The universe is constructed from 4 forces and 12 particles. But in another sense, it is made up of 3 “essences”; I don’t know what else to call them, because they are not substances.

The three essences are matter, energy and information. The main attributes of matter are mass and gravity; we used to also say “solidity”, but the view of the atom as mostly empty space made that untenable, and anyhow it never applied to gases. Still, matter is the “coarsest” of the essences, while the others are more and more “ethereal”. Matter is also the most basic, the deepest; the others are “higher”. Seeking the deepest and the highest is not the same thing; they are often at opposite ends, as the spatial metaphor itself suggests.

Energy is the ability to move matter. The definitions in physics on which this rests are: energy is the ability to do work, and work is done when a mass (piece of matter) is moved against a force, e.g. lifted off the ground against the force of gravity. Energy can take on different forms, such as mechanical, heat, electrical, light, and sound.

Information is the ability to move energy. This is a little less obvious, but consider: by knowing which button to push, we can cause 100 tons of TNT to explode, or send electric current through a province-wide network. Information is the most refined essence, and we often identify it with mind; so that our essences embrace both matter and mind, with energy in between. Is materialism or mentalism (idealism) a truer picture of our world? Both are just two different aspects of the same elephant.

The three essences are not entirely separate. Matter and energy are interconvertible with a conversion factor of c2 (as in E = Mc2 ), which is (3.1010)2 or 9.1020 centimeters per second, a very large number. This means that matter is a very concentrated, though relatively inert, form of congealed energy. It is difficult to convert it to active form, but when it is done, it produces prodigious amounts of energy. Matter-energy conversions occur in ordinary chemical reactions, but the mass changes are vanishingly small there, so that we accept the law of conservation of mass (matter) as a very close approximation. Matter-energy conversions become more noticeable in nuclear reactions, where the amounts of energy-mass involved are about 6 orders of magnitude (a million times) greater. Energy can also be converted back into matter, as in electron-positron pair-formation from gamma rays. So the law of conservation of energy (first law of thermodynamics) and the law of conservation of mass (chemistry) are subsumed together in one (perhaps absolutely accurate) law of the conservation of “mattergy”, as the common essence has been called.

Energy and information are also interconvertible. To arrive at the conversion factor, consider what entropy means in thermodynamics (an increase of heat energy divided by absolute temperature) and what it means in statistical molecular mechanics (a measure of the probability of a specific molecular configuration). The relevant proportionality constant at the macro-level (thermodynamics) is the ideal gas constant R. At the micro (molecular) level, it is Boltzmann’s constant k. The ratio R/k is Avogadro’s number (the number of molecules in a liter of ideal gas at standard temperature and pressure). Avogadro’s number is about 6.1023, and I would suggest this as the conversion factor from energy, which acts at the macro-level, to information, which acts at the micro-level. This is an even larger number (by 3 orders of magnitude) than the conversion factor of matter into energy.

If information is felt to be a property of the mental realm in some sense, then the preponderance of matter over mind seems overwhelming; a factor of 9.1020. 6.1023 comes to about 5.1044. But then we remember WHAT MOVES WHAT, and arrive at the concept of the double cybernetic relay.

A relay is an electric circuit in which a small amount of energy (just enough to close and open a switch) moves much larger amounts of energy in a bigger circuit which that switch controls. “Cybernetic” means “steering or directing”. Thus a tiny amount of the common “tri-une” essence (mat-erg-info), e.g. the human will, can move a huge amount of it through the double relay: controlling first the energy by an R/K multiplier and then matter by a c2 multiplier. This gives us the “mind-over-matter” pathway through which we normally operate – not any PSI magic, but ordinary everyday operations.

Yet before we too hastily consider “mat-erg-info” as a single essence, we are stopped by the fact that there is no law of conservation of information. (This is discussed from another angle in the essay on “The Importance of Being Saved” in Section IV.) Information, unlike matter or energy, can be created and destroyed, in everyday experience. Whether or not this is accompanied by minute energy changes is not known, because the amount of energy involved would be so small as to be undetectable. We do know that in heat engines entropy increases when energy is “degraded” to a form less useful for doing work (e.g. from high-temperature heat to low-temperature heat); and in information theory, “information” is identified with “negentropy” (the opposite of entropy). But whether this implies energy-information conversion under an overall conservation law is unknown. Normally we assume that degraded energy does not decrease in amount compared to high-grade energy, only in usefulness.

We were also much too hasty in equating “information” to “mind”. Raw information, in the sense of statistical mechanics and information theory, is only the removal of uncertainty. For example, will the next computer output be a 0 or a 1? This is at first uncertain; and if each is equally probable, then when it happens and one of them is chosen, we gain exactly one “bit” (binary digit) of information. Or if many quadrillions of molecular configurations are possible in a small cube of gas, and one of them materializes, we gain many bits of information, because so many other possibilities were discarded. But “information” in this sense is only “mere negentropy”. To acquire a mental status, it requires another property, namely “meaning”.

Whether the computer prints a 0 or a 1 has no meaning in itself, but it can acquire a meaning if we use it to signal, for example, the absence or presence of enemy military forces in a locality, as a spy would in wartime. (This is called “intelligence” in the sense of militarily useful information.) Or it could signal “0 if by land, 1 if by sea”. Or it could mean male or female, acid or base, metal or non-metal, sunny or cloudy weather – any number of dualities. A binary choice of “heads or tails” on a coin could mean “win or lose” something, ranging from a penny to a kingdom. In a way, we are using the meaningless “mere negentropy” to carry a metaphor of what we are REALLY choosing.

The choice is not always binary. With dice, there is a choice of 1 out of 6; with decimal digits, it is 1 out of 10; with base pairs of DNA, it is 1 out of 4; with musical tones in an octave, it is 1 out of 8; with letters of the English alphabet, it is 1 out of 26; with chemical elements, it is 1 out of about 100. The combinations that can be made from these relatively small numbers in consecutive choice is very great. Even with only a binary choice, even only 10 consecutive choices already give 210 = 1024 possible combinations. So the musical composers are not likely ever to exhaust all possible melodies, or the poets all combinations of letters or words, or the genetic code all possible individualities. With molecules in a gas, the numbers of configurations are large way beyond our imagination, though not truly infinite. Always, by choosing one melody, or one poem, or one genetic code, we gain or create large amounts of information, even as raw “mere” negentropy. The amount of information created is measured by all the combinations that were discarded.

But configurations of molecules in a gas do not have “meaning” for us; we lump together all the ones of equal probability, that’s all. With the assemblies of lesser numbers, like making words and sentences out of letters, or melodies or chords out of musical tones, or genes out of DNA base-pairs, we do assign meanings to particular configurations – or nature does. A particular base sequence (a codon) signifies a particular amino acid to be joined to a growing protein chain (e.g. ATG means methionine). A string of 0s and 1s, like “100”, means to us, in decimal notation, the number one hundred, or in binary notation the number eight. A set of musical tones with frequency ratios of 4/3 and 3/2 means a major triad (do-mi-sol). And so on.

“Mere information” would be ALL the possible combinations of ACTG (the 4 DNA bases) or 26 letters or 8 musical tones, while “meaning” would be possessed only by the viable gene (one coding for a useful protein), a word or sentence that communicates a real concept or thought, or an esthetically pleasing melody or chord. The permutations and combinations are very numerous in both “mere” information and “meaningful” information, but the latter is a subset of the former and much smaller in comparison.

How one passes from “mere information” to meaning is still controversial. The whole debate on Artificial Intelligence (“can computers think?”), featured for example in Scientific American, January 1990, hinges on it. John Searle (with his Chinese Room model) considers the gulf unbridgeable; this is an echo of Descartes’ views on the dualism of body and mind. The Churchlands argue that the leap is possible, and that meaning becomes an “emergent quality” when the computer program is richly complex enough and appropriate.

Language is a skill peculiar to humans. We can also use mathematics to communicate, but only a few of us acquire facility in its use, while all humans without exception use language. There are hundreds of languages, but all share characteristics as meaning-systems or semantic systems. Sign language of the deaf is of course included. All languages are a notch above information-as-mere-negentropy. Now we can further differentiate finer levels of “meaning” within the linguistic medium.

A “good sentence” must pass through successive “sieves” of qualification. First, it must be GRAMMATICAL, in two ways: (a) Lexical, i.e. using only words recognized as belonging to the particular language, and (b) syntactic, i.e. following the rules of syntax – putting the words together correctly.

Secondly, a “good sentence” must pass the SEMANTIC sieve, i.e. it must “make sense”. Not every grammatically correct stringing together of English words (for example) makes sense, as illustrated by examples chosen from my game of Scrabble solitaire. (I look at the words I made and try to make sentences out of adjacent ones. They often ALMOST make sense, but not QUITE.) Hofstadter quotes sentences of similar weird quality in his chapter on artificial intelligence in “Gödel, Escher, Bach”. My examples are: “Lawn elf gnaws the hag’s tame name”, and “If few emu star in toque, their IQ is OK”.

Third in the sequence of tests a sentence must pass is the LOGICAL one. The sentence must satisfy the rules of inference, i.e. rational thought. An example of a sentence that passed the semantic test but not the logical test would be “All computers are machines, therefore this computer is alive”.

The fourth and last test is the truth-value of the sentence. It could be grammatically, semantically and logically correct, and yet state a falsehood. (Our language abounds with such sentences, e.g. in propaganda. We sometimes call this “disinformation”.) An example might be “The laws of thermodynamics have been proved to be incorrect”.

There are similar sieves in other information systems, which successively sub-select ever smaller and more refined subsets from the vast numbers of configurations in “mere information”. It is like the process of refining a precious metal from a coarser ore, sifting gold grains from the river sand. Meaningless sequences are spliced out of RNA made from DNA in transcription, preserving only the true genes. Discords are avoided in music (though some composers have used discords to advantage). However, poets have experimented with breaking the rules of the linguistic sieves, e.g. Lewis Carroll who wrote whole poems made up of invented words. This was also done in children’s books, e.g. “The Owl and the Pussycat” and Dr. Seuss.

Jack Attali writes about another series of “information levels”.

1. Non-significant (mere negentropy).
2. Cybernetic (signal).
3. Semantic (discourse).
4. Relational (humanistic), addressing each other as “Thou” in Buber’s sense.

And then two degraded levels:

1. Symbolic (degenerate relational).
2. Semiologicall (manipulative).

“Information” does not always mean “mere negentropy” to all writers, however. In writing about “stages of learning”, Hayden Roberts, in CPREA Conference paper, Guelph University, 1984, quotes Masuda as outlining the following scale:

1. Data (which comes close to “mere negentropy).
2. Information, obtained by processing, selection and interpretation of data. Some data, considered irrelevant, are discarded at this stage.
3. Knowledge, obtained by further processing and discarding of irrelevant information. Note that these “discarding” steps make learning a sort of a funnel – some information must be destroyed or disregarded in order to gain understanding, to make the patterns stand out free from dross.
4. Intelligence (not necessarily only of the military kind), which is knowledge applied to action. Policy decisions are involved here, but are often “sub-optimized”, e.g. by benefitting only one-self or a narrow circle rather than everyone (ignoring equity), or going for short-range rather than long-range benefit (ignoring sustainability).
5. Wisdom, which is knowledge/intelligence related to moral purpose (such as equity and sustainability), aiming at true optimization of decision-making.

We have gone a long way indeed from physical quantitites like matter and energy, to explore mainly mental qualities like meaning and intelligence. But the double relay still operates, and unless our decisions are wise, our language logical and rational, and truthful and unless certain redundant baggage is discarded, the energy may be degraded and the material balances of this world adversely affected.