| The God Particle A key breakthrough of information theory was Claude Shannon's discovery in 1948 that took him beyond Lewis's insight: Dimensional vectors in mathematics do not end with four (three D plus time) or four (three D plus time and directionality) but can be expanded massively without mathematical incoherence. Shannon used multidimensional vector math to calculate the carrier capacity for information networks. Today, the materialist superstition stultifies many endeavors of science. Physics applies ever larger energies to matter in order to find ever smaller particles, until at last, they isolate the least of all, the Higgs boson, and call it God: The God particle. Biologists reduce the human body to merely a mix of physical and chemical elements. Thus, they stultify pharmacology with a random model of discovery by trial and error among astronomical numbers of molecules that they then inject first into rats and then into humans. Economists not only deny creativity to the divine; they also deny it to human beings. Their economic models reduce the human agent to a function of outside forces, essentially a Skinner box of stimuli and responses. Focusing on incentives rather than creativity, many economists are left with a model of capitalism that is driven by greed rather than by aspiration. Across the sciences, however, the recent triumphs of information theory uphold a hierarchical universe. In the greatest mathematical discovery of the 20th century, Kurt Gödel in 1931 proved it in his famous incompleteness theorem. Every logical scheme, even mathematics itself, is necessarily dependent on axioms outside the scheme that cannot be proved within it. Alan Turing and John von Neumann extended this view to the proposition that all computing machines must have outside programmers. No matter how much you know about the material substance of a computer, you cannot grasp what a computer is doing without finding the source code. The computer offers an insuperable obstacle to Darwinian materialism. In a computer, as information theory shows, the content is manifestly independent of its material substrate. No possible knowledge of the computer's materials can yield any information whatsoever about the actual content of its computations. In the usual hierarchy of causation, they reflect the software used to program the device; and, like the design of the computer itself, the software is contrived by human intelligence. Salient in virtually every technical field — from quantum theory and molecular biology to computer science and economics — is an increasing concern with the word. It passes by many names: logos, logic, bits, bytes, quantum qubits, mathematical functions, software, knowledge, syntax, semantics, code, plan, program, design, algorithm, as well as the ubiquitous "information." In every case, the information is independent of its physical embodiment or carrier. Today's Prophecy This reality expresses a key insight of Francis Crick, the Nobel laureate and co-author of the discovery of DNA. Crick's "Central Dogma" of molecular biology shows that influence can flow from the DNA word to the protein flesh, but not from proteins to DNA. By asserting that the DNA message precedes and regulates the form of the proteins, and that proteins cannot specify a DNA program, Crick's Central Dogma unintentionally recapitulates St. John's assertion of the primacy of the word over the flesh. Similarly, you cannot understand mind by pondering physics and chemistry; you need the source codes of DNA and the cosmos. You cannot understand economics without explaining entrepreneurial creativity. To grasp reality, you have to look up rather than down. You have to aspire rather than despair or deny. You have to seek singularities rather than average them to banalities. You cannot find anything new from an old place. You cannot have an assured path to the future by surveying the landscape in front of you. You cannot find safety in numbers or even in big data. In order to transcend the grip of the past and its entropic deterioration, you have to "leap before you look." In some sense, all investment must grasp this reality. So, as we explore biotech in this current contingency, we must understand it as the epitome of all the other information sciences we follow. Regards, 
George Gilder
Editor, Gilder's Daily Prophecy | 
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