(with contributions by Alexis Clancy)

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1. Inspiration in the work of Walter M. Elsasser

Towards a Truly Scientific Biology

In a great book in the budding field of Holistic Biology (Reflections on a Theory of Organisms: Holism in Biology), Walter M. Elsasser argues that the task of elaborating a truly scientific biology still lies ahead of us. Physics and chemistry, in their current states of knowledge, are truly scientific, according to Elsasser. Physics, for example, reached scientific status with the unfolding of the twentieth-century theoretical systems of quantum mechanics and relativity. Biology, on the other hand – molecular, evolutionary and genetic biology – is not scientific. It is reductionist. Current biological paradigms reduce our understanding of the living organism to a combinatorial model or formula such as the genetic code. But the genetic message is only a symbol of the complete reproductive process. “The message of the genetic code,” writes Elsasser, “does not amount to a complete and exhaustive information sequence that would be sufficient to reconstruct the new organism on the basis of coded data alone.” Based on this, we place into question the very concept of data.

The Cartesian Method vs. Complementarity

This reductionism on the part of biologists corresponds to the computational paradigm of binary or digital computing that has been available to us in the twentieth century. It is almost as if the biologists decided, since this is the limit of the computing power that we have, we will devise a biology that functions within the restrictions of what we can compute. It is the question of how do we deal with complexity. Within the existing or dominant computing paradigm, in order to deal with a complex problem, we break down the problem into smaller, more manageable parts. This is essentially the Cartesian Method. But it is impossible to apply the Cartesian Method to quantum-mechanical generalized complementarities like the wave-particle duality or the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle. Whereas the Cartesian method may work for mechanical systems, it cannot be of much use when we aspire to the understanding or creation of something that is living. The more correct approach that would correspond to a breakthrough into twenty-first century science would be to identify relationships of similarity, to find samples or patterns that capture something of the vitality and complexity of the whole without breaking it down in a reductionist way.

Holistic Information is Real

We need a Holistic Biology where we consider the living organism in its true complexity. The structural complexity of even a single living cell is ‘transcomputational’. Elsasser writes that the computational problem of really scientifically grasping a living organism (or organic structure) is a problem of unfathomable complexity. The single living cell is involved in a network of relationships with all life on the planet, with the planet itself, and with the history of life. The individual member of a species decodes in real-time, as it faces each new circumstance, its species-memory. It creatively retrieves this species-memory through a process of information transfer that is effectively ‘invisible’, and does not take place via any intermediate storage or transmission media. Holistic information transfer happens over space and time, “without there being any intervening medium or process that carries the information.” Whereas the genetic code is memory considered as ‘homogeneous replication’, holistic memory is one of ‘heterogeneous reproduction’.

Birth of a New Machine

Although Elsasser’s book is ostensibly about Holistic Biology, I read it as being a blueprint for Computer Science 2.0. Starting from Elsasser’s ideas about the living organism considered as an information system, and his reflections on how this information system actually works in the living being, we develop the design and construction of a new kind of computer. What we are in fact concerned with is a new kind of software system. At this early stage of the work, it does not yet have anything to do with hardware. But I find it reasonable to speak about this new kind of software system as being a new kind of computer.

Identities and Differences Make Static Software

One of our basic insights is that currently existing software is based on a logic of discrete identities and discrete differences. Given this logic, the instantiated software object remains essentially static. The properties of the software object are given to it at the time of its inception or its “construction” as object. Its blueprint or definition lies within the software classes which provide it with its finite number of states (as represented, for example, in the graphical artefact of the state machine diagram), and a definite identity and definite properties. This produces an essentially static system. There is no real dimension of time. The linearity of time is the mere playing out of something static. The software object stays what it is throughout its lifetime, until the programmer deletes it, or the system shuts it or itself down.

An Insight from Marxist Theory

In existing software systems, the software object is considered as a thing – it is the “dead” object of manipulation of an industrial process. There takes place an industrial “handling” of the software object. This insight into what existing software systems actually boil down to in their treatment of the software object comes from a familiarity with Marxist theory (and Weberian sociology). In his great book entitled History and Class Consciousness, the Hungarian Marxist philosopher Gyorgy Lukacs said that the essence of modern society (i.e., what Lukacs called “capitalism” – a nomenclature that, by the way, we do not accept) is a continual procedure of the transformation of living relationships into things. Lukacs called this process reification (or thing-ification). Paradoxically, it also does not really matter so much what Lukacs said. What matters is that what Lukacs said corresponds to the historical and contemporary social reality.

Software That Is Alive

Instead of the software object considered as a thing (the basic principle of existing software systems), we will consider the software object as being alive. We will design a new computer based not on mechanistic principles, but on the principles of life, of the living being, the living organism. Elsasser’s book on how biology really functions as an information system provides our blueprint and our inspiration. It is of the utmost importance that Elsasser was primarily a theoretical physicist, a quantum physicist. He spent the last 20 years of his life working on questions and problems of biology, and he brought his deep knowledge of quantum physics to that research. It is within quantum physics that we find the idea of a vast number of states of information which are potentialities, not yet “actualized realities,” and which have a relationship of similarity to each other.

This is an Interdisciplinary Project

The building of the “quantum/real world software system with similarity-based dynamic objects” is an interdisciplinary project. Elsasser describes the information system of life as a quantum-biological system. Our system will be quantum-biological, and it will also many other things. The creation of a system of similarites will require ideas from physics, biology, brain science, philosophy, psychology, linguistics, mathematics, etc. For example, we will we speak of a Gestalt of information, taking this concept from Gestalt psychology and Gestalt therapy. We will contrast chaos to Gestalt, not chaos to order.

It really does not matter that the ideas originated historically in what were called separate disciplines of knowledge. Those separated disciplines should be regarded as the pre-history of the knowledge that is now available to us. The advanced ideas from each of these disciplines are, for us, ideas. They belong to the history of ideas as a whole. We will apply the entire history of ideas to the birth of the new machine.

2. Four Components of the New Computer

a)   The “Quantum Reservoir” of Non-Observable Information

· How Does Similarity Work?

We want to go deeper and deeper into the understanding of how similarity works. There are many philosophical texts which will help us here. An example is Foucault’s The Archeology of Knowledge. Thinkers like Foucault, Derrida, Wittgenstein… they were information theorists without a computer, before the time of computers. Similarities is how the reality of the universe in fact really works. We are simply looking for thinkers in all academic fields who had insights into that reality (as opposed to the combinatorial reduction on which existing computers are based).

· Quantum Classes

What we want in the “Quantum Reservoir” is a special sort of blueprint. We want an immensely vast number of classes which are similar to each other in very subtle ways. We don’t want discrete identities and differences. That is a reductionist framework which was imposed upon the reality of the world by combinatorial computer science in order to get something functional up and running. That is our past history. We know from quantum physics that there are really many more states than these discrete identities-differences. The subtle similarities among the states are so vast because it is a vast world of potentialities which have not yet been “actualized” in the jump-over to “real-world” decisional states. The number of classes will be vast. They resonate with each other, as in music. They have similarity and analogy. They are invisible to the observer. They have no identity and we cannot look at them.

· In a Way, Quantum is an Idea, Not a Science

The physicists tend to think that they own the science of the quantum, that quantum equates to quantum physics. In a way the physicists are right, and in a way they are wrong. There are several sides to the question. One or another aspect of the question can be emphasized, depending up what our goals are in the given context. For right now, we wish to say this: the physicists are fond of saying that quantum physics is a correct description of reality (the most correct that we have). That is absurd. Reality is obviously a concept that precedes the advent of quantum physics, so how can it still be valid since quantum physics shook up everything? (The physicist Hans-Peter Dürr tries to “save reality” by distinguishing between the German terms Realität and Wirklichkeit, but we find that to be a weak defense). Reality is not entirely irrelevant (Baudrillard might say that reality is totally irrelevant, but we are not Baudrillard). In our view, reality has been relegated to the status of an earlier epistemological trope, one that still has some force (past history is always around as a component of the present), but whose force has been greatly reduced by its ever-diminishing half-life.

If one has not read Baudrillard and taken him seriously, then one is not qualified to speak scientifically about “reality.”

Taken out of its ordinary context of applied statistical physics, and sent out into the general field of interdisciplinary knowledge, the quantum is really an idea. It is a concept. Anyone can make use of it. As such, we will make use of it in computer science. A quantum informational system, designed by us. We simply need the idea and the design. This is a computer science and science fictional approach. A science fictional approach is indeed the correct methodology. If you build it, they will come. (Kevin Costner, Field of Dreams)

Previously (in “A Proposal for Developing Quantum Computing in Software”), I wrote about the “non-destructive space of observation.” By this term I meant a state of consciousness, reached through meditation, that is a part of quantum “reality.” It is a special subjective space available to the “quantum observer”. It corresponds to the “objective reality” of what is “there” that we call the quantum physical nature of “reality”. But this is a double-edged sword. We can just as easily strip the quantum of its prestigious “objective” status in physics, and appropriate it as a useful concept for computer science design. The software system is quantum because we conceptualize, design and implement it as quantum.

· Representing the Unrepresentable

This “unrepresentable” information must be represented. Yet in a write-only way! Reading the information will be crucial as well, but it will require a new, special kind of reading. It is read only in order to no longer be what it is. In the act of reading, the information is transformed from its own quantum state into the domain of real-world usefulness.

The number of states within the quantum informational reservoir or container is very vast. But it would be a mistake to call it infinite. Here we are in a realm beyond traditional mathematics, beyond concepts like finite and infinite, beyond their binary opposition. We are involved with a more complex and paradoxical topology. This is the applied task that awaits Alexis Clancy’s new mathematics: to make a correct description of the quantum informational space. Note how one of the main and recurring themes of Elsasser’s book is the question of the scientific status of creativity. Elsasser speaks of a principle of creative selection in biology. We know what creativity is in the way that this term is used in ordinary language: the creativity of the artist, of the poet. Something like creativity happens in the biology of the living organism: we must grasp that creativity as a scientific concept. What makes this creativity scientific is repetition, the repeatability of scientific experiments. The poet knows how to describe the indescribable. The concept of the description of information belongs to computer science. This is the task awaiting our new mathematics (and linguistics).

Note here a certain analogy with some of the basic questions of Holocaust Studies. Can the Jewish artist with the proper relationship to the Holocaust, like Claude Lanzmann, represent the unrepresentable?

- We must have a correct (post-quantum) mathematical description of this informational space.

- We must be able to write the code of the Generator-Transformer of the quantum representation of application-specific non-quantum information. Perhaps this code will be written in the new programming language Scala.

- We must specify the format of the input information to be prepared in the specific application domain.

- We must be able to write the code of the Instantiation Technique.

It is clear that a certain linguistics science is also going to be very important in defining the protected format of the quantum information. The realm of similarities not identities in language is the poetic dimension of language, the (often) cross-language nearly-endless signifying-signified chains of words that were studied in a certain tradition of Continental semiotics which culminated in Derrida’s book Of Grammatology. “Le monde, la douleur, la terre, la mère, les hommes, le désert, l’honneur, la misère, l’été, la mer, [le silence].“ (Albert Camus). I believe that Marc Silver’s work on linguistic corpus “databases” is also going to help us here. (Although the word database should become obsolete.)

Until now, only semantics and syntactics as branches of linguistics have been considered by computer science in relation to the question of language understanding. Semiotics and grammatology have not yet been considered by computer science. The area of language understanding in Spoken Dialogue Technology should be one of the most direct applications of the quantum-biological-linguistic reservoir of similarities. More generally, we are also talking about a new kind of database, where information of much greater, “unfathomable” complexity – in contrast to current identity-and-difference-based databases – can be stored. It is a revolution in computer science.

Elsasser speaks of a “ubiquity of creative effects” (154) in the general understanding of biological order. He is interested in the compatability between holism in biology and quantum mechanics. (38) He calls the “holistic memory” of living organisms a conservative machine, not an innovative one. The “more and more subtle” ordering relationships of biological-semiotic life indicate the “conservative character of creativity.” We dream of a computer with holistic information transfer. What is the information stability found in nature? What is the input into a process of creative selection? What is the output from a process of creative selection?

Elsasser formulates the hybrid quantum-biological nature of a computer with holistic information transfer, which he hypothesizes as being an extension of Niels Bohr’s concept of generalized complementarity: “In the scheme proposed here, we assume that two types of order exist in the world in such a way that they never contradict each other. This is, so far as I can perceive it, a novel kind of interrelationship between two different types of order: the laws of quantum mechanics based on a logic of homogeneous classes that, mathematically speaking, rests on an abstract scheme of infinite sets, as compared to the rules of biology which can only be expressed by a logic of heterogeneous and finite classes.” (144)

· The Dimension of Time

I believe that the dimension of time has not yet been truly considered in software systems. All that we have so far is a static model of identities and differences extrapolated onto a abstract-formalistic model of linear-chronological-tic-tock time. Time considered in its true textures and dimensionalities still awaits us as a field of knowledge investigation. Time in a truly dynamical system is very much related to differentiation in language. We need a theory of language and time. Derrida began to develop a theory of language and time in his famous essay on “Differance”. The essay on “Differance” was praised by thousands of academic philosophy and literature professors, but there was never any real scientific follow-up to its groundbreaking insights. “Differance“ means both to differ (in a language signification system) and to defer (in time). It indicates the connection between the poetic dimension of language and the intricate and undiscovered dimensions of time. I have been working on this area long enough to know that the secret to knowledge of the future lies here.

The implementation of differance in software, and the repetitive quality of software, will be the living proof that our approach is scientific, and not some mere manifestation of parapsychology. Here we distinguish ourselves, for example, from the “pataphysics” of Alfred Jarry. Jarry dreamed of a perpetual motion machine, something like a bicycle that would run forever without effort. He never tried to build this machine. He could not, because it is in violation of the laws of physics.

· Within the Quantum Reservoir, the Incompleteness Reservoir

Within the Quantum Reservoir, there is another component: the Incompleteness Reservoir.  The latter is the epistemologically recursive “unseen” in relation to the larger reservoir. Algorithimically, this seen-unseen relationship of container-contained continues on for a while (up to a certain limit, a certain number of iterations of a recurringly “recursive” loop).

An infinite dimension (Hilbert) space is overkill with respect to quantum models. It doesn’t give the quantum model sufficient space to break.  (Explicit) symmetry breaking is implicit as per Gödel’s Second Incompleteness Theorem. No matter how sophisticated the model, there always exists a statement somewhere in the universe that renders a proposition that is unanswerable. It does not compute. It breaks the model.

We want our software model to break. The “accident” (Paul Virilio) plays a completely different role than in Computer Science 1.0. In Computer Science 1.0, we have the semi-absurd and semi-useful activity of “bug-fixing.” In Computer Science 2.0, flaws are part of the design. We design our software to know how to continuously fix itself. This is EVOLUTION. This is CREATIVITY.

There is a Quantum Reservoir. There is an “Incompleteness” Reservoir within the larger component container. The Incompleteness Reservoir has its own physics.  It needs/requires new mathematics in order to describe it. An information description or specification.

The Incompleteness Reservoir is everywhere at once. It is time- and space-independent. It wεaves through Cartesian/Euclidean space, and also through finite dimensional Hilbert Space. As symmetry breaks, the Incompleteness Reservoir provides as many dimensions as are needed to patch the model. As symmetry will always break (in time), it follows that the Incompleteness Reservoir must carry infinite dimensions. Always.

The Incompleteness Reservoir carries within itself the logic of a trans-finite order. Note that that is beyond the binary opposition, the duality, between finite and infinite.

b)  The “Wall” between the Quantum Reservoir and the Real-World Pool of Dynamic Objects

· The Visible and the Invisible

The “Quantum Reservoir” must be protected by a wall of invisibility or non-graspability. Beyond that wall is information that we cannot directly access, the values of which we cannot explicitly set or get.

· Protection of the Reservoir

The quantum informational classes in the Reservoir are protected by a wall of quantum non-observation. Elsasser says: “Living things do not at all employ the engineer’s method of separating information from noise by a vast energy gap.” Classical information theory – like Claude Shannon – is based on this distinction between information and noise. We are interested in a vitally different kind of wall.

c)   The Real-World Pool of Dynamic Objects

· The Centrality of Roles

The object-oriented ontology needs to be radicalized in the direction of Roles and in the direction of the autonomy of objects. The attributes of software classes or software objects are containers of data. The concept of data is a consequence of a subject-centered worldview. Data is reductionist. What we want is a Gestalt of information. An informational field that is the true opposite of chaos, rather than a neurotic-compulsive need for order in the will to precise information.

The existing object-oriented model has no real appreciation of time. A class is a blueprint of an instance, and an instance is culled from classes in one single moment, at construction time. The instance cannot modify itself during the real-time activity of the program, of the software system.

We need a software instance that is in a state of “not knowing.” This makes it alive (almost sort of human). It goes along being alive without being so precisely defined. It picks up its definition in real-time, during the live in-play of the system.

Many roles are available to the instance. The instance is existentially free to “choose” among all these available roles. The system does not define classes, it defines roles. In the current OO model, there is a kind of Sartrean bad faith going on. The object is fixed or pinned down to its identity.

The object should have no identity. Everything that it does is a “performance.” (Judith Butler)

Creative selection occurs from an immense reservoir of possible and admissible states. We need classes where the possibility of life is prepared, and techniques for bringing this potential vitality to actualization, for the real-time lifetime of the dynamic software object.

We need a system where an immense number of possible states is possible, but the switching actions involved are manageable. As Elsasser concludes, the concept of similarity is representative of a somewhat larger cluster of concepts. Holistic memory is the biological phenomenon whereby an organism and an automaton are distinguished from each other. There is a great deal of flexibility in assigning individuals to classes, and a high degree of variability among the individuals of a class.

d)  Programmer Workspace: Programs and Data Specifications

· The Input Program that converts the Class Model to a Quantum Description

There must be a class model where the specific application that is going to be developed is modeled. This model will probably look very conventional – something like UML modeling of classes, attributes, and associations; or the definition of Hibernate classes and records.

There must be a program which converts the class model into a quantum description. We need to generate the quantum software classes without explicitly setting or even seeing them. They will exist in a sort of encrypted way. The mathematics of Alexis Clancy – which is based on the mathematics of Gödel, Schrödinger, and Riemann (to name but a few of many) – will face the challenge of providing us with a correct mathematical description of these quantum-encrypted informational classes. This Generator-Transformer quantizes the input data which we then no longer will be able to directly look at!

· The Output Program that instantiates and/or modifies the Highly Dynamic Sofware Object

There must be a program that instantiates and/or modifies the highly dynamic software object with values and/or information that comes from the “Quantum Reservoir” of Non-Observable Information. The Instantiation from the (quantum-biological) universe of potentialities to the (real-world) universe of actualities is an act of appearance. Non-visible, non-explicitly-setted, analogous-to-each-other-in-subtle- similarities, informational software classes are brought through the “Wall” between the Quantum Reservoir and the Real-World Pool of Dynamic Objects, brought through the “Wall” to visibility, know-ability, and “usefulness.” The object becomes endowed with real-world properties. We speak of an Instantiation Technique, rather than a mechanism (the latter of course now being an obsolete term).

· The Class Model Specification for Input

It will be important to define the class model specification for input.