About corkscrews:

This Chapter was written by Mel Reichler Tom Surprenant and Jim Egan

Extraordinary information (REVELATIONS.) Still other information seems to tell you about everything. After you receive it you seem to know a little more about everything; everything seems a little different. Although you can’t point to anything that specifically informed you about anything, everything feels different, you see everything a little differently. Then there are Corkscrews.

The compression of information.

Information compression is a significant topic. It has seldom been subjected to any interpretation. On the other hand there is a powerful scientific community working at improving data compression techniques. In this world of real limits on data storage and on channel capacity, data compression is of practical importance.

Compression of information involves conserving the amount and kind of information by changing the way it is represented in order to reduce the cost of storing or transmitting it. Data compression is a matter of rhetoric, elocution and diction, except the saying may be in a code not made for speaking.

Like dieting, simply shedding weight is not the decisive thing in data compression. The trick is to peel away the excess mass but do so in a way that does not compromise the integrity and essentials of person or message; losing 20 pounds by chopping off a head or an arm or other piece of ones anatomy would be an unacceptable weight loss program.

Figuring out powerful coding systems which allow for the efficient transmission of information is a major intellectual achievement. There is much science in this and not a little art. Effective compression of data involves discovering and eliminating redundancy. It involves avoiding saying something or even hinting at something even a fraction more than once. It entails finding a way to say something in a shorter way, in fewer symbols or words, or using no words or symbols at all. It is an issue of efficiency, of conservation.

Of course, it is possible to set ones mind on saying the same thing in different ways for variety, or the same thing in a longer more elegant, distinctive way for emphasis. And really effective compression of information might involve figuring out how to say a million different things in the same way showing that they were in fact the same thing even though they looked different. Which brings us to the nub of the matter.

It is the involvement of machines in the information process that has raised this issue to the level of significance and importance it has now.

As long as we were dealing mostly with other humans data compression was not problematic—we could get away with murder, and did. Within the range of human meanings and experience we compressed data furiously and shamelessly. As long as the demand for efficiency was held in human constraints and worked in human contexts that were shaped to respect human limitations and satisfy the interests of human communities in social contexts, no machine could come close to compressing data the way we humans naturally compressed data— in wild, world sized chunks.

But as we began to use machines more, especially computers, as we began to need great globs of information continuously and instantaneously, as our science began to require unbroken streams of information from far away planets, from the insides of atoms; as our economies became dependent on real time information about all economic transactions; as our medicine demanded that the human genome be mapped completely and totally, the human compression of communication became inadequate. No human context could cope with the range of data we were forced to compress; nor was the range of human experience wide enough to encompass the technic of compression; analytic, computer assisted compression came to be required and significant.

At the interface between human and machine the shape and form of communication remained constrained by human limitations, by how fast we can read or hear or type or speak; at the interface, human limitations dominate. The machines are bound by our limitations.

We realized quite early that because we needed to deal with computers only at the interface, we did not need to impose our limitations on them (although lending them our strengths was a different matter) and we could let our machines transmit information between themselves and calculate with information in whatever form was most advantageous to them even though it was completely incomprehensible to us. By giving up access to this intermediate forms of information we developed for machines to use—and ultimately, the data forms the machines developed for their internal use— we lost another element of control and, of course, our machines became one more degree unintelligible to us.

Human compression of information:

Humans have always compressed information. We have always worked hard at packing as much information as we could into our communications. We strive for efficiency and effectiveness naturally — not all the time every time, but consistently.

Humans compress information in different ways. One way by which we achieved compression by leaving unsaid what could be understood as being said only later, long after it was said, and, by not hearing those things when they were said. Humans achieve efficiency by compression on both sides of the communication divide — both on the speaking and the listening side.

Another way we compressed information was to shape the context that a person used to comprehend the messages we sent. First we learned that the more we could shape the context others used to comprehend our communications the more compressed our speech could be. Then, after we learned to use context to control information, we learned the trick of assuming a context and assuming the other person to whom we were going to communicate could figure out the context we were assuming they would use — so that we never had to use any words to communicate context at all. We learned to make context self defining. Of course, context depends on community, on a history, a line of connection to our fellows.

Humans also managed to compress information by using silence to communicate information. Humans learned very quickly that “nothing” could communicate enormous amounts of information if it was used in the right way. It is the management of silence that really distinguishes human compression of data.

In their management of silence humans have broken the back of scientific limitations on the compression of information. It is our capacity to make silence carry information and a lot of it, to let the unstated be a clue to the implied, to make what is not said constitute evidence of what might be said, and hence what is said by omission, that distinguishes human speech.

The length of silences, the shape of silences and attachment of silence to speech, silence as a commentary, silence as complement and criticism, all allowed a large number of ways of compressing information to nothing at all; even though were slower than machines we were cunning out of all proportion to our brain size, and our nature let us compress words into silences that spoke volumes.

Human compression of information by using shared and understood context and silence were two kinds of data compression humans used. There is another a different kind of compression of information, a compression in which information is compressed by manipulating something else other than information. We call them corkscrews.

Most of the corkscrews we encounter are aphorisms. it is in the form of epigrams that we are most familiar with corkscrews. But many works of art have the same quality; and occasionally other works—a good scientific theory, for example— do the same thing; Corkscrews seem a good general term for this kind of compressed package of information.

The term corkscrew is meant to convey a recursiveness, a continuous folding back on itself of something which no matter how closely packed, avoids touching itself but which is always asymptotically close.

As mechanisms for compressing information, corkscrews differ from silence and context in two ways:

• What is moved around is not only information about the world but also simultaneously, through the information about the world, some kind of information about information itself.

•The process of decompression of information is different. Silences and context are decoded — information is extracted — in a single, explosive reflexive stroke. But a corkscrew unwinds and unfolds strewing information in its path; information self extracts, uncoils in a continuous process that takes time but is self regulating, which occurs without attention, occurs like an unfolding. It self disassembles, then self assembles itself, then disassembles and reassembles itself again, in the mind. Like the purest information its contents emerge, become information only in the unfolding.

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Here are some examples of corkscrews.

Darkness also travels at the speed of light.

In a pinch you can use a hammer as a screwdriver but only once per screw.

It is bizarre that people will believe anything as long as you can prove it to them.

Sex is a pleasure; good sex is pleasure; great sex is what pleasure is about.

Armies never surrender at night.

The warning shot warns the shooter.

Folly is intelligence with a thorn in its paw.

Great novelists die in other people’s sleep.

The virtuous whore is the invention of the virtuous pimp.

Babies are nature’s way of explaining sex in exactly the same way in which fat is nature’s way of explaining food.

What is a corkscrew, really?

A corkscrew shows you an idea then it shows you the pattern in the idea then it shows you the pattern without the idea.

1. A corkscrew shows you an idea. Like any affirmative declarative sentence a corkscrew shows you an idea, presents an idea to you. It presents you with information about the world.

2. But a corkscrew shows you the pattern of an idea. Unlike most sentences which display an idea, a corkscrew shows you the pattern of the idea it displays, It makes the flesh of the idea translucent so you can discern its anatomy, see its bones, identify the underlying structure that gives it shape. A corkscrew presents you with information about the information it is presenting to you.

3.A corkscrew shows you the pattern without the idea. After a corkscrew presents an idea and the pattern of the idea it goes one step further; it displays the pattern without the aid of the idea it is the pattern of. A corkscrew presents you with information about the information it presented you. A corkscrew is information and meta information in the same package.

A corkscrew goes one step further than the edge of meaning; it makes the bones transparent and shows you the pattern without the idea, it dissolves the presentation of the pattern and leaves the pattern visible as a tracing on the mind itself, like a fossil in stone. Corkscrews work by blurring the line between information and information about information and information about information about information. Normally any pattern in sentences beyond the grammar, beyond poetry, is overwhelmed by the information the sentence carries. But in a corkscrew the words are arranged so that the information about the world is held at bay and is prevented from creating so strong a meaning as to overwhelm something else. What is this something else? It is a pattern of an idea around which words cling. Because the meaning of the world is held at arms length a corkscrew allows the idea to emerge to throw off words so to speak and emerge in their own light.

In a corkscrew, indirection, misdirection, equivocation, ambiguity and distraction are all instruments of information transmission. A corkscrew works in just the opposite way of ordinary information and makes the opposite kinds of demands the person using it. It depends on managed ambiguity, engineered, controlled unclarity, disciplined disorganization.

What is true about the world is that everything is happening at once; Human beings know this and participate in it. This parallel processing goes along with the constant compression and decompression of information, with the use of information on a variety of levels simultaneously.

We parallel process naturally. We sing and chew gum and produce white blood cells and make love and fantasize at the same time. Yet we cannot think in this way. Consciousness demands a linear, exclusive process. Yet we are always engaged in a dozen activities simultaneously. When the parallel simultaneous implications and meanings are represented in some fashion, in a set of words a sentence, we speak of a corkscrew. Corkscrews, or information like them, hold the information we need to do this parallel processing. Corkscrews then, are a kind of music of thought (because theme and variation and harmony and development are all graspedatonce.)

Folding

Corkscrews depend on an ability humans have which is magical but quite natural. It involves the ability to fold information onto itself in informational space in an almost supernatural way. Information about the world is folded together with information about the information then the folded material is wound around an idea and tucked away in a set of words. The magical part of a corkscrew is that once taken in as information it unfolds in the mind, drawing information through the mind pushing and pulling it around in the brain. A corkscrews is a miniature, moving light, an illumination that is never still, that dances and sings over a landscape illuminating different parts of the ground terrain.

Here are instructions for this mental origami. Take a set of words and organize them so that they press against themselves, Set up some interference pattern so that the meaning of the words is blocked or distorted, so that the meaning of the words is interfered with. What is left of the words, is the pattern they make up, a pattern that only some of the meaning of the words represents.

Errors

Our brains do not process information the way our models tell us brains process information. Our models are just that , models, representations of something, in this case representations of processing information. Our representations work in symbolic space and time; to use them ultimately we map our calculations onto another representation — ultimately visual or tactile or auditory (what we see or what we feel or hear). Truth for us is merely the degree of fit between these two representations.

What this means is that we ought never fall into the trap of treating our representations as the real thing however good they are at letting us predict the real thing, which is what they are designed to do. Our representations are designed to simulate the real thing. The better they do this the more we have faith in them. The danger is, of course the more faith we have the more likely we are likely to confuse reality with models of reality, to confuse faith in a models with a belief in the reality of the model.

We make our models to represent that reality to allow us to predict the reality; then we use it to make the prediction. The more accurate the model the more likely we are drawn into the trap that the model is the reality (rather than an effective representation of it) the more likely we are to make the tragic intellectual mistake of confusing the map with the territory. Each generation faces this problem in a different guise. This is ours. Information about reality is not reality.

We must build our models of reality up piece by piece gradually, whereas reality works in one fell swoop. Our models like our computers are mostly serial processors; Seriality is all we can handle; reality is parallel; everything is happening at once.

A lesson about information compression through three examples of corkscrews

“In a pinch you can use a hammer as a screwdriver but only once per screw.”

Taken by itself this sentence seems to state one of the first principles that govern the transformation of quality into quantity. The idea that a hammer can be used as a screwdriver forces you to think about fundamentals. A coarse smashing motion can be substituted for a delicate rotation motion. The universe is a pragmatic, flexible place—up to a point.

That point is when you act on it. Then something changes. You get nothing for nothing in this world. There is a cost. The universe has a monopoly on fundamental laws. It is when you have to remove the screw that the lesson of the world comes home to you. You can use a hammer as a screwdriver only once per screw, not one and any small fractional number, certainly not twice.

To affirm that you can use a hammer as a screwdriver is to assert something about equivalent things, things that are identical interchangeable— but of course only up to a point. But the assertion forces you to consider the contexts the circumstances in which these two dissimilar objects can be the same.

This corkscrew is an assertion that such a context exists and an invitation to consider it. The only way it makes sense is if you simultaneously reexamine and perhaps redefine equivalence. The idea that this equivalence is bounded in time, that it only works once forces some further consideration.

Why this limitation? Is it in the nature of screwable things that are hammerable? Is it a matter of the nature of the directionality of the world, what can be done and undone? Is the lesson really that the use of a tool changes the entity on which the tools is used so that it is no longer manageable with that tool again. Does this statement convey information about hammers, about screwdrivers, about the stuff of the world or about all of these at once.

A corkscrew shows you an idea then it shows you the pattern of the idea and then it shows you the pattern itself without the idea.

“It is bizarre that people will believe anything as long as you can prove it to them.”

What is this saying? It is about logic, and it is about believing, or about the ability not to believe, and it is about proof. In fact it is about all three of them together, so that the corkscrew raises an issue of what certainty and conviction looks like among humans.

People believe the most outrageous things. And the more outrageous the assertion they believe, the more they feel that they must believe these things, that they have no choice in the matter so long as you have proved the assertion to them.

This is the nature of proof, namely that once provided it compels belief. But proof is a sometime thing and this corkscrew talks to the issue of the logic within which something is proved as well as the construction of human beings who are compelled in their beliefs.

This conviction that they must believe is strongest when someone shows them that the assertion follows from something else they believe. The logic of this conviction is invisible, a silent, a-logical commitment

“Sex is a pleasure; good sex is pleasure; great sex is what pleasure is about.”

More than most corkscrews this corkscrew effectively compresses information on a number of levels. The trick —which is not a trick at all— is of course the twisty progression about pleasure— which is not a progression at all. This corkscrew uses pleasure to make sense out of sex and sex to make sense of pleasure— all in a single reasonable sentence. The idea that a particular something can express something generic is a little startling, so that the notion that good sex is pleasure or can be used to define pleasure, is surprising. But the progression twists on itself when it asserts that pleasure is about something and that great sex can be used to identify that which pleasure is about.

But what is pleasure about? It is about that which in one instance is characterized by pleasure. The progression is shown — as so many progressions are— to be illusory. The which can characterize something becomes at some point that which something characterized.

Here are some other examples of Corkscrews;

Darkness also travels at the speed of light.

Sex is like groping with your feet for something that you can not grasp with you hands.

In matters of love rub a thorn, remember the knife.

Genius is the capacity not to learn anything that takes more than three minutes to forget.

People seldom survive the bite of a butterfly. On the other hand, the scars of the bite of the butterfly are beautiful.

Money is always in heat.

Some people’s lives are based on a true story but not their true story

Wisdom, for the ant, is not walking on sidewalks even if the cracks are filled with candy and cake.

We mourn in our victory the death of possibility.

Most people have two childhoods, one too early, one too late.

The trouble with men is that they think that they same thing that caused a thing to happen explains it. The trouble with women is that they know that this is not so and they know why.

It is almost impossible to locate the exact point at which point at which the comic becomes tragic, but it is the