Louisville Process Theology Network

Information is the Magic Glue

Oct 16, 2009

From Page 250:


?“In societies, in organisms, in cells, the magic glue is information. Information is what synchronizes the parts of the whole and keeps them in touch with each other as they collectively resist disruption and decay. Information is what allows life to defy the spirit (though not the letter) of the second law of thermodynamics (entropy).

Information marshals the energy needed to build and replenish the structures that the entropic currents of time tirelessly erode. And this information is not some mysterious ?‘force,?’ but rather, physical stuff ?– the patterned sound waves that my vocal chords send your ear, the firing of neurons in the brain, the hormones that regulate blood sugar, and the cyclic AMP molecule in a bacterium.

Information is a structured form of matter or energy whose generic function is to sustain and protect structure. It is what directs matter and energy to where they are needed; and in so doing brushes entropy aside, so that order can grow locally even as it declines universally ?– so that life can exist.

Ever since the primordial ooze, information technology has stayed at the center of the story. From DNA to the brain to the Internet, information processors keep spawning bigger information processors, and being subsumed by them. Life keeps violating the spirit of the second law (entropy) on a grander and grander scale.?”