Simon Powell - The Psilocybin Solution

The first point to make about these three examples is that the information inferred is in a potential, or latent, state, which is to say that the unseen fingerprints remain as potential information until perceived; the distribution of ink across the exam paper remains potential information until the paper is read by an examiner; and an egg, before its untimely removal from beneath a hen, is also rich in potential information.

The second point is that this potential information can become active provided that it comes under the effects of an appropriate environment or appropriate context . As you will recall from chapter 5, I mentioned contextual environments in connection with their effect of providing meaning to individual neuronal patterns. We can now use this concept of context in a more general sense in order to understand how information can be made to actively flow or unfold from a potential state. As we shall see, context is an incredibly important word.

In the fingerprint case, a forensic expert armed with the tools of the trade can come to draw out the information embodied in the prints. The expert causes the information inherent in the fingerprint patterns to flow out into the larger environment, such that the information causes things to happen. The information has gone from a latent, passive state into an active state by virtue of the contextual effect of the forensic expert’s psyche and equipment (that is, the expert’s mind and equipment operate as a context). In other words, an appropriate contextual environment allows the meaning inherent in the prints to become manifest. To highlight the scope for causal effect that a transitional flow of information can have, we should note that information in fingerprint traces can penetrate a courtroom and induce a conviction. Information is a powerful thing, able to spread itself out into the greater environment.

With the distributed ink example, its analysis by an exam grader causes the potential information to flow out and be actively informative so that it comes to shape the grade awarded to the student. In the context of the psyche of an examiner, the information inherent in the precisely patterned distribution of ink is significant enough to indicate the intellectual capacity and communicational intent of the student.

As for the egg, its informational content similarly undergoes transition from a potential state to an active state when an appropriate environment draws the information out. In this case, a specific temperature acts as the initial befitting contextual environment, serving to elicit a flow of information from the sequential DNA patterns in the yolk (within the nucleus to be precise). Deny the egg the appropriate temperature context (take it away from warmth) and the information remains potential and inactive; hence a chicken fails to develop.

Besides the distinction between potential information and actively flowing information, there is also a distinction to be made between subjective information and objective information. In the case of the fingerprints and the ink distribution, the information is activated by us. The appropriate context is the subjective attention of human observers who come to channel the information. This means that the information is purely subjective in nature and depends on human observation to activate it. In fact, this subjective nature of information holds for the majority of the things we usually conceive of as information in our culture, things like TV and radio broadcasts, books, memos, newspapers, and so forth. To the fly crawling over the TV screen or the pages of a book, the visual or written information remains potential and dormant (unless of course the fly happens to be a cunningly designed electronic CIA bug), whereas in the context of the observing human psyche, the information actively flows out of these media and comes to be causally influential. It should be stressed however that this subjective nature of the information does not lessen it in any way; it is still very much a real part of the Universe. Relatively speaking, all and any kind of information is real.

The case is somewhat different with the egg, for human observers are not necessary to elicit the (genetic) information that they carry. The information in an egg is usually “read out” by the natural environment, and we can refer to an egg’s information as being objective in the sense that the objective natural environment is involved as the appropriate context eliciting the process of information flow. The same goes for seeds and spores. They are informational entities that release their stored information when the natural environment is in a specific state. If the seeds or spores fall on “stony” ground (the wrong context), then their information remains unread, dormant perhaps for years. Indeed, a rather dramatic and apt example of this process occurred in the case of a freeze-dried Neolithic hunter found in the Alps a few decades ago. When his nondesigner straw footwear was thawed out, some fungal spores in the ancient straw came to life and grew. Scientists were astonished, as it was the first time that such a turn of events had been observed. Cryogenically suspended for five thousand years, the fungal spores went suddenly from a passive to an active state due to the warm environmental context of the science lab. The information in the spores began to actively flow, and this process manifested in the elaborate growth of the fungus.

But in both subjective and objective information, what is it that comes to flow? What is actually happening when the fingerprints are analyzed, when the ink is read, and when eggs and spores begin to grow? It is obvious that some kind of flowing process occurs wherein potential information becomes active information. But what exactly does this flowing process involve?

Above all, when information flows, there appears to be movement and change, in particular, a change in the state of at least one of the systems involved. In analyzing fingerprints, the information they contain initially affects the overall state of the forensic expert’s psyche (the psyche being a system). Through analyzing the prints, the psyche of the forensic expert is provided with knowledge, a term often associated with information. Indeed, the concept of knowledge is bound with the theory of information developed by communication engineers, for information is conceived by them as representing a reduction in uncertainty. The richer the transfer of information, the less uncertain about something is the recipient of the information—hence more knowledge is gained. If I ask you to think of some famous person, and I try to guess who you thought of through the Twenty Questions game, then if my first question is whether the person is male and you answer “yes,” then that single bit of information has halved my uncertainty. For the communication engineer, information is correlated with knowledge and a reduction in uncertainty regarding a choice of possibilities. Actively flowing information therefore comes to reduce the number in an ensemble of possibilities. It reduces uncertain possibilities and gives rise to the actual. The net result is a definite change, or resolution of many possibilities into one certainty, in the receiving system involved in the information flow. An uncertain “open pattern” becomes a certain “closed pattern” as it were. In the fingerprint case the receiving system is the psyche of the forensic analyst that changes its state, or at least part of its pattern, according to how it is informed.

Regarding the examiner case, before he or she comes to mark the paper, there is complete uncertainty about the ability of the student. As the exam paper is read, the information flow gradually causes a reduction in uncertainty, until an eventual mark is settled upon. So, akin to the previous example, we can see that the information contained in the patterned distribution of ink gradually changes the state of the examiner’s mind or psyche. It is this sort of process that would appear to lie at the heart of subjective information transfer. A system of information on one level, or in one domain, connects to another system of information such that the state of the receiving system becomes altered. Or, to put it another way, one pattern of information is able to effect changes in another pattern of information. The human psyche is precisely a type of informational system, or informational pattern, able to change its state according to information coming from those other systems in which it is sensorially embedded.