Summary and General Diseussion 355 



inappropriate to his. This is closely related to what Mr. Bateson 

 was saying". 



In the section on the nervous system, Dr. Brazier gave us an 

 excellent picture of the whole field, with some emphasis on how 

 spontaneous wave generation might give an internal comparison 

 standard. Dr. John picked this up in his research report, then he 

 and Dr. Morrell had a good discussion on the mechanism of 

 fixation, to which I shall return. At the human level, Dr. Miller 

 contrasted the problem of energy and information flow and intro- 

 duced the concept of levels, and Dr. Burch discussed similar 

 problems in connection with his technicjue of extracting informa- 

 tion from a complex temporal signal. 



Now, what can one do to integrate all these fine materials? 

 I should like to conduct this discussion in terms of four major 

 headings: l)the question of order and information in general, and 

 as applied to organisms; 2) the role of the environment; 3) the 

 problem of malleability; and, 4) the problem of fixation. At the 

 end I shall say a word about our own work on fixation. 



I am not an information theoretician, but it seemed to me when 

 I began to put this summary together that organizing the material 

 as follows gave me further clarification of the session on information: 

 Think of a deck of cards in any particular order; obviously the 

 energy in it is exactly the same for any order. If you burn the 

 deck, the calories obtained are the same whatever the order. 

 Furthermore, any particular order in a well-shuffled deck is just 

 as probable as any other particular order. Certain orders are of 

 more interest than others, but any order would be of great interest 

 to a player for it determines the hands that are dealt. 



I think it is useful to distinguish a structural order such as the 

 kind of order in which the cards come from the manufacturer 

 (ace through king and one suit after another). Such structural 

 order we easily recognize in architecture. Usually it implies some 

 regularity and symmetry and repetitiveness, and ordinarily we 

 are likely to call this "order." But I can easily demonstrate to 

 you another very diff'erent order which I might call functional 

 order — an apparent "disorder"' in arrangement that emits ordered 

 behavior. You may have played this little trick as a child: Organize 

 the cards so that by moving the top card to the bottom at each 



