What are things made of? Inquiring minds want to know. Most of us, as curious children or puzzled adults, feel the need to peek beneath the surface of the world and inquire about the basic building blocks of our reality. (My son was once convinced that everything is made out of Lego.) So what is it that fundamentally structures creation? Cells? Molecules? Atoms? Electrons? Quarks? Vibrating Strings?

When we take the elevator all the way down to the smallest scales of the microcosmic realm, we encounter something quite unexpected. Rather than uncovering more solid stuff, we run up against an uncanny labyrinth of information. At the bottom, our universe is now recognized by science to be more like a ‘thought’ than anything else. In so much as that ‘thought’ is expressing itself—physical processes being akin to the universe talking to itself—the emerging world is comprised of this information which, as it gets more complex, forms higher-order phenomena such as atoms and cells. Moreover, we can treat this information like a language that we can learn to read, write, edit, and even reprogram.

Nowhere is this more evident than with a scanning tunneling microscope. While the principal job for which it was designed was to see what’s there at the atomic scale (this is no easy task inasmuch as atoms are smaller than visible light waves can detect and as a consequence the device functions by feeling its way along the surfaces of its object—seeing with touch like a blind person reading brail), it also managed another equally important feat. As the major tool of the trade, the scanning tunneling microscope is able to write as it reads. With stunning atomic precision, individual atoms may be placed into virtually any configuration one wishes.

Some versions of this instrument have even been modified into freakish atomic typewriters. The landmark achievement that first demonstrated this level of matter manipulation was in 1989 when Donald M. Eigler, a physicist working for IBM, managed to spell out the letters I-B-M with 35 individual xenon atoms.

The big news is that we have always lived in a digital universe. Far from being a mere modern-day invention—the handiwork of scientists fabricating with code and computers that turn everyday things into a new, dematerialized digital format—creation itself has always been about information. While science has only recently recognized this, from ancient times, the kabbalists have maintained that the nature of space, time, matter, and energy boil down to the even more fundamental phenomenon of information.

Furthermore, this information is structured digitally.

One of the earliest texts of Kabbalah is Sefer Yetzirah, The Book of Formation. Tradition places this text back as far as Abraham, from whom it was passed in oral form until reportedly being redacted by the great Talmudic sage Rabbi Akiva. By all accounts, this work hails from a past era that at first glance seemed to be ignorant of the information age of today. Yet, I would submit that the secrets of creation transmitted in this work make amongst the first, if not the first, text on information theory.

Jewish mystical teachings have always emphasized the notion that Divine speech engenders new realities. From the Genesis narrative, we find God saying ‘Let there be light’ and ‘There was light’. Creation through a series of speech-acts becomes the source of a multitude of reflections on the nature of language as the language of nature. For the rabbis of old, God made the universe using the Hebrew letters.

In a more nuanced fashion, the opening of Sefer Yetzirah (1:1) contends that everything was brought into existence “with 32 mystical paths of wisdom”. Wisdom or chochmah is understood in Kabbalah to refer to the seminal insight of the mind. In particular, it is associated with the ‘father’ dimension of the intellect. The term ‘father’ here possesses a similar connotation to that of the Latin word pater from which derives the word “pattern”. Similarly, chochmah/wisdom may be regarded as an abstract pattern of information. Thus, the expression in Psalms (104:24): “…You made them all with wisdom…” can be given a revised translation and rendered as “you made them all with information” as the intelligibility of everything is at its heart information.

Why 32? Sefer Yetzirah and its dozens of associate commentaries go on to itemize the 32 paths relating them to the 32 appearances of the name of Elokim (which refers to God enclothed within nature) in the account of creation given in the first chapter of Genesis. This suggests that the natural world is primarily structured in terms of these 32 paths which will prove to be defining of the overall character of the ‘installed’ universe.

Taking it a step further, these 32 break down into two subcategories which act as the two basic modalities of language: the 22 Hebrew letters and the 10 digits from 0 to 9. As kernels of semantic meaning, the 22 Hebrew letters are analogous to the objects they form. Packaged together in proper combination, we can see how the letters give rise to various entities or phenomena in creation much like the base pairs of DNA act as letters coding for a given organism. Beyond the organic, letters also represent the building blocks of the inorganic. There is a code for every rock or mineral. Even exchanges of energy and the morphing of space-time communicate something that may be depicted as a language.

This language, according to the teachings of Sefer Yetzirah, may be further compressed and rendered digital. The 22 letters reduce to 10 numbers. At its core, all of creation is digital!

Sefer Yetzirah (1:3) even explains the digital universe in binary terms:

…in the number of ten fingers, five opposite five, with a singular covenant precisely in the middle in the circumcision of the tongue and in the circumcision of the membrum (of the procreative organ).

Needless to say, this is a cryptic text. Why relate the numbers 0 through 9 in this way? For starters let us consider that the word “digital” comes from “digit” which in Latin means a finger. 10 fingers give us 10 digits. Yet these 10 are organized into two groups—a right hand and a left hand with five fingers each. This is tantamount to polarizing numbers into odd versus even types. There are only two alternatives. In kabbalistic tradition there are also masculine (odd) and feminine (even) poles. Taken differently, a binary bit being either a “one” (masculine) or a “zero” (feminine) also fits this model. This dynamic of right/left, male/female, odd/even centers on the covenant (binding or link) of circumcision of the procreative organ. As an interface object, which is marked with a sign of circumcision, the reproductive organs reflect all forms of creativity including linguistic iterations. Meaning is suspended between subject and object, male and female, speaker and listener, signifier and signified. This is the core binary relationship.

Moreover, the creative act as a covenant, a formal agreement or mediation, of that which is held in-between, also centers on the circumcision of the tongue. In Hebrew, tongue (lashon) also means “language”. While the term for circumcision (milah) can also mean a “word” or “speech”. As for the English term ‘circumcision’ which denotes the type of act i.e. ‘to cut around’, we might express this as a process of ‘outlining’. To cut around an object is to outline it. In this case, the two types of circumcision reflect the dual outline of the centrality of both language and creativity around which the digital world centers.

The many striking interrelationships between sexuality, creativity, and language born out of this kabbalistic context can be seen in a myriad of ways throughout the history of thought. In pondering these relationships, veteran literary critic George Steiner (who has had some minimal contact with Kabbalah), once remarked in his classic work After Babel (39) that: “Eros and language mesh at every point. Intercourse and discourse, copula and copulation, are sub-classes of the dominant fact of communication….Sex is a profoundly semantic act.”

In the book of Psalms (8:4), we find the expression: “When I look to the heavens, the work of Your fingers….” Here, the same term is used as in Sefer Yetzirah for fingers or digits. Consequently, we might explain this verse as follows: “When I look to the heavens” whereby heavens sometimes refers in the rabbinic tradition to the abstract origin of our concrete reality or earth, and it is there, within that abstract envelope that we understand “the work of Your fingers” to mean that ‘Reality’ or God, functions digitally. Eventually, we may come to realize that when we speak of God giving us ‘signs‘, that this is similar to stating that existence is built out of language. As we learn to read and write this language, we will uncover layer upon layer of the natural world as a digital enterprise.

Now that we have established the connection of creation to a Jewish conception of information theory, we can now look to real-world applications. We live in a participatory universe. If God uses digital information to create, then we also need to partner in that creation of digital information by being programmers. Reprogramming the universe is not only permitted, it is mandated in order to complete creation and establish a hospitable environment for the expansion and rectification of life.

From a Jewish perspective, we are intended to be a kind of Divine mirror. ‘To walk in His ways’ implies that our existence can attempt to approximate expressions of Divinity. Noting that the primary name for the Divine in Hebrew is the ineffable name of four letters which rearrange to spell the word Havayah meaning ‘Being’ we might be tempted to borrow from 20th century philosophy and express the imperative to emulate the Divine in less theological terms.

If the essential manifestation of Divinity is Being itself (thus making the expression “God is” a redundancy as if to say ‘Is is’) then it follows the perspective of the mystics that we as humans are the beings who are endowed with the capacity to embody Being on the whole. Not only that but, in the terminology of the philosopher Martin Heidegger, we are the being who is concerned with Being as a whole. As a particular being or entity (what Heidegger calls the ontic) we are bound up with questions of the ontological (the whole of Being—perhaps the whole of reality or existence). Thus, one of the essential relationships that characterizes our lives may be termed the yearning for symmetry between the ontic and the ontological. In a less obscure rewording of this idea, we might simply contend that humans want their individual lives to mean something of universal significance. This would be like a person saying that ‘my life is the key to understanding Life in general’.

From the get-go, God appears in the Torah as a Creator. Since the first Divine activity we read about is that of world creation and with it the creation of life (not to mention the singled-out creation of human life), it follows that we should strive to emulate all of these same things. In this age of new media and technology, we might come to understand ‘emulate’ as ‘simulate’. Can we simulate the process of creating the universe? Well, we’re trying. This is precisely the reason that billions of dollars were spent on the Large Hadron Collider in Geneva Switzerland.

As the world’s largest and most expensive science experiment ever, it better be going after something big. In fact, this massive particle accelerator is doing just that. Scientists want to recreate the Big Bang with which they think the universe came into existence. Only, they want to do it on a smaller scale—try a small bang with similar conditions but without the side effects of destroying us and everything in the process. Using finely tuned mathematical modeling, the hope is to canvass the creative process that produced the universe in a digital mountain of information that will take years to decode but should hopefully shed some light on how all this stuff works. While we will likely be waiting for some time for a book on ‘How to make your own cosmos’ to be published, the important thing is that we are striving to make better and better simulations.

What about simulating life? Synthetic Genomics is the name of a company founded by biologist Craig Venter who had already achieved world fame and a place in the annals of science by being one of the first to successfully sequence the human genome in 2001.  Not content with that benchmark achievement, Venter went on to lead a team of researchers to create what has been dubbed the first ‘synthetic life’ in May of 2010. This new, single-celled organism whose DNA code was written by a computer, has demonstrated the ability to reproduce and even possess coded ‘watermarks’ with which the scientists can keep tabs on it and its descendants.

And what of emulating or simulating human life? In this area, there is progress being made on a number of fronts. Now that the body and brain are being treated as information systems that have entered the digital age, the pace of progress is simply mind-blowing. In addition to the genomics or bioinformatics of Venter and thousands of others, breakthrough modeling is occurring in the areas of neuroscience, artificial intelligence, and robotics research. According to some standards of measurement, we are more than doubling our knowledge every year! Computers themselves are displaying greater and greater aptitude for mimicking key features of human intelligence. While no one yet knows at which threshold of complexity something like artificial general intelligence will come online, the small victories are adding up to very significant new technologies that are already, in limited cases, outstripping natural human capabilities or at least simulating them quite realistically.

Here comes the punch line of it all. Of the scores of rabbis immersed in the secrets of Sefer Yetzirah, one of the most famous was Rabbi Yehudah Loew (1520-1609). Known as the Maharal of Prague, Rabbi Loew is perhaps best known for his legendary creation of a Golem. The Golem is described as a humanoid creature that was artificially brought to life using the information technology contained within the traditions of Sefer Yetzirah. For many historians, the Golem represented the source inspiration for our modern concept of robots as well as synthetic life and artificial intelligence. In various accounts, the process of Golem-making sounds akin to the programming of an information system. The combining of this information system with physical substance made for a kind of reprogrammable matter that simulated life on some level.

While the issues surrounding the kabbalistic traditions of Golem-making are too vast to address at this point, let us suffice to point out some of the foremost venerated scientists who claim to trace their family lineage back to the Maharal.

As documented in several academic works (notably Machines Who Think by Pamela McCorduck and The Second Self by Sherry Turkle) these scientists include:

• Norbert Wiener (1894-1964) the founder of cybernetics and a major contributor to the nascent stages of AI research, computer science, and neuroscience
• John Von Neuman (1903-1957) whose computer science contributions include a design architecture used in virtually every computer in the world today, not to mention his contributions to quantum mechanics, game theory, and a host of other disciplines
• Marvin Minsky (1927- ) a founding father at MIT of modern robotics and artificial intelligence research as well as a number of other computer scientists and physicists.

More than being the descendants of the famed Rabbi, each of these pivotal figures has exhibited a profound intellectual heritage and kinship with the teachings of the Maharal, many of which may be viewed as an unpacking of the essential insight of Sefer Yetzirah—that everything is created out of information. Throughout his vast body of writing, the Maharal, again and again, returns to the theme of abstract form or information and its relationship to substance as the underlying drive of many of the concepts in the Torah and Talmud. One even gets the sense that for the Maharal, one of the most important insights of Judaism is the centrality of information theory and the notion of creation as information processing.

Spiritually speaking as well as scientifically, programmers are needed. Realizing the promise of the digital age is to embrace boundless creative freedom and the hope of a better world.

Revised and reprinted with permission from Interinclusion.org

Asher Cripe, BrainyBlaze Team