Summary and General Discussion 357 



I have just called structural information is the same as stored 

 information; but we tend to think of these gross structures a little 

 differently from the micro ones of ordinary memory, to which 

 I shall return. In all, of course, storage of information is a matter 

 of past experience, either of the race, with phylogeny and ontogeny 

 laying down structures that ate essentially uniform from individual 

 to individual in the species, or of individual experience and 

 learning, with the attendant high variance. 



The flow of information was discussed fully by Dr. Miller, but 

 I shall add a few general comments. First, all the informational 

 aspects of organisms are induced originally by the environment 

 acting upon the system, and changes in these aspects are over- 

 whelmingly the result of continued environmental influence. There 

 are, therefore, two extremely interesting questions to raise about 

 such influence. The first concerns the sensitivity of the system 

 to environmental influence; the second, the establishment of an 

 enduring change. Sensitivity can be of two kinds: 1) quantitative — 

 what threshold of an environmental disturbance or alteration is 

 necessary for the system to recognize it, so to speak; and 2) quali- 

 tative — what specificity exists, what discrimination is made be- 

 tween different kinds of environmental influences — which is per- 

 haps even more interesting. So we have the subquestions of 

 threshold and of specification. 



The other large question has to do with the conditions under 

 which a transient action of the environment leads to a response 

 of the system. The environmental action, although originally 

 ephemeral, may become irreversible and lead to a permanently 

 altered system. When and how does a reversible response of the 

 system become an irreversible change? This is the essential prob- 

 lem of evolution, of individual development, of group history, and, 

 of course, of individual learning; and I have liked the term 

 "becoming" for this collectivity of irreversible change of the 

 system over time — the "becoming" of the system. The architecture, 

 essentially constant in time, is its "being," the reversible changes in 

 time, its "behaving," and the irreversible changes its "becoming." 

 Let us look at the environment system in a little more detail. 



The environment alone is able to induce inhomogeneities in a 

 homogeneous system; and if the latter is appropriately responsive 



