WHAT IS LIFE:

The Evolution of Information From Quantum Flux to the Self

Ernest  Rossi

"There is a destination, a possible goal.  That is the way of individuation.  Individuation means becoming an "individual," and, insofar as "individuality" embraces our innermost, last, and incomparable uniqueness, it also implies becoming one's own self.  We could therefore translate individuation as "coming to selfhood" or "self-realization." (p173).      The transcendent function does not proceed without aim and purpose, but leads to the revelation of the essential human.  It is in the first place a purely natural process, which may in some cases pursue its course without the knowledge or assistance of the individual, and can sometimes forcibly accomplish itself in the face of opposition.  The meaning and purpose of the process is the realization, in all of its aspects,  of the personality originally hidden away in the embryonic germ-plasma; the production and unfolding of the original potential wholeness. (p. 110)

C. G. Jung, 1953, Two Essays on Analytic Psychology, Collected Works, v. 7.

In our current lives of haste it is well to recall that one of the most significant essays, The Transcendent Function, ever written by C.G. Jung (1916/1960) took him a leisurely forty-two years. He never even offered it up for publication in a peer-review journal. It might never have seen the light of day but for the fact that a group of his students actually had to snatch it from his files and publish it themselves in a private edition. This essay called "The Transcendent Function," sums up Jung's philosophy of psychotherapy as a constructive and synthetic activity whereby people learn to recognize the new as it evolves in a creative dialogue with themselves.  

in 2002.  Jung originally wrote his essays well before the current revolution in functional genomics, bioinformatics, and neuroscience.  His only anticipation of these current scientific developments was his mention of the "embryonic germ-plasma" as the archetypal source of our individuality.  Today we recognize that this so-called embryonic germ-plasma contains about 35,000 genes in humans.  Less well known is that most of these genes have minor variations in the 4 nucleotide bases that make up the genetic code.  There are about 3.3 million variations in these bases of the genetic code that are called "single nucleotide polymorphisms" (SNPs).  If you attempt to calculate the  possibilities of SNP variations, you come up with an astonishing  number: 4 to the exponent 3.3.  This is a sum beyond our everyday imagination.  Some of these SNPs are serious enough to be a source of genetic illnesses such as cystic fibrosis.  Others encode the biological sources of individuality in our responses to diseases as well as drugs to fight the diseases.  

The key idea here is that SNPs are responsive to environmental cues, including the psychosocial cues of everyday life in our personal relationships, our experiences of meaning, memory and learning, as well as the unique sources of our individuality in the creative arts such as music, dance, drama, meditation, and cultural rituals in general (Rossi, 2002).  The functions of most SNPs are currently unknown, however.  From a Jungian viewpoint, we would hypothesize that many SNPs could encode the psychobiological sources of our consciousness and individuality whose effects could only be experienced as the hidden archetypal source of the Self, soul, or spirit.  I hypothesize that many of these SNPs are the archetypal source of Jung's concept of individuation.  From this perspective, it becomes our individual response-ability to recognize and express the unique genetic legacy each of us embodies in the psychosocial genomics of our SNPs (Rossi, 2002).

One goal of a well-developed life according to Jung is learning to transcend the inherent conflicts between past and present by building a bridge that could reach higher levels of understanding that could embrace both from a new point of view.  Living art, language, science, humanities and religion as well as love and personal relationships are continually engaged in reorganization and creative synthesis. Dead languages, concepts or relationships, by contrast, are mired in a static state of equilibrium where nothing new ever seems to happen.

This essentially creative, synthetic and evolutionary point of view pioneered in psychology by Jung is in sharp contrast with the earlier analytic and reductive points of view that were typical of classical science as it developed between the seventeenth and nineteenth centuries. The method of taking things apart, analyzing and reducing them to their elements seemed successful during the first tottering steps of science. Who could argue with the mechanistic approach of classical physics and astronomy when they could build ever better clocks and successfully predict an awesome eclipse of the sun or even the existence of a new planet?

But what about life itself and the experience of human consciousness? Could classical science really say something about life by killing under the microscope or analyzing consciousness by reading its thumbprint in an electroencephalogram? Could we really say something about the origin of life by mixing a few gases in a test tube with an electric spark to produce amino acids that presumably were the first building blocks of life?

The origin of life on earth is still lost in the mists of ancient time called "The Archeon" more than four billion years ago. One of the first scientific attempts to describe the archetype or basic pattern of life can be credited to the Nobel Prize winning physicist, Erwin Schrodinger, who wrote a famous little book, "What Is Life? The Physical Aspect of the Living Cell." As we could expect of a physicist, Schrodinger began with a reductive explanation of life; he explored how the biology of life could be reduced to the chemistry and physics. With brilliant insight, however, he made a crucially important reinterpretation that enabled physics, biology and now psychology to be placed on a common foundation of information theory.  Since the publication of this book in 1944 this approach has been spectacularly successful. The modern development of molecular biology, the unraveling of the genetic code and new insights into the quantum nature of life and mind were all inspired and foreshadowed by Schrodinger.  (See the appendix on From Statistical Mechanics to Information Theory: 4 Pioneers of 100 Years of Conceptual Innovation).

Now, fifty years later, a curious situation has arisen that is little understood by the general public and most scientists. Concepts and qualities originally associated with mind such as "Information" and "Communication" are being introduced into the basic sciences of physics, chemistry and biology at an accelerating rate. This is curious because almost no one seems to recognize its major implication. Until recently the conventional wisdom has been that psychology, if it ever is to be a science, must rest on a reductive and mechanistic foundation of classical physics and biology. Now seems, the reverse is the case. Physics and biology are being reinterpreted to rest on a new foundation of information  a concept that originally came from psychology.  The currently emerging sciences of bioinformatics and complex systems are an new integration of psychology, biology and physics.

This new integration is typified by the work of an American biologist and physicist, Tom Stonier, whose recent book "Information and the Internal Structure of the Universe" re-conceptualizes the foundation of physics and biology as branches of psychology, information and communication theory. The atoms and molecules that make up the mass and movement of the universe and life itself are all highly organized structures. Anything that is organized, however, contains information and the flow of information that we usually call "communication." Physics, biology and life are therefore all to be understood as processes of information and communication.  From this perspective physics and biology can  be regarded as being branches of psychology and the humanities in general!

But is the information in atoms, molecules, mass, energy and biology the same sort of information that we all process when we talk about our mental experience? Surely we are expressing information when think to ourselves and communicate with others. What is the relationship between the sort of information that is encoded in the material structures - the molecules and genes of our body - and the kind of information that we experience in the mental realm as the wings of our consciousness, thought, feeling and dreams? How do the mental and material kinds of information relate to each other?

Let us approach an answer to some of these questions by imagining a play called "The Informational Evolution of Life" in three acts. Let's look at what we are learning today to determine if we can outline a plausible scenario from the origin of the universe in Act One to the evolution of life, mind and culture in Acts Two and Three. Perhaps our play will be the thing wherein we can capture current consciousness taking wing.

ACT ONE

THE ORIGIN OF THE UNIVERSE AND INFORMATION

A number of centuries ago an anonymous Christian monk wrote a little book called, "The Cloud of Unknowing." To achieve and awareness of God, the monk explained, it was enough to simply sit quietly and imagine and meditate upon a little cloud of unknowing floating just above one's head. As the meditator strived to reach and pierce the mystery of the unknown in the cloud so would an awareness of the mystery of God be realized.

It is striking that this metaphor of the cloud is being used by contemporary thinkers to intimate something about the origin and evolution of the natural universe by the process of "symmetry breaking." If you imagine yourself in a uniform cloud of infinite extent you would realize that you are hopelessly lost; everywhere you look there is the same uniform field of mist with no shapes to inform you of place, location or even up and down. Mathematicians and physicists call this a state of symmetry; everything is the same - symmetrical in all directions. Nothing can even exist in a universe of complete symmetry where all is sameness.

Now imagine that the cloud you are lost in is actually hot steam that is gradually cooling. You recall that water boils and turns into steam at one hundred degrees Fahrenheit. So as your cloud cools below one hundred degrees it starts turning into droplets of water and it rains. The uniform symmetry of the cloud has been broken; the cloud of steam has changed phase into a more organized relationship between molecules that we call water. As the water rains down you can now know the difference between up and down. Lowering the temperature has (1) broken the symmetry of the cloud leading to the (2) organization of water droplets so you now have (3) information at about the direction of up and down. As the temperature lowers further to zero degrees there is another symmetry breaking leading to another the phase transition of water as it is further organized (crystallized) turning into solid ice. Skating about on the solid ice you now have vastly more information since you now have the four directions - north, south, east and west. Once again symmetry breaking is accompanied by an increase in organization and information.

Crude as our metaphor may be it helps us understand Tom Stonier's view that matter, energy and information are all stages in the evolution of organization in the universe. Although we usually think of information as an aspect of mind and consciousness, the new informational view of physics recognizes information as an expression of the organization of energy and matter in the natural   evolution of the universe. Humans are expressions of the natural evolution of the organization matter, energy and information; they did not invent information any more than they invented matter. If we think of humans as "advanced informational systems," Stonier (1990) describes their evolution from the origin of the universe in the big bang as follows.

"The very large numbers associated with the improbability of advanced information systems causes one to wonder how such systems are possible in the first place.  The answer lies in the recursive properties of information systems.  Organized systems exhibit resonances.  Resonances lead to oscillations.  Oscillations represent timed cycles during which changes may be introduced.  Such changes may dampen or amplify the existing oscillations.  Alternatively, they may create new resonances and excite new sets of oscillations.  The more complex the system, the greater the likelihood of introducing  changes into the system during any given cycle.  hence the exponential growth of information.

In the light of the preceding considerations it becomes clear that fig. [1], which plots the relationship between information and entropy, also plots the evolution of the universe: At the far right--where entropy approaches the infinite and information the zero state--we have the Big Bang.  As we move to the left, the information content of the universe begins to increase, first as the forces of nature--gravity, weak and strong nuclear forces, electromagnetism--differentiate out, then as matter appears.  As we move further to the left, we see the evolution of matter into increasingly complex forms.  By the time we approach the ordinate--the zero entropy state--self organizing systems begin to appear, and as we move into the left quadrant we see not only the further development of more advanced self-organizing systems, we have now reached the realm of biological systems.  We also see the emergence of an entirely new phenomenon--intelligence.  From here on in, the curve depicting the growth of information becomes increasingly steeper, reflecting the autocatalytic process which characterize advanced systems capable not only of organizing themselves, but, with increasing effiency, also of ordering their environment...

Early, archaic life forms depend on the prior existence of complex molecules, derived form combinations of simpler molecules, which arose from the forces l inking up atoms, which in turn were formed by the intra-atomic forces linking fundamental particles into nucleons and atoms.  complexity utilizes pre-existing complexity to achieve higher degrees of complexity, building up the information content of evolving systems ad infinitum.  It began with the zero information state of the Big Bang: First the fundamental forces, then matter differentiated; the process of evolution had begun.  the exponential growth of information was inevitable.

Improbability fed further on existing improbability.  One does not start with zero information and have proverbial monkey's typing at random hoping to author "Hamlet."  Instead, a highly advanced information system named William Shakespeare was born into an advanced information culture and in due course added further information as the universe cycled on.

The concept that as the universe evolves, its information content increases, is in opposition to the idea that the increase in entropy will inevitably lead to the "heat death" of the universe (pp. 70-72)."

Stonier's concept of a universe that evolves in complexity and information as opposed to the dreary traditional idea of its eventual thermodynamic "heat death" as it runs out of energy is entirely in keeping with current concepts in physics that are brilliantly developed in way that is accessible to the general reader in a recent volume on The New Physics edited by Paul Davies [See also "Consciousness and the New Quantum Psychologies" in Psychological Perspectives, spring, 1988]. Many cosmologists now believe that the origin of the universe out of the Big Bang was the expression of a "probabilistic quantum flux" that gave rise to the waves, resonances and oscillations that make up the world as we know it (See "The Wave Nature of Consciousness" in Psychological Perspectives, Spring 1991). The creative thrust of current developments in physics and mathematics is away from the reductive, analytical approach of the past toward an understanding of how the synthetic systems of life, intelligence and consciousness are self-created by the still mysterious process of autocatalysis. Autocatalysis now takes center stage in Act Two of our play as we seek to understand the origin and evolution of life itself.

The Evolution of the Universe from the Big Bang to the Self adapted from Tom Stonier's mathematical model (diagrammed in the upper right yellow block).

ACT TWO

AUTOCATALYSIS AND THE CO-EVOLUTION OF LIFE

A few generations ago the concept of feedback was the newly discovered principle that explained how all forms of life and machine systems could regulate themselves to achieve homeostasis - the same steady state. From complex humans to simple machines -like thermostats that regulate the heat in your home - the principle and mechanism of "negative feedback" was used to keep a constant temperature or state of homeostasis even when everything in the environment was changing. It is called "negative" because it reverses any tendency to change the steady state you want to keep. Negative feedback helps maintain homeostasis - it is literally a means of keeping the same state - to keep the temperature the same in your house or keep your blood volume the same in your body or even your consciousness within certain mental limits. This is of fundamental importance for the vital balance of life on one level, to be sure, but certainly life is more than just keeping within previously established states and their limits! What we are really interested in today about living systems is how they create themselves, change and evolve beyond their previous limits. The new principle that explains this dynamic process is autocatalysis: how systems on all levels from the molecular and genetic to the psychological utilize "positive" as well as negative feedback in a way that leads to a further evolution of their organization, complexity and information content. "Autocatalysis" is a new name that is emerging for describing the dynamics underlying what is typically called "development" in biology and "individuation" in the archetypal psychology of C. G. Jung. The advantage of this new name is that it unites the previously separated sciences of physics and chemistry with the evolutionary processes that are of essence in biology, psychology, culture and the humanities with the new mathematical language of Chaos theory [See the special section on "The New Math of Archetypal Psychology" in the spring 1989 issue of Psychological Perspectives]. Current thinking about the autocatalytic origin of life has been aptly described by Lynn Margulis and Dorion Sagan in their Microcosmos: Four Billion Years of Microbial Evolution which is a fascinating introduction to this area.

"The ponds, lakes, and warm, shallow seas of the early Earthy, exposed as they were to cycles of heat and cold, ultraviolet light and darkness, evaporation and rain, harbored their chemical ingredients through the gamut of energy states.  Combinations of molecules formed, broke up, and reformed, their molecular links forged by the constant energy input of sunlight.  As the Earth's various microenvironments settled into more stable states, more complex molecule chains formed, and remained intact for longer periods.  Amino acids, nucleotides, and simple sugars could form and remain in solution together.  Even ATP, a molecule used by all living cells without exception as a carrier for energy, could form from the union of adenine with ribose (a sugar with five-carbon atoms) and three phosphate groups.

Some molecules turned out to be catalysts:  The made it easier and faster for other molecules to join or split without themselves being destroyed.  Catalysts were important before life because they worked against randomness to produce order and pattern in chemical processes.  some of these "dead" autocatalytic reactions form pattern whose increasing complexity over time is reminiscent of life.  From both theoretical calculations and laboratory evidence, it has been suggested that an interaction of two or more autocatalytic cycles could have produced a "hypercycle."  Some scientists theorize that such catalyzing compounds "competed" for elements in the environments, thus automatically limiting their existence.  but the basic idea of the hypercycle is quite the opposite.  Far from destroying each other in a fight for chemical survival, self-organizing compounds complemented each other to produce lifelike, ultimately replicating structures.  These cyclical processes formed the basis not only of the first cells but of all the myriad structures based on cells and their products that followed...

Nature's Archean experiments with long hydrocarbon chains were yielding compounds that could encapsulate a droplet of the surrounding water and its contents yet allow movement of other chemicals in and out of the enclosure.  This was the semipermeable membrane, a sort of soft door that permitted the entry of some chemicals while prohibiting that of others (pp. 52-54).

    The formation of these semi-permeable membranes was the crucial step that made the first cells of life possible. The concentrated space within these cells facilitated the process of autocatalysis whereby life encoding molecules of RNA, DNA and proteins of ever greater complexity could synthesize and replicate themselves. Margulis and Sagan's exact words, "...self-organizing compounds complemented each other to produce lifelike, ultimately replicating structures" has interesting resonances on many levels from quantum physics to psychology. Niels Bohr's used the word complementarity to describe paradoxes of the wave-particle nature of elementary particles and Carl Jung used the same term to describe the dynamics of our mental life (e.g.. the balance between the functions of the conscious and unconscious) and personal relationships (e.g. the complementarity between the masculine and feminine). There may be more than coincidence in this wide ranging use of complementarity to describe fundamental processes on so many levels in so many sciences. Complementarity appears to be an "archetypal" process leading to the evolution of complex informational systems that are currently being investigated with the new mathematics of chaos and fractal theory [See "Archetypes as Strange Attractors" in the spring 1989 issue of Psychological Perspectives].

Lynn Margulis, who is Distinguished University Professor in biology at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, has made outstanding contributions to the new Co-evolutionary view of the origin of species. Darwin's concept of natural selection maintains that evolution proceed by the "survival of the fittest." Competition was the key by which certain gene pools and life forms survived and were eventually "selected" as new species in an ever changing environment of limited resources. Darwin cannot be blamed for it, of course, but the erroneous over generalization of this view of nature as "ruthless fang and claw" in western civilization has been used to justify malignant social and political philosophies as well as the short sighted decimation of our planetary resources.

The new co-evolutionary view complements Darwinian competition with a deeper appreciation of the cooperative processes that were fundamental in the origin of life and the evolution of species. Following the faint hints provided by a few pioneering but generally unappreciated biologists of the past century, Lynn Margulis amassed data for the symbiotic origin and continuing evolution of all life forms. To be sure, the many varieties of those first primitive cells that originated four billion years were continually and intensely involved in competition for food. But in their haste to devour one another some of them got a stomach ache. Occasionally the process of digestion failed and the eater and the eaten became stuck together in ways that led to a grudging compromise where they had to learn to live together for mutual survival. Eventually some of these forced partners learned to share their genes in a symbiotic relationship that had greater survival value than either alone. Margulis and Sagan describe it as "...the same old story lines of vicious attack, compromise, and ultimate partnership of victor and vanquished."

While many of Margulis's ideas remain controversial, such as the origin of movement and the evolution of the brain itself in the symbiotic union between spirochetes (those long microorganisms that move by wiggling) and primitive prokaryotes (cells that had no nucleus and did not move), many of her early results are now accepted and may be found in standard textbooks of biology. In a recently edited and highly regarded volume on Symbiosis as a Source of Evolutionary Innovation, a variety of researchers on an international level provide many important lines of evidence for understanding how these co-evolutionary processes are continuing even today. These studies are providing deepening insight into the dynamics of many forms of organic disease where invading viruses, bacteria and their human hosts, for example, either destroy each other or go through "...the same old story lines of vicious attack, compromise, and ultimate partnership of victor and vanquished." On the broadest level Margulis's research forms a core of scientific documentation for Lovelock's Gaia Hypothesis - that our entire plant can be regarded as being alive - a living autopoietic organism that has evolved in symbiotic relationship with the universe.

The positive connotations of the term "symbiosis" to describe an early stage in the evolution of all higher living systems is in sharp contrast with the use of symbiosis as a pejorative term in psychology where it usually means that two or more people have remained too dependent on each other for too long (See our interview with Aniela Jaffe in this issue). We can reconcile these two different ways of using the same term when we recall that it is perfectly healthy for the developing fetus and mother to be in a symbiotic relationship. It is still okay for mother and infant to be in symbiotic closeness for a while. As the infant develops into a child and adolescent, however, we expect that its evolving complexity will lead it through a process of individuation as it becomes a psychologically mature adult. This process of maturation is stressed and even aborted when individuals as well as whole societies get stuck somewhere along "...the same old story lines of vicious attack, compromise, and ultimate partnership of victor and vanquished."

There has to be a lesson in all this for generating a profounder philosophical, psychological and practically important understanding the human condition. Symbiotic and co-evolutionary processes are of essence in the self-generative dynamics of life toward increasing complexity, organization and information content as illustrated in our illustration of the evolution of the universe from the Big Bang to the Self. Stonier's accelerating upward curve of informational complexity implies that we are headed toward future evolutionary developments of matter, mind and information that we can only dimly comprehend at this time. I placed "Point Omega" at the top of the curve along with "The Cloud of Unknowing" because it reminds me of Teilhard de Chardin's spiritual speculations about our ultimate human destiny. From a psychological perspective we could just as well use Jung's concept of individuation and the evolution of the Self for this apparent destiny. Stonier speculates that a symbiosis of human and computer intelligence is the next step that is already upon us in the way our children are accepting "personal relationships" with these teaching machines. This inevitably leads to Act Three of our play where we will speculate upon this continuing evolution of genes and memes in current culture.

ACT THREE

GENES, MEMES AND CULTURE

Our first two acts presented the evolution of matter, energy and information from the Big Bang to the gradual organization of the first living cells and the co-evolutionary development of humans with Gaia. But to say that we are simply walking, talking multicellular bipeds expressing information really does not seem to be getting at anything new about human nature. The prospect of learning something new at this point, however, is hinted at by Richard Dawkins in his provocative and brilliant book The Selfish Gene. Dawkins sees an analogy between the kind of biological information encoded in our genes and the information in our minds which he calls "memes." Memes are now beginning to evolve within the soup of human culture just as genes began to evolve in biological gene pools on the primordial earth of The Archeon four billion years ago.

The new soup is the soup of human culture.  We need a name for the new replicator, a noun that conveys the idea of a unit of cultural transmission, or a unit of imitation.  "Mimeme" comes from a suitable Greek root, but I want a monosyllable that sounds a bit like "gene."  I hope my classicist friends will forgive me if I abbreviate mimeme to meme.  If it is any consolation, it could alternatively be thought of as being related to "memory," or to the French word meme.  It should be pronounced to rive with "cream."

Examples of memes are tunes, ideas, catch-phrases, clothes fashions, ways of making pots or of building arches.  Just as genes propagate themselves in the gene pool by leaping from body to body via sperms or eggs, so memes propagate themselves in the meme pool by leaping from brain to brain via a process which, in the broad sense, can be called imitation.  If a scientist hears, or reads about, a good idea, he passes it on to this colleagues and students.  He mentions it in his articles and his lectures.  If the idea catches on., it can be said to propagate itself, spreading from brain to brain.  As my colleague N. K. Humphrey neatly summed up an earlier draft of this chapter: "...memes should be regarded as living structures, not just metaphorically  but technically.  When you plant a fertile meme in my mind you literally parasitize my brain, turning it is not a vehicle for the meme's propagation in just the way that a virus may parasitize the genetic mechanism of the host cell.  And this isn't just a way of talking--the meme firm sat 'belief in life after death' is actually realized physically, millions of times over, as a structure in the nervous systems of individual menthe world over."

Consider the idea of God.  We do not know how it arose in the meme pool.  Probably it originated many times by independent "mutation."  In any case, it is very old indeed.  How does it replicate itself?  By the spoken and written word, aided by great music and great art.  Why does it have such a high survival value?  Remember that "survival value" here does not mean value for a gene in a gene pool, but value for a meme in a meme pool.  The question really means: What is it about the idea of a god that gives it its stability and penetrance in the cultural environment?  The survival value of the god meme in the meme pool results from its great psychological appeal.  It provides a superficially plausible answer to deep and troubling questions about existence.  It suggests that injustices in this world may be rectified in the next.  The "everlasting arms" hold out a cushion against our own inadequacies which, like a doctor's placebo, is none the less effective for being imaginary.  These are some of the reasons why the idea of God is copied so readily by successive generations of individual brains.  God exists, if only in the form of a meme with high survival value, or infective power, in the environment provided by human culture.

Some of my colleagues have suggested to me that this account of the survival value of the god meme begs the question.  In the last analysis they wish always to go back to the "biological advantage."  To them  it is not good enough to say that the idea of a god has "great psychological appeal."  They want to know why it has great psychological appeal.  Psychological appeal means appeal to brains, and brains are shaped by natural selection of genes in gene-pools.  They want to find some way in which having a brain like that improves gene survival (pp. 192-193). 

It is difficult to believe that so literate a writer as Richard Dawkins does not realize that his concept of the meme is a rediscovery of the concept of the archetype first described by Plato and most recently elaborated by Jung who describes it as follows.

The term "archetype" occurs as early as Philo Judeaus, with reference to the Imago Dei (God-image) in man.  It can also be found in Irenaeus, who says: "The creator of the world did not fashion these things directly from himself but copied them from archetypes outside himself." ...For our purposes this term is apposite and helpful, because it tells us that so far as the collective unconscious contents are concerned, we are dealing with the archaic or--I would say--primordial types, that is, with universal images that have existed since the remotest times.  The term "representations collectives" used by Lévy-Brühl to denote the symbolic figures in the primitive view of the world, could easily be applied to the  unconscious primitive view of the world, could easily be applied to unconscious contents as well, since it means practically the same thing.  Primitive tribal lore is concerned with archetypes that have been modified in a special way.  They are no longer contents of unconscious, but have already been changed into conscious formulae taught according to tradition, generally in the form of esoteric teaching.  This last is a typical means of expression for the transmission of collective contents originally derived from the unconscious.

Another well-known expression of the archetypes is myth and fairytale.  But here too we are dealing with forms that have received a specific stamp and have been handed down through long periods of time... Especially on the higher levels of esoteric teaching the archetypes appear in a form that reveals quite unmistakably the critical and evaluating influence of conscious elaboration.  Their immediate manifestation, as we encounter it in dreams and visions, is much more individual, less understandable, and more naive than in mythos, for example.  The archetype is essentially an unconscious content that is altered by becoming conscious and being perceived, and it takes its colour from the individual consciousness in which it happens to appear (pp. 5-6).

...There is a good reason for supposing that the archetypes are the unconscious images for the instincts themselves, in other words, that they are patterns of instinctual behaviour (p. 44).

The archetype an sich, as I have explained elsewhere, is an "irrepresentable" factor, a "disposition": which starts functioning at a given moment in the development of the human mind and arranges the material of consciousness into definite patterns...  The more clearly the archetype is constellated, the more powerful will be its fascination, and the resultant religious statements will formulate it accordingly, as something "daemonic" or "divine."  Such statements indicate possession by an archetype.  The ideas underlying them are necessarily anthropomorphic and are thereby distinguished from the organizing archetype, which is itself is irrepresntable because unconscious .⁶ (pp. 148-151) [Italics added]

It is evident that Jung uses the concept of the archetype to conceptualize a primordial organizing process within nature on all levels from the instinctual and biological patterns of behavior to the daemonic and divine in human experience. What Dawkins's idea of the meme adds to the concept of the archetype is an association with the biological gene, the essence of the new informational view of the nature of life. This addition helps heal the split between mind and matter that has plagued western thought since the time of Descartes. Since the dynamics of genes and memes can be investigated experimentally and conceptualized by the language of mathematics, Dawkins's view holds the promise for developing a new empirical science of archetypal psychology as well. Just as Jung updated the concept of the archetype from the philosophical to the psychological, so Dawkins and Stonier may be providing the basis for integrating the psychological view of the archetype with the organizational view of the physical and biological as expressions of information. We can now understand in retrospect that the very concept of the archetype itself as it developed from Plato through Jung has been a consistent effort to describe the organization and dynamics of life, mind and the universe. This organizational activity of the archetype on the evolution of information finds its most recent expression the way beautiful mandala-like images are generated on computers using the new non-linear mathematics of fractal theory.

Stonier view of the evolution in our concept of the essence of nature in physics and biology from matter and energy to information thus has profound significance for understanding human development. As long as we believed that the essence of the universe was matter we could only describe the obvious organization of life as some sort of special imprint, an archetype or original "fixed pattern" that was always in danger of being lost in the next generation. This view was dangerous, however, because it could be used to justify all sorts of rigid and Draconian attitudes of what is "normal" in human psychology, social class structure and fundamentalism in theological thought. The idea of matter as the essence of the universe and imprint as the expression of life was dangerous because it could stifle our natural processes of development on all levels.

When our understanding of the essence of nature shifted from matter to energy as it did with the development of statistical mechanics and thermodynamics in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries more flexibility was introduced in our notions of the universe and the human condition. The archetype became a dynamical energizing force that led to the organization of dead matter so that we could understand movement as the expression of forces and energy in physics and vitalism in biology and development in psychology. The problem with this energy point of view was that ultimately, according to the second law of thermodynamics, the universe would run out of energy and all life end in a "heat death." This was a depressive view that could be used to justify a sense of futility about the meaning of life as well as the dog-eat-dog survival of the fittest philosophy of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries that led to the heedless destruction of Gaia.

As we now shift from matter and energy to the idea of information as the essence of the universe, nature and the evolution of being and consciousness we open a vastly new potential for facilitating the human condition. Higher forms of life are now understood as being possible only if the stage of cooperation completes the process of Co-evolution. "Survival of the fittest" is only one early stage of the Co-evolutionary process that makes higher forms of life possible. We now have an understanding of the archetypal as an autocatalytic process of non-linear dynamics that generates an infinity of ever more complex and individualized expressions in physics, biology, psychology and culture. No two individuals are ever alike. Human psychology and social systems need freedom to evolve ever more creative solutions to the ever more complex situations they find themselves in.

Approaches to facilitating this infinity of potentials to evolve are well represented in this issue of Psychological Perspectives. Our interview with the late Aniela Jaffe clarifies how the freedom for each individual to develop their own unique path to individuation was the essence of Jung's approach to psychotherapy. Emily Conrad's approach to therapeutic movement illustrates how to break out of routine and deadening habits

to experience a oneness with the spontaneous freshness of our ever evolving possibilities in every day life. Sam Keen's emphasizes the same ideal in the men's consciousness raising groups he leads by breaking out of the old stereotypes of how we should behave by liberating our concepts of what it means to be masculine and feminine.

Does all this help answer the eternal question, What is Life? Well, not really in any ultimate sense, of course, but it does provide a cross-section of present day thinking about how we can investigate it in evermore relevant ways for gaining a deeper perspective about current culture. For Stonier there has been an evolution in our concept of the essence of nature in physics and biology from matter and energy to information. Their common denominator is an effort to understand the evolution of organization in nature and ourselves - the same organizational process that has been called "archetypal" in ancient philosophy and modern psychology - the same organizational activity that we now call "information processing" in computer networks that are shaping our evolving global culture. So is information the ultimate concept for understanding life? Assuredly Not! Tom Stonier has a new book to be called, Beyond Information, slated for publication by Springer-Verlag this summer. I can't wait to lay my hands on it. 

References

Dawkins, R.  (1989).  The Selfish Gene.   New Edition, Oxford Press.

Fester, R.  (Ed.)  (1991). Symbiosis as a Source of Evolutionary Innovation.   Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT Press.

Jung, C.  (1916/1960).  The Transcendent Function.  The Structure and Dynamics of the Psyche.  The Collected Works of C. G. Jung.   Vol. 9(1),  Princeton:  Princeton University Press, 67-91.

Jung, C.  (1958).  Psychology and Religion. The Collected Works of C. G. Jung.  Vol. 11.    Princeton:  Princeton University Press.

Jung, C.  (1959).  The Archetypes and the Collective Unconscious.  The Collected Works of C. G. Jung.   Vol. 9(1),  Princeton:  Princeton University Press.

Margulis, L. & Sagan, D.  (1986  ).  Microcosmos:  Four Billion Years of Microbial Evolution. N.Y.: Simon & Schuster.

More, W.  (1990).  Schrodinger: Life and Thought.   Cambridge, Mass: Cambridge University Press.

Rossi, E.  (2002).  The Psychobiology of Gene Expression: Neuroscience and Neurogenesis in Hypnosis and the Healing Arts.  New York: W. W. Norton Professional Books.

Schrodinger, E.   (1944).  What is life?  The Physical Aspect of the Living Cell. Cambridge,  Mass.; Cambridge university Press. 

Stonier, T.  (1983). The Wealth of Information.  London: Thames-Metheu

Stonier, T.. & Colen, C. (1986).  The Three C's: Children, Computers and Communication.   New York: Wiley.

Stonier, T.  (1990). Information and the Internal Structure of the Universe.   New York: Springer-Verlag.

Appendix

A profound conceptual revolution has taken place over the past one hundred years in the way we conceptualize nature, matter and mind. We can summarize the story by reviewing four fundamental steps taken by the following four theorists and the evolution of their understanding of the possible states matter, molecules and information. Does the similarity in the mathematical expressions for the organization of molecules and information imply that their dynamics are somehow the same? Does this imply that we are discovering a new common denominator between mind and matter that may be of essence for future developments in mind-body healing?

LUDWIG BOLTZMAN (1844-1906) was a physicist who greatly admired Darwin's theory of biological evolution and sought to describe the evolution of matter. At the time much of the scientific world did not believe in the reality of atoms. To describe the evolution of matter, however, Boltzman insisted that atoms must exist and their combined interaction could account for the experimentally observed dynamical relationships between the pressure, volume and temperature of a gas, for example. Boltzman laid the foundation of "Statistical Mechanics" when he formulated these dynamics in statistical terms for the first time - the mechanical forces observed in nature - everything from the heat flow in engines to the flight of a plane - could be described as the results of the statistical interactions of billions upon billions of atoms.

Boltzman's contributions are currently enjoying renewed appreciation because his statistical formulation of the second law of thermodynamics is an important source of our emerging ideas about nature of information and the dynamics of self-organization in biology and individuation in psychology. Boltzman's famous equation S = k log P expresses the second law of thermodynamics statistically with the simple idea that entropy (S), the most likely evolution of any mechanical system as we observe it (a steam engine, for example), equals the probability (P), the number of ways the atoms in that system can arrange themselves, times a universal constant (k) known as Boltzman's constant that can be derived by experiment.

While Boltzman's equation led to excellent predictions of the way mechanical systems operated, it led in its original form to a rather dismal implication about the eventual "heat death" of the universe. The second law of thermodynamics states that entropy must always increase and Boltzman's equation identifies this increasing entropy with a growing probability of molecular disorder. This nineteenth century view of the physical universe led to the implication that the matter was falling into greater disorder and the loss of energy ("heat death") in the universe. This view was difficult to reconcile with the way biological, psychological or cultural systems could evolve in the opposite direction by increasing molecular order, organization and information. It is a sad irony that although he tried to formulate the dynamics of the evolution of matter, Boltzman's ideas during his lifetime seemed, to the contrary, to point to the ultimate dissolution of the universe. Boltzman acknowledged that his life always swung between periods of great joy and grief but he was finally overwhelmed by his depressive response to his vitriolic critics. He finally committed suicide at the age of 62 just a few years before his ideas were finally vindicated for isolated mechanical systems.

ERWIN SCHRODINGER (1887-1961) enrolled in the University of Vienna in 1906 shortly after Boltzman's tragic death. When Schrodinger won his Nobel Prize in physics in 1933 he noted in his autobiography that Boltzman's creative vision made such a deep impression that Schrodinger was inspired to infuse it with new meaning. In his epochal little book, What is Life?, Schrodinger expressed this new meaning by describing how life could evolve by "extracting 'order' from the environment as follows.

This radical reframing of Boltzman's concept of increasing molecular disorder, entropy and eventual heat death of the universe into "negative entropy" as a source of increasing order and information for the evolution of life and culture was a pretty trick, indeed! There is a direct line of inspiration from Schrodinger's new view of the essence of life as information in the chromosome in the form of a "code-script" and an "aperiodic crystal" and Watson and Crick's eventual discovery of the genetic code for which they received the Noble Prize. The recent biography, Schrodinger: Life and Thought by Walter Moore (Cambridge University Press, 1990) contains a richly documented account of Schrodinger's passionate life and his deeply introspective studies in philosophy, psychology and religion (Buddhism, Vedanta and Yoga).

CLAUDE SHANNON, a research mathematician at the Bell Telephone Laboratories and Donner Professor of Science at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, published a classical paper, "The Mathematical Theory of Communication," in 1944 to deal with the purely technical aspects of telephone transmission. It has been said that Shannon was persuaded to introduce the concept of entropy as "missing information" in telephone transmission by the mathematician John von Neumann who joked, "It will give you a great edge in debates because nobody really knows what entropy is anyway."

Shannon clearly acknowledges that his mathematical formulation of information deals purely with the syntactical or structural aspects of operating a communication channel rather than its semantic or meaningful content. An unfortunate implication of his approach is that high information is equated with high uncertainty rather than the high level of meaningful organization characteristic of biological, psychological and cultural processes. Many random strings of letters, for example, could be just as highly uncertain as a Shakespearean sonnet. Shannon's concept of information is therefore of little practical help to the life sciences outside of its specialized role in the purely mechanical transmission of information.

TOM STONIER obtained his Ph.D. in biology at Yale in 1955 an then engaged in fundamental research in cancer at the Rockefeller Medical Center for many years. He then greatly expanded the horizon of his research interests as "Professor of Science and Society" at Bradford University in England where he wrote a number of highly acclaimed books such as "The Wealth of Information" (1983, Thames-Methuen) which updated Adam Smith to describe our current shift from an industrial to an information based society. While co-authoring a volume with Cathy Colin, The Three C's: Children, Computers and Communication (1986, Wiley), Stonier realized that although we all use the concept of information with increasing frequency, no one really knows what it means. In a effort outline a general theory of information that could integrate physics, biology and psychology, Stonier, wrote Information and the Internal Structure of the Universe (1990, Springer-Verlag) where he updates the Boltzman-Schrodinger equation to S = k log [I / I]. As can be seen the only difference is in the last term: for Boltzman it was the probability of molecules reaching maximum entropy in complete disorder; for Schrodinger the reverse of entropy became a measure of order - a code of life; for Stonier it becomes an expression of information. Stonier's equation emphasizes that the quantitative expression of entropy (S) is an constant (k) determined by experiment and the ratio between the information content of the system when entropy is zero (I ), and the actual information content of the system at any given entropic value (I). The 100 years of conceptual development between Boltzman's molecular disorder and Stonier's informational content of any intelligent system required only slight shifts in the mathematical formula but a profoundly new understanding of how we can better understand nature and ourselves.

Originally published as:  Rossi, E.  (1992).  What is Life: From Quantum Flux to the Self.  Psychological Perspectives, 26, 6-22.