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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