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Even the most primitive of tribal entities,
those most materially deprived, seem to
have extraordinarily complicated and sophisticated intellectual systems. And, along with
generating wonderous classification systems,
they stack up tales of underlying, fundamental orders, and the creation of these orders,
into layered versions. In contrast, modern, western thought is relatively simple and
simplifying. 

\emph{Formally} speaking, all these \enquote{pre-modern}
systems are very alike: in practice, quite different. 
The introduction of modern formal analysis may be a particularly western
mode for making unlikes alike, a strategy for
destroying singularity and quality, still lurking in ultra-modern,
western civilization. We see the imposition of this western 
formalism on the underdeveloped world. On a
formal level, these older systems seem to
bear a curious resemblance to modern ones.
Is this a function of modernist and leveling
perception? And all, of course, address
themselves to origins and endings.

A cosmic or godly event begins the series.
New versions are invented. Beginnings and
endings proliferate. Origins are projected
and analogized to inconsistent historical
and mythological structures, which are then
rationalized and united. The Kaballists ask;
what happened \emph{before} the Biblical version of
creation? The Hindus retroactively add geological strata of explanation and, \emph{literally},
concretized them out of mountains of stone,
chiseling the \emph{Kamasutra} of creations:
a sexual version. The Mayans and Aztecs choked
their cosmos with Gods of retroactive explanation.
But, as far as the Judeo\slash Christians
were concerned, nothing less than the hunt
for \emph{The One} would do, worshipping at the
shrine of The Great Unifier and Explicator.
But, yet, in entropic time, the cathedrals of
nuclear particle and information priesthoods
abound with sacred Fundamental Particles
and Forces (or operators). Looking backward,
the god or culture hero, the calculator-supreme, the order-bringer who will, after a
hunt for a mystic vision, will enter the
spaces of inspiration and blinding insight:
there he will view an inscape, not of earth.
After which he will return to deliver the
Message of the Oneness of all things.

All information theorists erect their knowledge-processing gods: Prometheus, Lucifer,
Thoth, Metatron, Hermes, Hermes Trismegistus, Simon Magus, Giordano Bruno, Jesus
with his tidings of great Joy. Now we can
look at the latest culture hero in a new light:
as \enquote{truth-bringer.} Under the hero's mythic
appearance are subsumed physicists, astronomers, 
molecular biologists, financiers, geneticists, neurologists ... is the five-faced
Cyberneticist: Alan Turing, John Von Neuman, Norbert Wiener, Claude Shannon and
Noam Chomsky (it should be understood that these names are mere variables for
which other names may be substituted).

The great cosmic battle that calls them
into being are the first two world wars. The
civil war in western civilization is matched
up to that great pre-primal civil war in
heaven, the aboriginal revolution. This great
Initial\slash Final struggle provides the impetus
to machine the universe and go into business. Before earth existed, God and Lucifer
battled. Earth was created (a rearrangement
of space, matter, energy and time) as a tool
and a battlefield in the Grand Struggle. The
Grand Alliance vs. the Comecon legions of
Pandemonium. Before the earth and the
galaxies were invented (or reinvented), the
Communists sinned against The Light and
had their Great Fall from Grace. Or conversely, the Capitalists sinned against the
light of Primitive and Paradisical Socialism.

The Delphi where their cybernetic or information thought was born are the Macy
Foundation, the Rand, IBM, Bell Telephone, bank wire rooms, the coding, cryptography
and signal intelligence systems of government,
the military and the universities.
Rather than being anything new, this mode
of thinking was designed to reorganize and
incorporate the long tradition of western
rationalizing and simplifying: Greek and
Judeo/Christian thought. This scattered and
compartmentalized Delphi strove to organize all divisions under its aegis, devouring
and engulfing all before it, metabolizing
diversity into this new, computational-assisted, gray pap. This assumption, this reclassification of diversity into fundamental order and unity in the universe, all things in
it and all interrelationships among them, may, in the long run, be an act of faith ... the
propagation of a magic spell to colonize all minds.

Magic depends on a community of belief.
The more who believe, the stronger the
dominating resonance of the vision, which
is then broadcast out into space like an
incantation. If, indeed, as the quantum
theorists would have it, the observing mind
and its prosthetics intrudes into the cosmos,
then wouldn't a cacaphony of visions and
systems lead to a plethora of spaces? To
make sure that chaos is averted, peer review,
and ceremonialized, hierarchical orders of
permissible discourse allow only for glacial
change. Experiments which might prove incontrovertable
diversity, or lead to a final
skepticism are not funded. Goodness: what
if Ernst Mach, who disputed atomic theory,
was right?

In modern thought, each version of universal order, developed in history, subsumes
and tries to erase past or contradictory versions, negotiating away genuine differences
or, at best, converting them into polar opposites or contradictions. But to call something
a contradiction is to subsume it. The early
efforts of unification included the pantheonizing activities of the Greeks, Romans,
Christians, Mohammedans, Hebrews, Buddhists ... who attempted to compress, resolve and rationalize the many gods (who had many attributes and stood for many things), spirits, realms and cultures. Early
unified-field theorizing. (And at the same time, intractable organic trees were converted
into rows of stone pillars with stone leaves on top to control the wild proliferation of
nature and to house this riot of now-domesticated gods.) Not only did the arcane formations of the past lurk on, visible to the eye,
palpable to the touch, but in dream-states (since brain activity generates a wild, a surreal associationism, generating metaphors and conceits); the ever-present archeology of
past formations collected in social thought (the true artificial intelligence/memory)
which was the matrix through which education is sifted. These re-emerge when unifying attempts run into trouble in their encounter with intractable reality.

When order, universality, oneness,
falls apart, when classification fails,
fallback positions are prepared. Contradictions are
invented, the perniciousness of dialectical
thought. Human thought (or at least the
thought of some subset of humans) seems
obsessed with the use of polarities to explain
what will not fit; similarities percieved as
counter-identities. (Is a lobster the opposite
of a human?) All this finds its way into
computer thought, based, simply enough,
on addition ... mechanistic thinking built
on the limited operations that, first logic,
then switching devices and logic gates can
perform (input-output and feedback devices).
For all its complexity, any computer has to
use a symbolic logic, which is limited by the
control of the flows of electricity. The speed
of a vast amount of miniscule operations is
mistaken for complexity. The messiness outside this logical world --- 
whole living ecosystems in wild and wonderous irregular
shapes, plants, marine shells, animals,
microorganisms, a memory of jungles, sea
bottoms, a casual distribution of galaxies --- 
must be reduced to binaries, Cartesian\slash
Leibnizian pixels on an image-processor's
screen, or a printout. And this presumably
matches the world outside this hermeneutical cave 
of transistors.\footnote{Computerized image-recognition depends on building up a reference library of simplified, sensor-apprehensible images, compatible with computer recognition.} 
All this is another way of, as
Aristotle put it, holding up the mirror to
nature. We see what a few of us, who have
designed the sensors, expect us to see; the
designers have their preconceptions reflected.

Economic behavior is also obsessed with
input-output polarities; systems which account for-and-of capital flows, the \emph{yin} of
debts and the \emph{yang} of credits; male gain and
female loss; dark and light; the dialectic in
which money in a bank is a liability and
money out on loan is an asset; the hurling of
a profit in Frankfurt to a loss-column stationed in Panama (but both in an electronic
balance sheet in, say, New York), or anywhere. All quite Hegelian. Hegelian thought
is particularly applicable to accounting systems. In the first place, it is ideal, which is to
say that it deals with representations, not actualities. In the second place, implicitly
shows progressive and inevitable, even divine growth --- an organic metaphor --- which,
when tied to evolutionism, fulfills itself, or God's Purpose, in Time.

Now, the question is: was Hegel the father of the modern, automated balance sheet, or
does his thinking derive from double-entry accounting practices? We have been trapped
since double-entry bookkeeping and unit-pricing was invented by the ancients. Another
question is, how to deal with the unexpected,
random, \emph{risk}, and uncertainty?
If no one knows what happens \enquote{out there,} but projects: if no one knows what happened 
\enquote{back then,} but retrojects (doing a long run ... for
which a computer is ideally constructed ...
if the events can be specified), the past,
present and future can be procrusted into a
prophet's or risk-analyst's dream. (Consider
Joseph in Egypt, whom we will mention again.)

In physics, this long range dialectic concerns itself with entropification, for which
quite Manichean Maxwellian Demons were
invented to reconcentrate dissolving matter and overcome long term loss. Maxwellian Demons
dealt with particle matter, but couldn't deal with the quality of matter; it
was a Statistical conceit. Norbert Wiener
derided the very notion of \enquote{quality,} which
he considered a Medieval hangover. How
can you measure or chart a quality? Humans,
inventing particle physics (physical biologists) see humans as agglomerations of
quanta.

As for business, the non-quantifiable aspects, compulsive behavior, fundamental irrationality, the rites attending successes or
failure, the ceremonies of contacts and connections, the accompanying trade in prestige and rank (and frequently women), panoply, display, to say nothing of individual obsessions, trade in contracts, stupidity, shortsightedness, favoritism, structural theivery,
fraudulent accounting, altered and destroyed
records, computer glitches (and bad design),
invented numbers, nepotism, bribery, kickbacks, the giving and receiving of presents,
acts of abject faith, all are ever-present and
must be factored in ... however indirectly.

These sorts of thinking (particlization, accretion,
mutational variation within combinatorial limits, dialectical contradiction,
fleshly pythagoreanism, accretive historicism
on the pilgrim's progress to transubstantiation and resubstantiation), when applied to
the replication of organisms, give rise to the
notion of genetic structures as information.
This living, quivering biology, this jellyware,
comes to be seen as mysterious codes, cryptograms, instructional algorithms for the development of bodies. In sociobiological
thought, bodies are mere totality shells, packets, envelopes for transmitting genetic
messages along a carrier wave, that becomes embodied from time to time, down the ages.
Genetics is not only information, but it is memory.
(And, as an instrumentality that
interferes in the universe's workings, generates mind which then generates it.)\
Perhaps, at time's end, the messages will reach
such a level of accretion and recombination
that humans will evolve and transmogrify
into angels. (Hence, one burden of this essay is time itself.)