The Struggle for Survival, Information, and Immortality

Mankind's first miracle: defeating the edge of the sword with the tip of the pen

Information is the Currency of Survival 

All living things react to their environment - to live is to ingest information, using it to navigate a theater of selective pressures, whether it’s a relaxing scene like bees pollenating flowers, or something more tense, like a wolf fight in the snow. We might navigate the complexities of a social hierarchy for opportunity and advancement, and get that promotion; wolves in the winter forest might track which packs frequent this territory, which mates are available, which wolf could I beat in a fight, and where all the prey at; or for a single-celled organism, to blithely swim along a chemical gradient of nutrients and poisons, do I flagellate to the left, or flagellate to the right. The evolution of a species is entirely bound up in the lives of individual animals, struggling for survival, reacting to their environments the best they know how.

We think of evolution in terms of species - wolves that are fierce, horses that are fast - where a species is like an individual sports teams that wins or loses. A more accurate view of life, however, is that it is a competition among genes, the players that make up a team, with genes working together for the team’s success. A gene for cold-resistance might replace a gene for heat-tolerance, and which is best depends on where the game is played - in the sun or on the snow. A single species has genes comes and go across time, the team’s genetic makeup evolving with the rules of the game, passing seasons, as new genes come along with better advantages and fewer weaknesses. Where do genes originate? Like a million monkeys on a million four-letter typewriters, new genes are made with a random walk in the space of possible DNA ‘words,’ and like the proverbial primates of prose, almost all such compositions are garbage, though occasionally you might generate something close to Dickens. 

With genes constantly being created, some better some worse, on the million typewriter random walk, then a single successful species is like a “Collected Best Works” anthology, a choice selection of snippets from a large corpus of written material that together create a coherent, compelling genetic narrative. A solid team of complementary genes is a recipe for a successful species. This cobbling-together-of-genes is nowhere more clear than the bacterial world, where genes are traded, translated, and transposed between distinct species like the shuffling of players in a league. For example, in recent history antibacterial genes first evolved in one species, and then were rapidly disseminated across many others - a first draft pick for any species where humans are the playing field.

The vehicles driving the gene-trade are viruses, which are able to take genes from one species and put it directly into another. In fact, this constant exchange of genes, not just between bacteria, but also between complex multicellular organisms, is a major source of evolutionary change for humans. With each trade, viruses insert new genetic material into their hosts, and in rare cases the inserted material becomes useful, functional - an advantage - despite carrying with it the baggage-train refuse of sloppy viral gene-merchants. How much baggage has fallen off the wagon-trains of the viral gene-trade over human history? In the human genome about 8% of all human DNA is remnant from past viral genetic exchanges, so quite a lot. Inside your chromosome are the instructions for making long-extinct viruses, detritus that has gradually become load-bearing genetic infrastructure, like poorly commented legacy code that everyone is afraid to touch.

That humans are ~10% ancient leftover virus-code isn’t supposed to be weird, or gross, or uncomfortable - it just is. As messy as a code-base it might be, theres really no other way things could work - without viral exchange, evolution just doesn’t happen fast enough, and for billions of years, animals competed by how quickly they could outpace each other in an evolutionary arms-race to become faster, tougher, stronger. This information - about which wolf I can beat in a fight - is important, but the things that make wolves wolves, or that wolf bigger than another, or who is prey and who is predator - these things are determined not by information about the environment, but genetic information that determines the form and function of an animal species. The exchange of this genetic information through viruses drove evolution, and for all of pre-history survival meant those with the best genes passing them down for generations to follow. Until humans came along, that is.

“It’s the Idea that Counts”

Humans have essentially stopped competing with other species in the environment on the basis of genes and genetic information, but instead win or lose by the information stored in our heads, our memories - memetic information. However, memetic information as a survival advantage is not unique to humans, it’s just that we rely on it far more than our genetic advantages (okay, maybe having big brains is a genetic advantage). Any animal with a nervous system is forming memories - mapping stimuli inputs with some set of behavioral responses, encoded in synapses. It’s not even contingent on synapses - acellular slime molds encode ‘memories’ in the structure of their microtubule skeleton, to bias future action based on past events. 

An animal might learn to trust a human over repeated interactions, and even generalize to trusting humans as a whole - abstracting away from several memories to generate a new behavioral rule that helps it survive. We might say the animal has developed an ‘idea’ of humans as safe, nurturing, as allies and not enemies. The wolfe becomes tame - a dog. A pattern has been encoded in the animals neuronal synapses that is both specific, applying only to humans, and also general, applying to unknown future humans in unknown future situations. The abstraction of memories into ideas, then, can hardly be claimed as the sole purview of homo sapiens.

What the animals cannot do, of course, is tell each other who to trust. If genes are the hardware, and ideas are the software, then apart from the default software that ships with every animal’s OS, each generation of non-human animals are entirely on their own when it comes to writing programs, which they have to do painfully, experience by experience, where a single bad idea - thinking something is an ally when its a threat - could mean death. Unfortunately there are no nice stories elder mice can tell younger mice about when and where it’s safe to eat cheese, rather every mouse must learn to sail forbidden seas.

Humans are writing and re-writing our own software constantly, and nowhere is the delight we have in constructing this new knowledge more present than the enjoyment we derive from our senses. Language is the miraculous invention which lets us recreate the senses of one person in the mind of another; to describe the sunset, a rose, a beautiful voice, creates in us a memory of something we never saw, nor smelled, nor heard. This linguistic-sensory reconstruction is how humans “do” transfer learning, that they confer immense survival advantage is why scary stories keep us up at night, why tales of horrible crimes eternally fascinate - they are powerful programs, written at great expense by unknown others, helping us navigate a world of hidden threats. These cultural mythos, like Aesop’s fables about trusting scorpions, are remnant ideas formed at great personal expense, clusters of dangers in the conceptual latent space of linguistic memory, remnants of past battles that like ancient viral-DNA hiding in our chromosome, act to warn us that ‘bugs are gross’ or to say “bless you” when someone sneezes.

The true power of language is this transfer learning, this translation of sensory experiences as abstracted by ideas, so lets be precise: in composing a story about the world, we package the neuronal structure generated in response to someone else’s traumatic life experience into a readily transportable, digestible packet, that when uploaded into another's mind, through listening, recreates an analogous neuronal structure that will motivate the learned behavior justified by the original experience. Monkey hear, monkey do, and after a while bugs, which are cool to play with as kids, become gross. What’s fascinating is the encapsulation involved here - we have no knowledge, no guarantee that the specific connectivity of the mind is replicated, in fact it almost certainly isn’t - but the idea contained in the memetic information is replicated with fidelity - stay away from bugs. That all memories are copies of our original senses, and ideas are abstractions of memories away from specifics, is itself not a new idea. Indeed this process of replication of sense-impressions, as carried out in the mind, is at the root of our word for both memory and memetic, from Greek, mimena - “a replicated thing.”  

And so humans compete with humans by the quality of their ideas, that while strength might be important, the deciding factor is how true their arrows might fly, how secure their triremes might sail the wine-dark seas, or how sharp an edge their bronze breast-plate armor might turn aside. More importantly, humans compete by the power of their myths as tools for motivating heroic deeds that fly against our biological instincts. The fearlessness of Achilles was that he knew, from the oracle at Delphi, that only Hector could kill him - and so he fought without hesitation against any other trojan, hesitation that might’ve otherwise been fatal.

In the parlance of modern day tech, languages, like Java, make software operable on different platforms regardless of whether the experience was originally compiled for that platform. It can even produce software never compiled for any platform, like the belief that “a hallucinating oracle at Delphi said I’m invincible and so, I’m invincible.” Such a non-experienced idea could only make sense in the context of a grand narrative of similar ideas creating the clear and vivid sense that things like Gods protect warriors like Achilles.

Also, like Java, humans don’t have much control over how to manage their memory. Our brains are good with connotations, but not with details. Homer and the Iliad are impressive not just as stories, rife with ideas, but because they are oral, that is, spoken-word constructions that are memorized. Much like the non-coding regions of DNA in our chromosome, large parts of Homeric ballads are in fact repetitive mnemonics that don’t translate into meaningful, functional ‘things’ that advance the plot, but are there to help the story-teller correctly transcribe the information given the human limits of recall. 

A problem for people is a problem for society, and social problems beget social technologies. Given that information is the currency of survival, that to survive as societies we must operate as storytellers of ideas, as facilitated through language, the survivability of ourselves and our societies will forever be limited by the limits of memory. This means more than just rhyming the instructions for heart-surgery so you can remember them better, but places hard limits on the total amount of knowledge we can cumulatively bring to bear on any facet of survival. More than just survival advantages, the knowledge of ourselves, our past, how we came to be us, will be something found “a la recherche du temps perdu,” consigned to be lost, in time, like tears in the rain….  

Writing and the Invention of Immortality

At the end of the movie Blade Runner, Roy, an android, saves the life of the android-repo-man sent to hunt him down. Roy’s life is ephemeral, programmed for an early death, and he frantically murders his way through his manufacturer’s management trying to find the abort codes for his own countdown-kill-switch. Roy’s lament, that all his memories will be lost in time, is not a reference to Proust or French literature (Roy was too busy fighting cool space battles to read about dreamy childhood summers along the Rhone), but rather the agony at knowing the experiences encoding his senses, his memories, will not become a story told to others, a mimene, a replicated thing - but rather like an NFT - one of a kind, and soon forgotten. Achilles and Roy both knew their fate, doomed to die, and were both warriors who didn’t hesitate to kill in the search for immortality; Achilles, by defeating Hector and the Trojans in battle knew he would live forever as the embodiment of glory; Roy, having only the abyss of nothingness promised to the afterlife of someone living in an atheistic, materialist, scientific worldview, actually wanted to live forever.

Achilles lived on, both as memetic and as genetic information, having as his claimed heir none other than Alexander the Great (this is, of course, more myth). Perhaps Roy, despite the ignominy of his death, could have escaped the bleakness of his finite lifespan without constructing a fanciful narrative where he joins the pantheon of great heroes in some cool jazz bar in Hades, if only he could have children. If androids don't dream of electric sheep, they might at least dream of a better tomorrow for their android offspring. The quest for replication of the self, of genetic propagation, is something that unites all life on the planet, and the uncertainty and inconsistency with which this information is propagated generates both the laws of the jungle and the ‘endless forms most beautiful’ which inhabit it.

However, we are not, as humans experiencing ourselves, primarily genetic beings. We are first and foremost social identities - Greek, warrior, myrmidon - that define ourselves in relation to a world of ideas - fate, Gods, and glory. In our popular conception of immortality, we don’t fantasize about the longevity achieved by Henrietta Lacks, who for decades has powered laboratory science as bequeather of the first immortal human cell line - HeLa cells - but rather the immortality fantasized by Achilles, who despite brief life would have his name, and his deeds, his persona, his identity, glorified and remembered for thousands of years. 

Genetic immortality is a laboratory phenomenon, but uninteresting to the social mind. Achillean immortality is a grandiose aspiration, achieved by heroic deeds captured in homeric ballads. The act of language has abstracted away the particular instantiation of experiences, senses as recorded by neuronal connectivity, into ideas, narratives, and ways-of-knowing that can be translated into other receptive minds. Achillean immortality is the knowledge that the patterned mind formed by individual experience will exist long after the mind containing the original pattern ceases to be.

In this day and age of well-patterned language models which capture the sum-total written corpus of humanity in the “friendly neighborhood gestalt supermind,” what is remembered is what is written. Writing, in breadth and in depth, is exactly the transfer learning required which enables the connectivity of one mind to replicate itself a thousand, a million times over. To write, then, is to deal in the currency of survival, ideas, in a format that escapes the onus for its invention - mortality, and our own biological limits. Writing is the first of our transcendental technologies, and proof that humans can work magic.

Welcome to my Substack, where I will write about anything and everything, based on absurd connections that span disciplines but capture some reflection of how I think, and see the world. This first article, on how writing is at essence the “first transcendental technology,” how information is the currency of survival, the evolution from genetic, to memetic information via language, and the power of writing in passing on what truly counts as our identity, contains a pattern I’ll revisit time and again: a simple biological fact, which drives a social response, that demands a new technology, which transcends biological fact. I hope you find some patterns worth thinking about, and worth keeping - my own attempt at achieving a modicum of Achillean immortality.