difesa del Tao - I

Defenses of Faith

A second group of examples of noncommunication or unknowing will move us somewhat closer to the more clearly biological. These examples are necessarily very different from those I have already offered, but I believe the issues to be formally comparable.
It is seemingly a general truth in biology that the body that is adjusting itself to the stresses and vicissitudes of experience shall not communicate with the DNA, the carrier of genetic instructions for the next generation. No news of the body‘s adjustments shall be registered in the DNA to affect the offspring. In the old phrase, there shall be no inheritance of acquired characteristics.
Similarly, it is apparently necessary that we have no knowledge of the processes by which in our perception images are formed.
Can these two very different prohibitions on the transmission of information be compared to each other? And can they be compared to the kinds of necessary noncommunication discussed in the previous chapter?
I maintain that if there were communications across the so-called Weismannian barrier, the whole process of evolution would break down. Similarly, if we were aware of the processes whereby we form mental images, we would no longer be able to trust them as a basis for action. They say the centipede always knew how to walk until somebody asked it which leg it would move first.
In chapter 7 I showed that there are messages in human affairs (descriptions, news, injunctions, premises, and propositions of many sorts) that had better not be communicated to certain parts of certain systems. But this has been indicated in only the most general way. I have not stopped to define the formal characteristics of such messages nor under what circumstances these messages become pathogenic; nor have I explored the application of this notion to other kinds of systems, such as organisms or populations.
If we think of information as travelling in a network of trains of cause and effect, does it then become possible for us to describe in some formal way how any given message is located in the network and thence to identify which (even ―true‖) messages should not - for the sake of the whole system – be located where?
I will focus on cases where the pathogenic process – the blockage or confusion – is not due to a local effect of the message alone, but is a result of relationship between the message and the total system that is its overall context. Thus, I exclude as trivial those cases in which the disaster or pathology induced by successful communication falls only in a part of the system. Often A will not tell B a given truth because telling will hurt either A or B. We protect our own and each other‘s feelings, and we may sometimes be wise to do so. There are, of course, people who see it as almost a duty to communicate information that will give pain; and sometimes such people have wisdom on their side. I am not concerned here to judge these cases, except to note that these people form a subspecies of those who rush in where angels fear to tread. I am here concerned only with the formal characteristics of sequences in which damage to the system (A plus B) results from the message and/or its communication.
The asking of this question generates a maze of complex considerations. First come the tangles of the relationship between prior state, new information, and outcome within (B), the part of the system that receives the new information, but those tangles are only the beginning of the matter. After that come the complexities of the relationship between the recipient part (B) and the communicator (A). For instance, one might ask of a personal relationship, what was the context of a communication, what was the message conveyed, and what sidelights did the message and its communication throw upon the relationship between the persons? If we ignore the relatively simple problems of tact and protection of the pride or self-image of either person individually, we still face the problems of integration in the relationship.
Suppose that someone had advised the Ancient Mariner to take a voyage to the South Seas, there to search for sea snakes that he might bless them (but not ― unaware!), surely no Albatross would have fallen from his neck! The possibility of change from his disintegrate state of self-reproach to a state of integration would have been precluded by the conscious knowledge of the injunction to follow a recipe.