File spoon-archives/lyotard.archive/lyotard_2001/lyotard.0104, message 14


Date: Sat, 07 Apr 2001 15:53:34 -0400
From: hugh bone <hbone-AT-optonline.net>
Subject: Re: Information


Steve wrote:

> I think in answer to your question about MTV it is after all a question
> relating to what was once called the industrialisation of culture, but
which
> in this century, for the first time we should call it the
> informationalisation of culture, the reduction of culture to bits of
> information

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Some thoughts on "information"

Emerson wrote:  "Nothing is rich but the inexhaustible wealth of nature. She
shows us only surfaces, but she is a million fathoms deep."

Wittgenstein speaks of the difficulty of unraveling the knots of philosophy,
of the "deep disquietudes" arising from " a misinterpretation of our forms
of life," which have "roots as deep in us as the forms of our language."


INFORMATION

Consider the extraordinary complexity of  "forms of life"  compared with the
underlying  particles, fields and forces  which make them possible; that
humans are one of tens of millions of living species which remain after even
more species have perished; that some organisms have life-spans of more than
three thousand years, some grow to thousands of times the  size of humans,
others are weighed in grams.  Fish, birds and reptiles navigate the globe
and return to birthplaces.  Some animals have a super-sensitive sense of
smell,
and others navigate by echo-location.

During their life-times they generate "information".

In  "The Ontogeny of Information", by Susan Oyama, (1985) , she  summarizes
some  of the the complexities under the heading,  "levels and essences":

 "The "informational" significance of any developmental influence, as we
have seen, depends on the state of the entire developmental system,
including genes, phenotype, and relevant aspects of developmental surround,
and on the level and type of analysis.  Developmental state is a kind of
temporal slice through the life cycle.  It carries evidence of past gene
transcriptions,  mechanical influences inside and outside the organism,
results of past activities, nutrition or lack of it and so on, and it has
certain prospects for change.  If we are guided by the notion of information
as the difference that makes a difference, then what developmental
interactant makes a difference  depends on what is developing and how."

and,

 ..."To gain information we need to specify a context and a set of
possibilities.  It is in this sense that organisms generate information, and
it is in much the same sense that scientists do.  Events do not carry
already existing information about their effects from one place to the next,
the way we used to think copies of objects had to travel to our minds for us
to perceive them.  They are given meaning by what they distinguish.  This is
why a gene has different effects in different tissues and at different
times; why a stimulus calls out different responses, including no response,
at different times or in different creatures, and why an observation that is
meaningless or anomalous at one stage of an investigation or to one person,
becomes definitive under other circumstances.  A difference that makes a
difference at one level of analysis, furthermore, may or may not make a
difference at another.  This is, in fact, the key to understanding apparent
spontaneity."


Information - Inform, deform, reform.

Besides the traditional science of information as transmission of words,
music and pictures, we now speak of information as genetic codes that
transmit instructions for initiating and terminating the processes of form
(morphology)  and growth, that produce  new life.

The term "intelligence of Nature" would include all sorts of information -
that which is found in both animate and  inanimate "matter", and that which
is found in  "mind" or "spirit"'.  The "thing(s)" which emerge from a
vacuum, the "thing"(s) that transform  matter into energy.

If  philosophy is the  "pursuit of wisdom), it seems the pursuer(s) would
seek the greatest possible knowledge of the Universe, the Earth, the world
of humans, the world of knowledge in which wisdom is pursued, the world of
nature, self, and society.  For example:

1) The flow of information in Nature that occurs in those animate and
inanimate processes which are revealed by the natural sciences.

2) Information in the human organism, which in addition  to explaining
characteristics that humans share with other species, gives humans their
extraordinary awareness of consciousness and self-consciousness , the
science of mind.

3) Information of a social nature - information transmitted from generation
to generation which among other things, legitimates:
      a) allocation of rights to real, personal, and intellectual property
      b) human rights - including freedom of the person, freedom of
speech, freedom of  assembly,
      c) forms of justice  which  promote these rights, and remedy wrongs.

Analogy to computers is useful because storage and retrieval of memory
content is  obvious.

Those who are unhappy with the deconstructed "self" can rename it "a memory"
, meaning a particular store of specific memories,  A memory contains
information which enables function - whether the memory is composed of
tissue,  as in animal bodies, or silicon, as in computers.

It is then easy to think of humans as  "memory machines"
with legs who contain some intelligence hard-wired at birth, plus life-long
learning.  Active  computing machines and active human memories are
continually updated with new software and experience.

We can consider "information" as in "it-from-bit", as a  basic element of
reality in the present state of the art of physics. Of  course Popper, Bohm,
Kuhn, and others have suggested the potential instability, over time,  of
the most widely accepted scientific concepts.

As phone-answering systems proliferate, it is obvious that only a part of
the information we communicate is with persons.  And on TV, the percentage
of live transmittals continues to shrink.  If all Earth-bound humanity
disappeared, the channels of communication would continue to send
pre-recorded  messages and the Space Station crew could see, hear, and view
some of  these artifacts until  the power supply was exhausted.

Is the Universe made of "bits"?  - "it-from-bit", in the  words of John
Wheeler.

 A recent article in the New York Times, is headlined:  "No Quark
(or electron )  is an Island In the  New Physics of Relationships.   John
Wheeler's "it-from-bit" statement is referenced,  the concept of  "mass
without mass" is used to describe a situation in which the mass is said  to
come entirely from the  arrangement of the quarks, and not from the quarks
themselves.  Not all of this is new, since  Wheeler discussed  "it-from-bit
in a book published in 1990.

At the greatest depth and seriousness of our knowledge of nature, we have no
guarantees.  We have no assurance that the Universe will not prove to be
different than we think - no assurance that future potential discoveries
beyond the frontier of present knowledge will not force revision of our
most-valued theories, or worse, no assurance that unknown forces will not
destroy humans or even destroy the only Universe we know.

Regards,
Hugh




   

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