In March 2006, Discover Magazine did an article on the recognition that all life comes from the function of viruses.(Unintelligent Design) This led them to an unflattering statement about the idea of God:
In fact, they are wrong. I had argued this very idea about viruses twenty six years before, in college class with my biology professor. It is the utter simplicity of these replicating genetic “morons” that demonstrate a mind at work, from all levels of biology, up to civilizational development.
As I have been exploring the history of Jews in developing civilizations, I have shown, via the history of Max DiMonts work, that the Jews have played a central role in the development and “complexity” of civilizations, from Egypt to the present days. The pattern in basic terms is also discussed by physicist Paul Davies:
“Simple patterns are logically shallow, because they may be generated rapidly by short and simple programs(such as viruses). Random patterns are also shallow, because their minimum program is, by definition, not much shorter than the pattern itself, so again, the program is very short and simple: it need only say something like ‘print pattern’. But highly organized patterns are logically deep, because they require that many complicated steps be performed in generating them”.
From simplicity to complexity, from “print pattern”, to complex levels of redundant organization at many levels. Continuing with Davies’ statement:
“One obvious application of logical depth is to biological systems, which provide the most conspicuous examples of organized complexity. A living organism has great logical depth, because it could not plausibly have originated except through a very long and complicated chain of evolutionary processes…. The essence of Life’s complexity(in cellular automata) lies not with the rules, but with their repeated usage. The computer has to work very hard again and again before it can generate deeply complex patterns from simple initial states”.
The complexity generated develops from the immune system, which, as Dr. Sharon Moalem stated, depends on a tremendous degree of diversity and information to generate adaptive processes of behavior. While the virus as a parasite enters the organism with simple instructions as “print pattern”, it links with the cell nucleus in a com binatorial pattern of viral DNA and cell DNA to create a “blueprint” of RNA which is then multiplied throughout the organism, providing the immune system with necessary information for adaptive change.
Davies has provided us with the basic model in terms of “computerese” in dealing with the redundant functions of life generating more complex and adaptive life. But he has shown much the same pattern with developing civilizations, since the Jews have, through the centuries, served the same purpose of cut and paste of civilizational DNA with their own DNA.
The pattern is quite similar. The Jews, with their application of Torah, which is not to be violated nor questioned, developed a “RNA” code for adaptive re-construction of interrelations with other nations. This “RNA” was then used to develop more integrative processes by which nations could operate in greater security and extend trade. In doing so, the Jews, with their alphabetic text, competed with Babylon, having its own simple text, and then used that alphabetic “code” to generate new “code” for integrative functions, keeping their own private “DNA code” untouched by canonizing it and allowing no other entries. It merely became a reference point from which all other integrative decision s would be made, based on the “RNA” of Mishna, Gemara, and Talmud.
In terms of Davies’ statement, with the appearance of Hillel, the combination of Mishna and Gemara had become “random” because there wass no no system by which it could be “algorithmically compressed”. Hillel’s Seven Rules claimed to present this compression, allowing a process of “filtering” by which the Torah could be reconciled with the increasing confusion of Mishna and Torah.
In iological systems, living organisms, the immune system has established its own form of “Torah” by developing replicative “print pattern” commands derived from the genes. By interacting with its surrounding environment(as the Jews did when enslaved by Babylon), the organism must find ways to incorporate relative DNA with it’s own imperative of replication. The virus serves this purpose by introducing DNA from the environment which is then incorporated into the organism, which identifies , neutralizes, and incorporates into its own adaptive processes.
The intelligence of the organism is enhanced because it has now developed a larger “library” or ‘database” of reactions to its environment. These are stored in the form of antibodies, or “junk DNA”, which is later tapped for viral DNA that has itself evolved due to its “cut and paste’ nature.
For Jews, the “junk DNA” consisted of decisions and legislation developed in adaptation to the civilizational “DNA” of other nations, but is weakness was that it could find no way to “compress” the codes and data into a meaningful system that increased its own adaptive intelligence as a race/species/civilization. Hillel offered that process by which different systems were analyzed for similarities and analogous patterns. A civilizational form of RNA.
The difference being that an organism stores in its own body the “memory” by means of antibodies and junk DNA. For Jews, this information was stored externally in a code called the Talmud.
A DiMont pointed out, and shown last essay, with each adaptive process, the Jews introduced new “scriptwriters(codewriters)” who took whole patches of Mishna and Gemara, formed a more adaptive Talmud, and became “judges” over a kind of international, calling themselves “Gaon”. As we also saw, this process evolved into the more familiar concept of laws we see today, involving “due process(Maimonides, also cited by SCOTUS in ‘Miranda v Arizona’)”. We also saw that the Council of Mainz created the idea of privacy consistent with the Fourth Amendment , and copyright law, which came later. This occurred long before Magna Carta.
All this can be explained in terms of a simple process whose only function is to replicate and “print pattern, being forced to integrate all commands into other “print pattern” commands, and deriving greater redundant complexity from the process.
Since Hillel influenced the Pharisees of his day by declaring that the civilizational “message” could be reduced using Hillel’s Seven Rules, Jesus came along, as did Paul, and declared that such reduction, such “compression”, was impossible for the human mind(Romans 8:7 , Matthew 24:23). While “God’s laws’ served as guideposts, there was no way to shorten all human experience and behavior into those laws, such that they could be reduced to one algorithmic function that explained all related systems. In fact, the laws were never intended to generate such regimented regularity or unity, but were, in fact, intended to produce the very diversity and speciation of systems they produce today(Matthew 10:34-38).
The Pharisees, with their need for control of the intellectual process, were “shutting up the kingdom of God to men(Luke 11:52, Matthew 23:13)”. The whole point of such diversity generation is to allow each and every person the right of exploration of such avenues for him/her self. That is, each person develops as a kind of “scale model” of the system in its entirety, as a cell becomes the “container’ of all necessary information to re-generate an organism. Such knowledge is not “compressible” to a single body of collective human thought.
This process is described by DiMont, after the Jews had developed international influence in law via the Gaons, the Jews were being “squeezed” from the Islamic “Renaissance” into feudal Europe:
“As they filtered into Western Europe they infused the European Jews, as they had the Spanish Jews, with a new intellectual awareness. Within a century of their arrival, a coalition between the cultures of the Sephardic(Oriental and Spanish Jews) and the Ashkenazi(European Jews) would re volutionize European Jewish life….History was handing the Jews of Europe the scepter of Jewish destiny.”
DiMont points to the evolution of Jewish history by comparing it to stages of development , from a “Greek predestination drama” with God as author, to the seco nd stage as “French existentialist” with the Jew himself as author, to the combined force of Sephardic and Ashkenazi Jew. The Jews, wrote DiMont, deliberately chose to write their own “script”, and retroactively attributing it to divine authority.
In fact, the Jews of that period had become accustomed to a re-write of the “RNA” of their adaptive code, the Talmud, and they would do so yet again, leading into the formation of ‘common law” concepts that would be later adopted in England.
“…the European Talmudists had to perform a new function. Jewish history has unerringly chosen the right name for them, the Poskim, the “Decision Makers”. With the scalpel of ‘codification these skilled grammatical surgeons deftly removed those parts of the Talmud no longer needed, and with the clamps of ‘commentaries’ they transplanted into the Talmud the new ideas needed for survival….these two innovations(codification and commentary) were originally by-products of Gaonic genius….In the way the unknown ‘Stonehenge’ people erected alters in their path of conquest across North Africa to England in the tenth century, B.C., so the Jews founded academies in the path of their flight across North Africa to Europe in the tenth century, A.D.”
This may be compared to a kind of “metastasis” in an organism, but in fact it was integrative, a process in which the acted as a type of informing “virus” rather than a non-integrative process by which a cell follows its own replicative algorithm, producing “shallow logic”. In fact, we can compare the developments of mass Christianity today as a form of “shallow logic’ with “regimented replication” to the “deep logic” process by which systems integrate at ever more complexity and redundancy in a form of recursion.
Christianity as we know it today has become cancerous because it focuses on the non-intellectual formation of “shallow logic” which consists only of replication and “conversion” without regard to changing factors, actually destroying the complexity of knowledge necessary for the deeper complexity of life processes, as in cellular automata. This conforms to the description of violence given by Erich Fromm in Escape From Freedom:
“…the amount of destructiveness to be found in individuals is
proportionate to the amount to which expansiveness of life is
curtailed.”
The attempt to reduce, or to “algorithmically compress” all life’s
meanings to a singular prescription, contributes to the destruction of
the “expansiveness of life”. I will explore this idea next.
