Fractic by Chris Sullins^
To design your own fractal, visit
http://azureabstraction.com/school/fractal/
Bookmark & Share
