Intelligence, War, And The Immune System

“High tech neural nets are hordes of individual electronic switchpoints wired in a complex mesh. The network linking the switches together has an unusual property. It can beef up or turn down the number of connections and amount of energy channeled to any switch points i n the grid. An immune system is a team of free agents on a far, far grander scale. It contains between ten million and ten million different antibody types. In addition it possesses a flood of entities known as ‘individual virus specific T cells’…Agents which contribute successfully to the solution of a problem are snowed with resources and influence. But woe to those unable to assist the group….Both T cells and neural network nodes compete for the right to commandeer the resources in which they abide. And both show a seeming ‘willingness’ to live by the rules which dictate self-denial. This combination of competition and selflessness and turns an agglomeration of electronic or biological components into a learning machine with a quandary-solving power vastly beyond that of any individual module it may contain”. (Howard Bloom, The Global Brain)

So, we have a learning machine based on what “works” statistically, composed of modules(T cells) that are “willing” to sacrifice themselves for the good of the cause. This is the “machine-like response” that make war such a rapid feedack mechanism for social organisms. And, you will notice, it is driven by the immune system.

As I pointed out earlier, the “intelligence” of the immune system is enhanced by rewarding those T cells that “win”, and it stores antibodies produced from this technique, making “war” its basis for selection, survival and learning. Dr. Sharon Moalem writes that our bodies are host to ten times as many foreign microbial cells as mammalian cells. We are merely “conduits” of evolutionary change, not “terminals”. We are a biological information system that “steps up” responses in situations in which we and our genes are affected by the environment so the immune system is the model for the neural net that would become the brain.

This leads us back to the idea of “meaning’ as described by the philosopher Antony Flew.

“If you make a claim, it is meaningful only if it excludes certain things….But if contradictory phenomena and associated qualifications keep multiplying, then the claim itself becomes suspect”.

Here we have the link between “meaning” in the philosophical sense, and “meanng” in the sense of the genes and immune system. Both our brains and our immune system can harbor competing and contradictory ideas or microbes, but it can quickly bring the command of the database available in order to make a decision, and that decision will seek the elimination of contradictory “data” that challenges the existence of both the idea and the organism.

If we assume, as Dawkins did, that the “meme” is an extension of ideas competing for survival in our brains, then the brain must act constantly and selectively to eliminating competitive or competitive or conflicting data , just like the immune system. As we saw earlier, the developing infant’s brain is randomly “seeded’ with “jumping genes’ which are nothing more than viruses which have been stored as DNA bits, to make each brain uniquely adaptive in its responses. The neural net of the brain, however, develops “patterns” of response over time between certain synaptic connections, that cause it to function in a way that will shape the processes and patterns of thought for a lifetime.

As Dr Moalem points out in Survival Of The Sickest:

“Even sexual attraction has a connection to disease. Why is the scent of someone you find sexually attractive so alluring? It’s often a sign that you have dissimilar immune systems, which will give your children wider immunity than either of their parents”.

This dissimilarity in immune systems may explain why there is so much “make-up” sex in marriage, or even why women seem most determined to protect themselves from men to whom they actually feel attracted. At the lower levels, the immune system is forcing choice on both, with male proving “value’ to the female. “Battle of the sexes” indeed!

War and sex, in the “learning machine” of the “superorganism” becomes the fastest model of evolution , and technologies become extensions of those various competing models, or as McLuhan has written:

“All wars are fought with the latest technologies…In his Education Automation, R. Buckminster Fuller considers that weaponry has been a source of technological advance for mankind because it requires continually improved performance with ever smaller means…It is this trend toward more and more power with less and less hardware that is characteristic of the electric age of information.”

In a high tech communications technology, war is fought with information and communications, with emphasis on “deception” and manipulation, not unlike the methods used by staph infections that seek to emulate part of the “self” in order to gain a foothold in producing them selves, using our own bodies as the “manufacturer”. In fact, that was the essence of the “Cold War” of the sixties, with emphasis on new ways to use propaganda to influence other governments that “we” are really the “good guys”.

McLuhan points out:

“The ‘hot’ wars of the past used weapons that knocked off the enemy, one by one. Even ideological warfare in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries proceeded by persuading individuals to adopt new points of view, one at a time(as Libertarians claim to do today). Electric persuasion by photo and movie and TV works, instead, by dunking entire populations in new imagery.”

The meaning of a message, wrote Kenneth Boulding, is the change it produces in the image. The image is much easier to change than the internal workings of biological systems, but those same biological systems are already “programmed’ to work collectively, according to the “corporate image”, which brings us again to Hoffer’s statement in The True Believer. Even though the content of movements, cults , and holy causes are different, wrote Hoffer, they all have a uniformity that drives them to seek unity with others. While the content of all holy causes is different, the underlying cause that compel men to die for them, said Hoffer, may be the same thing.

That “same thing” is the collective driving force of the “learning machine” that works to statistically select the most successful processes of survival, and the most successful processes compete among themselves in war to see which one the “learning machine” selects.

This brings us to that interesting and unique focal point in history, when the Jews, scattered around the world in the Diaspora, became the integrative “learning machines” that quickly “cut and pasted’ among various cultures and developed their own symbol system of legislation and commerce that would link nations together economically. If wars accelerated technology and provided evolution with shortcuts, it was the Jews themselves, acting as a kind of “civilizational virus”, that accelerated the process of linking by trade and commerce, along with growing legislation, “code”, that could be gradually reduced to the same standard language.

But if the Jews were becoming the universal system that connected different cultures in economic systems, it was the Pharisees who began to represent themselves as the able representatives of that socioeconomic system.

In fact, at the culmination of the four empires, ending with Rome , the “learning machine” reached a fork in the road. Numerous cultures came together, educated by the various philosophies of different empires. The Jews, scattered around the world, came back to Jerusalem to forge these ideas into a new synthesis, but they had to find a method employing reason and logic that would suit the needs of the emergent concepts of Greek logic, reason, and philosophy. The man to do this was known as rabbi Hillel