Written by Mel Reichler and Tom Surprenant

Copyright 2002

Chapter 1

Introduction

The trick is not to start the ball rolling but to get out of the way

Human culture, every human culture, depends on information and the mechanisms humans have developed for handling information, like symbols. But to modern societies which are evolving into super electronic, digital and technological worlds, information is absolutely central.

Information seems to have taken on a life of its own; it has its own priesthood, rituals, rites and secret passwords. In modern societies information has consumed culture by becoming a culture unto itself. But we only see this when we shake loose from the pragmatics of information, when we resist putting information to any practical use.

Information lay virtually invisible in the world, camouflaged by everyday activities until there was a technological structure providing virtually unlimited material for its growth. Now that modern science and technology have revealed its hidden aspects, we are recasting our understanding of information. Our times not only require an expanded science of information but they need and demand a sociology, a psychology, a political economy and a philosophy of information also.

We marvel at the science of astronomy because of the ability of astronomers to track the discovery of our universe to its beginnings. Yet the search for our origins pales when compared with the discovery of information because information makes possible the discovery of other peoples universes as well. And, of course, we are not dealing with the origin of the universe but with information about its origin. Only information has made this science possible at all.

It was only with the development of the printing press that information broke out of the strangle hold of a limited set of priests and began to affect culture in a direct and significant way. Since the technique of easy reproduction of information was invented an entire new series of universes has been revealed.

Every change in the technology of information produces radial shifts in the way human beings exist on earth. Digital information is creating a paradigm shift as it becomes more prevalent in the culture.

What has changed about information to allow us to speak of an information revolution?

•The amount of information has increased enormously.

The sheer quantity of information available is overwhelming. In part, this is because

•The way information is processed has changed.

The invention of the computer has changed the way we manipulate information. This processing has changed

•The speed at which information moves.

Information moves at light speed, not foot speed or ship speed. We have the capacity to manage and sift through mountains of information today. One of the consequences of this is that

•The distribution of information has changed.

Physical space is no longer a constraint on information. Information is distributed to people instantaneously and available anywhere. The effects of this is that

•Information takes new forms.

Information which before was limited to books and written documents now is given a confusing variety of forms. The digitalization of information has completely altered

The way information is manipulated and stored. The memory of the species has changed. As our memory has changed, our existence as agents in the world has changed. Information has changed the entities for which it is information.

Chapter 2

Information and common sense

Somewhere between WWII and the Gulf War, between Univac , the IBMPC and the internet, the world stopped making sense.

It stopped making sense because science and technology changed radically: and economics and politics were completely transformed; and social life altered totally. But common sense did not change.

Common sense— the kernel of knowledge on which we depend to make sense of all of the rest of what we know— did not change at all. Like some tiny, prehistoric animal caught in an antediluvian tar pit, it stopped moving, then it collapsed and shriveled and sank in the mud.

In the years between Univac and the Internet, common sense fossilized— turned into stone. Inaccessible and impenetrable, common sense stopped doing what common sense is supposed to do; make the world casually available; Make what is happening in the world as clear as the nose on your face, as obvious as two and two are four.

We need a new common sense. We really do.

Common sense on common sense

Common sense is universal and it is reflexive. What do we learn when we put common sense to work understanding itself, understanding common sense?

Common sense informs us that common sense is how we think about the world when we are not thinking about it or thinking about how we think about it. Common sense understands itself to be the reasoning we use when we are not formally reasoning about the world. Commonsensically, we recognize common sense right away, fresh out of the box. And we recognize common sense also by its absence, when someone is not using it. To common sense, common sense processing of information seems to be the level of reasoning that a switch uses when it turns a light on — none. Put simply, common sense does not have a clue about what common sense is.

It takes more than common sense to recognize that common sense is a profound form of reasoning. If this seems to be an exaggeration to you, if it seems to be making a mountain out of a molehill, think about a computer. Understanding that if a person goes into a restaurant and then later pay his bill is obvious he ate something, is not an idea that occurs naturally to a computer. A computer has to be cajoled and encouraged and really helped into making the inference that if two deaf mutes are having a conversation they are using sign language. Of course this means that a computer is not likely as we are to be prejudiced, believe in magic, or have a compulsion to gamble. A computer lacks the commonest of common sense.

Common sense consists of the natural power of reasoning that emerges when human beings are brought up in human society. Both of these elements are necessary. It is not enough to be one of us biologically, a member of the species. Biology is not enough for common sense. In addition to being born human we must be raised human; we must be human in a second sense. It is the interaction of these two fundamental elements of being human that produces common sense.

Common sense is so much our birthright that we take it for granted, so fundamental that we do not know what it is that we know. We know someone is using common sense because they are seeing the world just as it obviously is. Common sense presents the world instantaneously, naturally, seemingly without any mediation at all. Common sense appears to us as recognizing the world for what it is. The judgments someone using common sense makes are those that seem evident in the world, which correspond to what is obviously present in the world.

Common sense is a very complex form of reasoning about the world. Common sense tells us what we are seeing as we are seeing it. It gives us an immediate interpretation of anything we encounter in the world. How does it do this?

Here is an interpretation of how common sense works, not all of it but a significant part. Common sense gets its power from a coherent, organizing image that brings the world into focus. At the heart of common sense is a picture —a model or metaphor— that we use to make sense out of the world. We use this model to represent the world to ourselves. The key to a new common sense is a vital, new, controlling image: the new image is information.

Every metaphor provides a template against which reality can be aligned. Every metaphor is a map of the unknown.

Common sense makes sense of the world by using a model of what the world is like to process our perceptions. Common sense anticipates— pre-processes— the world before we perceive it. And common sense adjusts and modifies our perceptions of the world after we have had our look-see-listen- hear at the world, to correct our perceptions.

Common sense continuously corrects our picture of the world. Common sense works like a pair of 3 D glasses for our understanding. Through the two lenses of these glasses common sense draws the world in. It uses the image at its center in two ways.

First it uses the image as a frame, a backdrop, like a movie screen on which a picture has been painted. Common sense projects the world on the image at its center. This image furnishes a background against which the world we live in becomes discernible to us; it puts a frame around the world for us. Against this background, by some contrast only common sense perceives, our world becomes visible.

Then common sense uses the metaphor at its center in a different way. It lays this image, like a transparency, over our perceptions This overlay provides us with a virtual image of what we are going to see before we see it. By aligning a constant, complete image with our shifting, always piecemeal perceptions of reality, common sense shows us the hidden, unrecognized set of connections that exist in our world. The image at the heart of common sense acts like a map revealing the camouflaged and obscured connections between things. This projection completes our partial and always incomplete perceptions of the world.

It is common sense that recognizes the deep structures that exist in the world.

Chapter 3

Chronocentricity:

Every generation is chronocentric. Each generation believes that its time is different from all times that preceded it. Sometimes this Chronocentricity turns out to be true. Is it true for us? Is our time really different from other times?

Our times are different, truly different from almost all other times in human history.

Some think not: They believe our times are merely a quickened past, an intensification and exaggeration of the kind of change that people have experienced in most generations before us. They believe we are making a defining moment out of a moment merely because it is ours.

They are wrong. Our time is different, truly different from almost all other times in human history. Our times are more than an intensification of change. It is not only that all of the changes in information are focused, that all of these changes are coming together, It is not simply that they are mutually reinforcing, compressed and self accelerating. There is something else happening.

In one sense the changes in information are merely an index, a convenient set of markers which tag the transformation we are experiencing. The changes which register as change in information are changing not merely the way we deal with the world, they are changing our spirit and our substance: our needs, desires, our impulses and the way we think. They are not merely the development of new tools; they are changing the tool maker and the tool user. They are changing and will change our substance individually and the form of the collective system we make up, The best way to think of this is that we are self evolving into something different from the humans before us. It is evolution as definite and identifiable as the change from proto human into homo sapiens. We are self creating a new creature and a new species.

The way things are connected to other things is new; the kinds of systems we are forming is different.

The speed, and density and dependability — the tightness — of connections that we are seeing between social groups were only possible between elements of an organism before. Our social groups are woven more tightly connected than even some organisms were before. For the first time every social system is potentially directly connectible both to its own parts and to the other systems which make up its context. Simultaneously, organic wholes are being broken apart, separated in ways they could not be separated before. Organ transplants are the most visible token of this new separability.

We are intervening in our world’s natural processes in a way that has never been done before. We are burrowing into ourselves and nature in new ways. We are intervening in our own reproduction processes, leaping to reproduce and modify the natural processes that govern energy creation at the heart of suns. We are insinuating ourselves closer to the center of the natural processes than ever before.

Where every other generation tried to imitate and dominate nature we are learning how to modify and co-opt natural processes. We are shifting, blending and transforming nature.

We feel these changes in different ways. Much of the novelty we recognize as disorienting our lives flow from these fundamental changes. Belief, which was always an occupation for the very few—for lawyers, politicians, intellectuals and saints—, has become an avocation and an entertainment. Individuals have the leisure to believe anything. Belief is no longer connected to survival but has become a matter of a style of life To be believed, a statement doesn’t have to be true only usable in some argument or debate. Every fact is a resource for status, a chip in some power game.

Any particular fact has become disputable and defensible. Any combination of facts is arguable, any theoretical argument tenable. There is a data base for every conviction, a spreadsheet for each creed.

In the end of course, science and common sense refutes, rejects, and denies. The world is what is actual, not what is possible; The world is not what would be nice for it to be but what it is. Not every argument is true; some alleged facts are false.

But while we scrap about fractions of truth, dispute each interpretation of a possibility, we thrash in a limbo of uncertain virtual realities. While we wait for the truth to sort itself out, we become bored with distinctions, indifferent to claims of truth. It doesn’t matter who is right or which party is telling the truth. There is no chance of really knowing. Falsehood believed with conviction is just as good as truth badly argued. The only difference between two facts is how well they are asserted. The only difference between two ideologies is the price of defending them; the only difference between two creeds is the price of believing. This is the cost of living in our time.

The intellectual and scientific version of this disorder is the theory of chaos and complexity. Reflexively we are studying our experience and developing the formalisms and frameworks necessary to understand it. Our times are really different.

One way of understanding this is to recognize that some times are evolutionary, some are revolutionary; ours are both. Two interwoven lines of development are occurring simultaneously but in different dimensions. We are simultaneously changing in two different ways simultaneously. On one line we are going about the business of living as every generation before us went about the business of living. We are raising children, planning careers, adapting and adjusting. The changes we are making in this line are what makes us appear like the generations before us. But at the same time we are fundamentally altering every aspect of human life: we are altering the life we are living as we go about living it. The details of each of these processes seem to have a natural place in the other. We are plausibly doing the impossible.

Chapter 4

Changes and Connections

“The world is different now; it has changed completely” a voice states bluntly. Since when?” we want to know. “Since the last time you looked, whenever that was,” comes the reply.

The world is changing before our eyes. In the years between Univac and the IBMPC and the internet, many new inventions changed the world. But new inventions are not the main reason the world is different. What has really transformed the world are new connections between things.

Information is a guide to the connections between things.

The couplings between things have changed even where the things connected have not changed at all. New links have been forged between old things; Old relationships between things have been transformed. Changing connections between things are responsible for the radical change of the world.

•Where there was one connection now there are a

multiplicity.

The feedback loops have multiplied in the world; Everything has been connected to everything else.

•The speed at which communication travels over connections     has increased drastically.

That which took weeks before, takes minutes or seconds now. The interaction between ourselves and everything else in the world has speeded up.

• Indirect connections between the things have become direct.

Before we worked through inherited, natural connections. Today we intervene directly. Before, we bred our animals in real time through the natural routines of sex and birth. Now, bypassing the crude but dependable natural processes, we intervene directly by modifying genes in human time.)

Our connection to the very basic physical, biological and psychological processes which sustain us has changed. This rapid evolution of connections has changed the world thoroughly and completely.

Behind our own backs, we and the world have evolved into a new kind of system.

Chapter 5

Our old common sense

Our old common sense absorbed the world we lived in and transformed it into a kind of logic. Whenever people confronted the challenge of making sense out of something that was complex and organized like the groups and societies they belonged to, or the universe they lived in, they turned to common sense for a hint. And common sense suggested that this puzzling complex organization was like some type of machine, a simple machine like a clock or a complicated machine like an organism. The image of the machine was at the center of the old common sense.

When people tried to make sense out of the societies they lived in, the image common sense provided was the familiar, complicated machine that is the body. When people tried to make sense out of the social systems they lived in, the groups and societies they were a part of, common sense said, “these groups and societies are social organisms just like the body which is a physical organism. It’s as clear as the nose on your face.” When the universe itself challenged human beings to make sense out of it, common sense whispered “the universe is just like a big machine. It works like a big clock.” Common sense suggested that the parts of mysterious complex entities humans encountered were like the gears and levers of a clock, or like the arms and legs and a brain of a person.

Before Univac and the IBMPC and the Internet, people used images of some kind of machine when they wanted to call attention to the fact that a piece of the world was organized and whole. At the center of the old common sense were the dual images of clock and the organism. As a matter of common sense, both variations of the model of the machine— the clock and the organism— convey the essential idea of systemness, of a complex of interdependent parts whose interconnection is central to their function.

Through the metaphor of the machine, common sense asserts that the parts that make up a whole behave differently when they are connected to one another than when they are separated. In these images of simple or complex machines —clocks and organisms— common sense finds plain-on-the-nose-on your-face support for the perception that it is only when things are put together properly that any whole can function at all. Both of these images insist on the centrality and indispensability of arrangement and organization; both identify organization as a key to the way the world realizes itself.

The image of the complicated machine—the organism— intensifies the clock’s idea of a complete wholeness by adding the idea of self regulation and levels. The conception of a part whose function is the regulation of some aspects of the organism as a whole becomes obvious in the brain of every animal. And with the transformation of the organism into a metaphor for wholeness and organization, the notion of levels emerges clearly also.

Even the young boy who pulls the wings off a butterfly understands the notion of sub-systems of an organism. The idea that pieces combine with other pieces to form bigger parts— subsystems— which combine with other parts (subsystems) hierarchically to make up the organism imposes itself on our thoughts about wholes. The notion of levels emerges as we think about systems as if they were organisms.

Clock and organism set up the ground rules about how we can think about wholeness in the world. They establish what kinds of wholeness can exist in the world as a matter of common sense, how we should understand what being complete (as an obvious property of things) means.

Until the IBMPC and the Internet, wholeness and self regulation was enough for the metaphor at the center of common sense. It is not enough anymore.

Chapter 6

Entropy enlarged

Since Univac and the IBMPC and the Internet, the world has become less coherent, more filled with randomness— altogether less intelligible.

It is not simply the fact that the negative aspects of the world have multiplied, not merely the eruption of a senseless violence that has invaded nursery and school. It is not a matter of independence dissolving into homelessness, not even the flash fracturing of continents that has diminished the intelligibility of the world. It is not a matter of negatives empowered and enlarged. Overwhelmingly positive changes have had the same disorienting consequences.

The bending and roughing up of social distinction and hierarchy in the name of empowering the dispossessed—minorities, gays, women, the disabled, the newly arrived— has contributed a full measure of disorientation. The rationalization and re‑engineering of the multinational corporation with its corresponding reinterpretation of work and career has contributed to the general decline in the sense of meaningfulness in the world. And the wave of scientific developments, the computer and genetic engineering, has made the conviction that the world can be understood nearly untenable.

Almost every change had disorganized our understanding and confounded our common sense. It is not the world in its rare and exotic moments that has become bewildering. It is the normal world, the everyday, boring, tedious, humdrum, ordinary world that has become almost unintelligible. Our common sense says that in the future, as things get better they will start to make more sense. It is not true. The better things get, the less sense they will make.

In the future, the faster we run the further we will get left behind: the more we achieve, the less we will accomplish. The world is no longer a sensible place. Our world has become opaque and inexplicable.

There has been a basic change in the logic of things.

It is not the scale or scope of changes that has sucked meaning from the world. What has changed is the logic of things. The new symmetries of the world outstrip our capacity to make sense out of them. Using the models of machines, of clock and organism, common sense cannot make sense out of the new logic that is beginning to dominate the world.

The un-intelligibility of the world is not the world’s fault. It is the fault of the mechanism we use to make sense out of it. It is common sense’s fault. Common sense is exhausted and used up.

Chapter 7

Why things don’t make sense anymore.

The clock and organism models turn out to be variations on the same themes. They recast, redecorate the same figures and patterns.

There are differences between the clock as a simple machine and the organism as a complicated one. Whereas the parts of a clock —as any mechanism—retain their coherence and individual states of existence when someone takes the clock apart— when the whole they comprise is disassembled— the parts of an organism decay and spoil when the whole which they make up dies. When they are amputated from the body they make up, the appendages and organs of an organism retain for a while their character as parts. Their form persists. They degrade slowly. The ability to function is often restorable or repairable. For organisms, the idea of limited independence, of a constrained existence of the parts that make up the whole is still a reasonable notion.

Common sense tells us that if the whole is disassembled the parts retain their essential existence.

To our old common sense, if the whole is more than the sum of its parts it is not much more.

The box of gears on the watchmaker’s desk provides proof of the conclusion our old common sense draws from these metaphors for systems. But in the world we live today, the idea of the independent existence of parts, the even-partial separability of parts from whole they make up is just false.

The parts of modern systems only exist as parts of the systems they compose. Apart from this whole they make up they shed the costumes we recognize them by. Separated from this system, they have only a virtual, mock existence.

The box of gears, some broken, some worn, on the clock maker’is desk represents old systems.

There are no gears in the modern watchmaker’s box of gears.

Chapter 8

New systems

A new image will convey what modern systems are about.

The clock; Imagine a ticking, traditional looking, clock with a transparent face. Hands revolve telling time. We can see, behind revolving hands and the face, gears and springs. A familiar, sensible, commonsensical, clock. Take the mechanism out of the case and take the clock apart. Suppose, as each piece is taken out of the machine— each gear, each lever, each spring and rod— it changed into instructions for making the part. Imagine that when you took the clock apart you did not get parts of a clock— you did not get the gears and springs visible when the clock was working— what you got as you pulled each part out of the whole it made up were—instructions for how to make the spring, make the gear.

This is a description of the modern digital clock which has chips for gears and levers and springs, diodes for a face, and moving patterns of light for hands. Now, reassemble this strange clock. Imagine that as the instruction for how to make each part is connected to the instructions for how to make other parts, as each set of instructions is reinserted into the whole from which it was taken, the instructions change back into the part itself.

This is a picture of the systems that make up the world in which we live. The new systems in the world carry the principle of the development of organisms to its full extent;

There are no parts separate from the system they make up. The parts of a system only exist as parts of the system when they are put together; When the system is disassembled, the parts no longer have an independent existence as parts. They change into something quite different.

What is the significance of this? We are the parts of the groups, or the social systems we make up. Inside these systems we are different from what we are outside of the systems. When we leave these systems we loose the existence we had within them and become something quite different.

We have not quite recognized the consequences of this fact. As we belong to more and more systems as we are linked to more and more systems, we are ourselves becoming multiple sets of differences, becoming and changing as we enter and exit different systems. In a sense this has always been true. But as the systems, we are part of become more like the digital and less like the mechanical watch, we ourselves are subtly changing. We are becoming more like instructions for selves than independent, coherent beings.

Chapter 9

Old Metaphors and New Systems

The old metaphors, the clock and the organism no longer provide us with an appropriate invisible template that lets us grasp and manipulate the new systems that have come into existence.

Common sense which embodies the old metaphors of clock and organism no longer lets us move effortlessly around the world we live in, seeing what is there to see, knowing what have to know, no longer lets us navigate our familiar world casually.

The old metaphors no longer provide us with a map to the hidden territories in which we dwell, to the mysteries of the world we circumnavigate.

The old metaphors of clock and organism, no longer let common sense map the chaotic buzz of the world onto a felt, organized constellation which is always present but never visible. The world we live in is, like the new digital clock, a whole with virtual parts.

The world is changing. We need a new common sense with a new image at its center, a new metaphor for grasping the changed connections between things, a metaphor which will make the new logic at the center of the everyday world, the new symmetries that characterize our world sensible, plain as the nose on our face.

The image at the heart of a new emerging common sense is information.

To the new common sense that is materializing, to the common sense with information at its center, it makes perfect sense that any system, any whole, when disassembled, does not break into the parts that are apparent and obvious when you look at the system when it is operating.

The parts of any system come into existence only when the whole comes into being: They exist only as long as the whole exists. Wholes and parts mutually determine one another. More, they mutually enable, empower and manifest one another.We need a new metaphor, a new tag and a new image for a new common sense. Information is that metaphor. The common sense which will develop around that metaphor will define our times.

That common sense will tell us that the parts of our modern world cannot be thought about as gears or limbs, the whole cannot be conceived of, or felt as if it was an assemblage of gears or limbs or subsystems of an organism. The most real of our systems, the most tangible of them are spook systems, virtual systems. Treating them as if they were some sort of a machine —a clock or an organism— is a misunderstanding of what the world is about and reduces our ability to deal with them. This is the message of the new common sense.

Chapter 10

Why now, why information, why me?

There is a long answer to these questions and a short one. The long answer traces the development and interaction of science and technology and economics and social organization from the middle ages to yesterday. The short answer is the computer.

Before the computer only animals processed information. No machine‑‑ no matter how complex‑‑ could generate, produce, process and act on information. For the first time in human experience we have developed a machine which processes information.

Many people are not impressed with computers because they compare their ability to process information to human capacities for processing information. In that comparison, the machines fall short. It is the wrong comparison. We should be comparing the computer to stones, to bridges, to steam engines, to bacteria or paramecium. What we should notice is the fact that for the first time a device can work with information the way humans work with information.

This means also that machines can control other machines the way we control other human beings — on the basis of information. Information is coming to the fore because physical systems are being called into being by information. Physical systems are assembled in the real world by information. Machines are being connected to one another by information managed by computers.

It is important to be clear about what this means.

It means that pieces of machinery are being connected to one another by information links rather than rods and pulleys. Systems are being managed and controlled by information. The links that connect one machine to another are information links, established by communication, controlled by computers.

Information is substituting for physical connections, for rods, levers and pulleys. The physical connections between things are controlled, organized and held in place by digital communication connections, by messages.

Physical systems — machinery, devices, factories — are becoming like intimate groups, like conversations.

So what: What difference does all of this make?

So: People are being separated and divorced from their actions. This separation of agent from agency is taking place rapidly. Human beings are acting nowadays by calling forth demons and wizards— byte sized chunks of computer programs‑‑ which scurry out along networks and carry out the requests of computer users by turning machines on and off.

So what? So, in the past humans beings had to babysit their machines. Without a human being directly guiding it, a machine stopped. The most complicated machine failed unless a human being guided, supplemented its action. That is no longer true. The action in the world is being done by computers and computer controlled machines. Humans control things by setting computers in motion.

So what? So, frequently we do not know exactly what these demonic apprentices are doing, how that are accomplishing the tasks we are setting them doing. We care about and control only the output. Humans have lost control of the processes by which their desires are realized, the way their needs are satisfied. Increasingly, we are not setting up processes which accomplish the ends we desire. More and more we are implementing processes‑which‑determine‑the‑processes that determine the outcome we want. We regulate the action of these invisible, communication agents by indicating how well the output corresponds to what we want.

The level of human control has shifted up a level. We have more power but less control. We have been pushed further back in the chain of command.

One consequence of this is that almost nothing is fixed in our world. The work we need done is accomplished by virtual organizations called forth to carry out the job. These organizations only live only as long as the job takes. They take their shape from the task that needs to be done. Afterward, they dissolve and other organizations are put in their place. Virtual teams, temporary alliances are put together on the spot and dissolved after they have done their work.

Information is the metaphor and model that makes sense out of the world. The characteristics of information are becoming the characteristics of the world around us. The greater degree of connectedness the computer provides, the directness of computer connection, the density of connections, the fact that feedback loops are multiplying, that everything influences everything else instantaneously has made the world itself like information.

Chapter 11

A Perspective on information

The next few Chapters may seem like nonsense. It isn’t so. Think about this:

If you want to dream, you must first go to sleep. You must shut out the routine common sense, rational thinking of everyday life. You can’t see a movie if the management keeps the lights on in the theater. To see images on the screen the lights that let you find your seat must be shut off. You can only see the stars when the light of the sun is removed. The light of a single close sun overwhelms the light of galaxies of suns further away.

Seeing some things keep you from seeing others: knowing some things keeps you from knowing others. As the examples of dreaming, watching a movie and seeing the stars make clear, this is a practical matter. There is nothing esoteric or mystical about it. To see the point that this Chapter is making you have to block out exactly the light that you need to maneuver around the everyday world, to put on your underwear, to drive to the mall. Practically this means that if you want to understand what we are talking about you are just going to give up some of the very rational very intelligent, very commonsensical ideas that you use to make sense out of the everyday world you live in. Nothing mysterious. It is just that: you can’t look at the movie we are projecting if you keep staring at the old, flickering, silent movie that is showing in the movie theater in your head.

It’s not the fact that the world doesn’t make sense that confuses us, it’s the fact that the sense it makes doesn’t make sense.

Information has exploded as a practical reality. It is crouching, poised to spring out as the key conceptual tool for the 1990’s and beyond. Information is becoming the shared framework for understanding social and personal transactions, the foundation shared by art and science. Like the mechanical clock and the organism before it, information is becoming the common metaphor for comprehending the world.

Chapter 12

Assumptions About Information

The new common sense will reform itself around the image of information as a pearl takes shape around a grain of sand. But before this can happen the conception of information must be clarified and refined.

Our current understanding of information is based on several outmoded assumptions about information.

•We assume for instance that information is attached to the world at both ends.

•We assume that information is about something.

•We assume that information was produced by someone for someone, that it goes somewhere and that someone receives it.

Like most of men’s assumptions about women and parent’s assumptions about children, these assumptions are no longer true. They have not been true since Univac and the IBMPC and the Internet.

We can no longer assume, for instance, that information is attached to facts about the world. Things are changing so quickly that by the time most information is produced, transmitted and received the facts the information represent no longer exist. Most information floats free from the world.

Nor can we assume that information originates in human action, or is produced by human beings for human beings. Much information, broadcast helter skelter by routers, over networks by automatic dialers via fax machines, goes everywhere and ends up nowhere in particular; Blended with desire and displaced, mis-remembered facts, it is sucked into the black holes of personal information managers and do lists or lost in disconnected or broken telecommunication devices. It is discarded and read by no one, or spewed into the hands and minds of people for whom it becomes golden noise, who misread it. And increasingly, the information we are struggling desperately to make sense out of is created , collected and organized by computers, not people. Not only are computers the source of considerable information but they are its intended target as well. Captured by a human beings, much information is unintelligible gibberish. We can no longer assume that information is attached to humans at either its origin or its destination.

Besides the direct assumptions we make about information there are assumptions about the rest of the world that we casually apply to information because we believe it belongs to that world, that information can be treated as an object in the world, out there, a thing like other things. While many of these assumptions might be true it is certain that many of them will turn out to be false; that what holds for much of the world does not hold for information. For instance, we believe that given a closed system we cannot take out of the system more than we put into it. Yet as far as information is concerned this may be false. It may be reasonable to suppose that we may constantly mine more information from a system than is contained in it. In the universe of information perpetual motion machines may exist. There is no magic in this, merely a misunderstanding about information; information is not out there. Information is a triangulation, a connection, neither here nor there.

Only human beings can squeeze into the space between information and what information is about.

Chapter 13

Data, Information, Knowledge

Data, information, and knowledge appear to be linked in a tight hierarchy. Everything starts out with data, with facts. Information is made up of pieces of data, of facts. Knowledge consists of organized information. Information cumulates and knowledge emerges.

The only thing wrong with this picture is that it misses the point. Data is data in light of information and knowledge. Information exists only in the context of knowledge and data. Knowledge exists only emersed in data and information. None of these come from one of the others: they come mutually from each other.

We have always been able to enter into circular, closed loops by making an arbitrary entry — by breaking into the loop somewhere — and making our way from there. We were, until now, always able to dissociate the whole from the parts that made the whole up, and the parts from the whole they made up and deal with each separately then put them together again. This is not longer possible. Every point has become a location on a non linear path.

Information:

Information is the middle passage between data and knowledge.

Consider that: Information comes into being only as someone, or something, becomes informed. And we know someone is informed only by how they act. The act of becoming informed cannot be achieved without information, yet information only comes into being as someone— or some device like a computer— becomes informed. Information does not exist independent of someone or something becoming informed, and potentially at least, acting.

AND (of course) . . .

A dead chicken is just a dead chicken but information about a dead chicken is something else entirely

The chicken lying dead on the supermarket counter is one thing, an anonymous dead chicken lying dead on the road it was crossing on its way to becoming a joke is quite another. But in neither of these cases should the dead chicken be confused with information about dead chickens. Information about something and the something it is information about are two different things. Information is an object displacing, value-adding experience. Without the potential for choosing, without real choice and action, there is no information; but without information there can be no action.

Information and action are intertwined and inseparable. The potential for action— even the possibility of action— liberates information. And information is necessary for even the most insignificant action. But this connection between action and information has changed.

Chapter 14

What is information?

Information is managed chaos. Whenever and wherever chaos is controlled, information appears. Chaos constrained appears as choice. That is what information is about.

What is information, really.

Information provides an actor with the potential for doing something, the possibility of choosing. What does this mean? Choice, as realizable possibility, is universally considered a measure of information. In the past it was all information was about because ‘how much’ was all we could grasp when we dealt with information. But there is of course more.

Without the potential for action, without choice, there is no information. And without information there can be no effective, or efficient, action. The circle is complete. It is also interesting that when I expand my choices in the world, I enlarge the store of information that the world contains, I increase it. As long as the choices are real then information grows!

Really, Really, what is information?

Information is not the kind of thing that is; of course that does not make it the kind of thing that isn’t either.

We can say that something ‘is’ when we can place it in time and space.

Information has no simple location in time and space. It does not even have a complicated one. Its existence is an irreducible betweeness stuck between spaces and times. It is always a relationship between action and an actor and a world in process. Like love, information is the kind of thing exists in a constant state of becoming. Information is not something that is because it is a set of connections and relationships. Like betweenness information is not anywhere.

Information is always a middle passage, a middle passage between data and knowledge, between actors or agents and their actions.

It emerges when agents and action and objects in a situation come together. It is not distinct from someone or something being informed or what it informed about.

Information comes into view only as someone acts, and becomes informed. This is the answer.

But what is the question?

How does a dead chicken get to be information about a dead chicken? How does it stay information about a dead chicken instead of becoming a television advertisement for a chicken farmer. These questions get to the essence of the matter of information becoming.

Information and uncertainty go hand in hand

Information resolves uncertainty, at least at its fundamental, or primary, level. But someone or something has to be uncertain at some time. Information is nothing more than the measure of uncertainty resolved. The more uncertain we are about something, the more a message about it informs us. The more certain we are about something, the less choice we have, the less information any message about the thing conveys.

I can know something. I can know I know it. I can know what it is I know and I can know I know that I know it.

It is also true that I can be uncertain about something and uncertain about what I am uncertain about and uncertain about my uncertainty about being uncertain. Each of these ‘knowings’ is different in the same way as data is different from information is different from knowledge. Of course, knowing something isn’t exactly the same as having information about it.

Chapter 15

Data

If information is managed chaos, data is restrained anarchy. Data is an illusion, an abstraction on information. Data is unsorted, unrelated, potential for information. Data cannot exist without being associated —from the start— with information which it makes up, which is nothing more than the organization of collections of data. Context is the key to grasping data and information is the context of data. Take away the context and you have less than an illusion of information, a shadow of a shadow. Data itself is useless. It becomes information when brandished, when it is used to strike something.

If this makes sense then you can think about this.

Information can only be communicated from person to person as a stream of data.

The ultimate irony is that only way we can communicate information is by communicating the data embedded and contained in it. While it is understood as information by the communicator it moves to the receiver as a data stream. But the receiver can only receive it tacitly, as if it were a piece of information. Data, information and knowledge are locked in an endless cycle of becoming. Data becomes information which becomes knowledge which becomes information which . . . . Knowledge is information imprisoned and data incarcerated.

Becoming is a continuous process, not a state of affairs. Data, information and knowledge are caught in the whirlwind of becoming. There are caught in a continuous blur of interconnecting change.

The path to information is always around data, not through it.

One does not get to information in a straight line. The path is always curved, always doubles back upon itself and dead ends. Data represents what is taken to be known; what is taken to be unknown but believed to be knowable is —information. Data is like a series of shoals that must be navigated. Data is always on the verge of becoming something else. Potential is not static and it does not have a place.

Chapter 16

Knowledge

Eighty percent of what is valid knowledge today was not known yesterday, and seventy percent will be forgotten tomorrow. Knowledge is information being manipulated. Knowledge which seems to be manufactured out of information is really the matrix for producing information. Knowledge is what we call the factory which produces information and data. Knowledge consists of data and information and an essential something else. What the something else is difficult to say but here is an attempt to say it: the something else is the organization of data and information, their arrangement.

While we have recognized information, as a separate existence, we have come to understand that it is as indefinite as a photon. It is only late in the twentieth century that we have come to the realization that information should be viewed in such a way. The search for absolutes is gone. The search for relative absolutes is gone. We are in the time of absolutely relative relativities, the age of nearly complete ambiguity!

Information is continuously changing and unstable; it ceaselessly alters knowledge

Which leads us to point out one of the unique attributes of man

•Give us sufficient data and we can come up with an idea about anything

To which an appropriate response is:

•Ideas change nothing in the world except the world itself.

Until recent times information was buried inside choices. No one recognized the idea for what it was, no one noticed the independent reality of information. It was the multiplication of the possibilities created by choice and the demand for rationality that focused our attention on information, that forced the individuation of information, the separation of the idea of information from choice. And it was computers with their digitalization of information that pushed us over the edge.

Once it has been received, a message repeated is noise; any collection of words is a message only once.

Chapter 17

Complaints

You may feel you have been hustled. It may seem that we promised you a world tour of information and produced a cheap, badly packaged day excursion into words.

Let us try to put your complaint into words.

WRONG, WRONG, WRONG. How can you say data and facts are illusions? Every day of our lives each of us is forced to deal with the world as it is, not the way we would like it to be. The death of someone we love, the illness of a child, being fired from a job, being sick are realities not illusions.

Data and facts belong to the world that is out there. Believing that there are no facts is a foolishness that only philosophers can afford. Believing that the data we get from the world is an illusion only works if you live in an ivory tower. The rest of us who live in the real world can’t afford the luxury of believing that. If we do, we slip on the first patch of ice on the sidewalk.

Every business is struggling to collect data on customers and sales. Every scientist in every laboratory in the world is collecting data trying to find out the facts. The Guinness book of records, the world almanac, all the spread sheets on all of the computers of the world are overflowing with data and facts.

Each of us has our essential facts about the world, facts about self, historical facts, facts about events that happened in our lives. For each of us the critical facts are unique and different. But each of us clings to the facticity of our lives. For each of us that factuality is clear and simple and definite. These facts, these data, are the substance of our lives. We know them without doubt. There is no tinge of dubiousness, no uncertainty about them.

To say that data is an illusion is just nonsense. (That is what common sense says and which is why common sense can’t make sense out of the world.)

Response

It is true that until now, only philosophers had the luxury of arguing about the facts of the world, whether there were facts that were real or out there. Now, the rest of us are drawn into that argument as a practical matter.

The changes the computer has wrought in sensing the world, in manufacturing facts, in compiling and organizing the world has very practically changed the nature of facts in the world.

Can we escape from the factuality of the world?

Facts are, in common sense view, what is true about the world At any given time we can describe the world. The description that makes sense consists of just the facts of the world.

So the facts that the roof leaks, that my wife’s husband is having an affair are facts. They will not go away just because we refuse to pay attention to them. So the fact that company A is preparing to buy company B so that the price of their shares are going to rise is a fact of the world. In this sense there are facts about the world that are independent of our think so.

All of us recognize quickly enough that many of the facts of the world do not have this character.

• If enough people think a fact is true then the consequences of the belief bring the fact into existence.

• If we deny the existence of the fact, the consequences of the fact (which we take for granted or are likely not to think about too carefully or too closely) may not hold. So many religions can change the fact that if one is poor one is going to feel deprived by a construction; being poor now means that one is beloved of God.

If we look closely at some important aspects of fact the certainty and facticity of the world dissolves. There are a number of different kinds of facts. There are facts, there are relevant facts. There are significant facts there are central facts.

We can fill a thousand books with facts about each of us or anything in the world. Like the infinitude of sentences that we can utter facts are innumerable. Between any two there is another; given any two one can create a third representing the fact that both of the facts are true and then a next saying three are true together and so on. But most of these facts are irrelevant, absolutely useless except as facts. Some of them are significant given our purposes, given other facts we take as relevant about the world. What does this tell us about the factual character of the world?

The world consists of the relevant and potentially relevant facts about it. Data is significant only in a framework that establishes what are significant facts, what are relevant facts. We want to say that facts are given by contexts, by purposes, by the frameworks we use to generate (to notice and identify) the facts.

Two facts joined are not the same as two facts taken separately. You can change any fact (change the significance, meaning, of any fact.) Any fact can be changed when it is adjoined to another fact. Facts do not stay the same when they are put together with other facts. The fact that we cannot fly means one thing when it is put together with the fact that the airplane has been invented or that genetic engineering is possible. The fact that we cannot fly means quite another thing when it is put together with the fact that anti gravity devices are impossible (or possible.) We take facts as units. But they are not units. They are parts of units which like the digital clock make sense only when they are aspects of larger systems, when it is recognized that they cannot stand alone, never do stand alone. This means there are not individual facts in the world but only packages, parcels and clumps of facts. Facts then exist only collectively. No fact taken alone is a fact. Only in clumps or sets does an individual fact have a distinct existence meaning. Facts are real only as parts of a system of facts which itself is real only as a part of another system of facts.

We can see this only when the world is changing, only when the contexts that were the usual contexts of facts, the usual backgrounds of facts, are changing. Facts are the limit of what we of what we can see in the world and can’t change.

The smallest fact is really a pair of facts, like pages in a book which face one another. The hardest, most real of the facts always shows two faces and allows at least two interpretations. No fact exists in splendid isolation. An isolated fact is smoke reflected in a mirror.

The loss of a job is a multitude of facts. If you lose a job, you can interpret each of these ‘facts’ in many different ways. Each of these interpretations allows you to see yourself and the world in a slightly different way. The loss of a job appears one way when construed as an opportunity and another if seen as the loss of income. In the context of a rich, religious belief the death of a loved one is quite a different experience than that death seen in a hard cold materialist conception of the world.

This is the stuff of every self-help, change-your-life-book ever written. But given the changes in the world, today it is the hardest, coldest reality we confront in the world.

There is the world out there. Then there is our construction of that world. The hardest of facts is a construction under constraints. A fact is process in vivo.

Does this mean that we can believe anything we want, that no facts are real, that no information is definite? Definitely not! We are constrained because our facts have to work together like the parts of our digital clock. Facts and beliefs and perceptions have to fit together if we are going to act in the world.

In making sense out of reality we have to start in the middle, and have to have a picture of the end in order to produce the beginning. If you believe that we begin at the beginning and move in a line to the end—rather than beginning in the middle and finding the beginning through the end, today’s world is not going to make much sense to you.

When we take up the question of data and information paradox glares in our face and blinds us. As science churns faster and faster, the concepts —the words and terms — we use to describe the world changes rapidly. Facts are statements in words of the way we understand the world to be. But as the words we use to talk about the world change so does our perception of the world. What we see when we look at the world today is not what our ancestors saw when they looked at the world; it is not even what we saw when we looked at the world yesterday.

With change so rapid, the world does not stay still long enough for use to have confidence in the facts we accumulate. What was true when we identified something as a fact is often no longer true when we come back to use the fact to make our way in the world.

Facts seem to be based solidly and embedded in our sense. But we have machines for making photographs of things that never existed and for producing sounds that never were. We have techniques for modifying genes and creating creatures that never existed in nature. These machines and techniques change the character of what we can say we see and taste and feel and be. The drugs which affect our loving and our sexuality influence what we can assume and say about loving and sex. The roiling world of business and technology devours careers and occupations. A changing world changes what it means to be feminine, what it means to be generous, what courage means —what the facts of the world are.

The flood of information, the multiple sources, the dependence on machines to provide information means that facts have become intangible. Winning an important race now depends on a timing apparatus which we can only check up on only by using other pieces of apparatus that we can check up on only by using other pieces of apparatus that …. Similarly we depend on devices for sensing things we cannot sense without them and that we can check up on using other devices for sensing things that we can check up on using.... The chains have become so long that our senses are at the end of nearly infinite paths; and the paths are not linear. Faith and trust have become an integral part of facts in the modern world.

Even in our personal lives facts change as we learn more about ourselves, as we look back and forward. When life was short and stable, facts had the stillness to harden. What we believed were the facts are altered as we live longer and change careers and life styles in mid-life, understand more about who we have become.

Facts are an endangered species.

Data is information in its potential form, steam before it is frozen into ice or, depending on your perspective, ice on its way to becoming steam. When you look the facts square in the eye, you see the reflection and shadows of the information and knowledge which has already shaped it.

The upshot of all of this is that facts appear only after the fact, become data as they are used to manufacture information, made to produce knowledge.

Facts are what illusion aspires to be.

But it is true we have to start somewhere. Illusions penetrate reality to different depths. There are more primitive and less primitive illusions, more public and less public illusions, less processed and more processed illusions. There are more primitive and less primitive data, more public and less public data, less processed and more processed data. Illusion is too simple. There are mirages, tricks, error, mis-perceptions, misconceptions. Data can be all these things.

The fact is; we have to start somewhere but we never start at the beginning. Like the gears of a digital clock which are gears only when they make up the working clock, potential facts become facts only when they are used in the company of the other potential facts to do something. And they stay facts only when they are used as part of a collection of facts and beliefs and perceptions.

Chapter 18

The age of information

It is well known that we live in the age of information: We are constantly telling one another we do. We are told that the most significant innovation of our time, surpassing the invention of the printing press, is the computer, which is a device for making, collecting, storing and processing information. We are told the key to success is education, which is nothing more than advanced training in the processing of information. Is this true? Yes. But what is more true is:

We live, simultaneously, in several centuries.

We own a 1999 model of some car and this clearly marks us as late 20th century folk but the computer chips distributed through the vehicle identify us as early 21st century people. Yet the engine that drives it is a 19th century device. Our desires for a car, the reasons we buy one we share with fifth century peasants. And in our use of the car, our driving, we are closer to 1st century Mongols. So much for living in the 20th century.

We don’t think clearly about things

Most of it is not our fault. It is our biological imperative, the way nature made us. Our minds are constructed so that we can pick from a narrow set of choices very quickly. We can distinguish the lion from the lamb quickly enough to eat and avoid being eaten. We have a very profound sense of pattern, organization and order. But this capacity is hidden from us. It operates in the background, out of awareness, as if the ability to sniff out patterns, organize ourselves and maintain some order was an embarrassment. It is certainly an embarrassment of riches.

Some of it is our fault. It is the way we have adjusted our lives to be able to spend as much time as we can being entertained during that fragment of time that we live in the 21st century. At the same time we ask what is that entertainment? It is the electronic technology, a technology that has two contradictory effects: the electronic technology squeezes the world in the middle. It makes us passive receptors at the same time that it ratchets up our activity level.

Chapter 19

Kinds of information: Introduction

We are surrounded by information from the time that we are conceived until we die — and according to more than one religion, even after we die. It appears to be an extension of the amniotic fluid in which we are nurtured. In this Chapter we explore one of the qualities of information, its homogeneity. Is all information the same? Is it true that once you’ve seen one piece of information you have seen it all?

Yes and no, yes and no.

No: My love’s eyes, the taste of her lips, her voice whispering sweet nothings in my ear, all tell me different things different though they are aspects of a unitary love.

Yes: the digitalization of information has made information in the world like information in the brain, all homogeneous electrical charges. It has made differences in information a matter of connections, placement and processing. In the brain’s compass, all of the senses are transmuted into the same kind of signals, just as the digitalization of information makes all information, Beethoven’s Ninth and Picasso’s Guernica, a collection of indistinguishable bits of information on a disk. On the CD ROM on which my love appears speaking sweet nothings, her voice and her appearance are collections of identical pits on the suface of a disk.

Yes and no. As we are making the world operate like our brain, neither yes nor no is simple anymore. It makes sense to believe that there are many different species of information. Essentially, species means kinds. We use the more biologically pitched word because it connotes stronger differences. ‘Species’ projects some sense of organization, something that has aspects of a hierarchy of form and matter. Being in a hierarchy also gives a sense of direction to movement: it can evolve and devolve.

Species of information may compete for belief or credibility, dominance or relevance. Thus, some information has a higher status and is preferred if there is a choice.

We know more than we can say but can’t say how much more.

This is evident every day of our lives. We often find ourselves speechless and angry over the fact that we know that we know something but cannot find the words to express it. Sometimes it is only necessary to relax and momentarily ignore the difficulty. Temporarily abandoning the struggle to express oneself is often enough bring what we had in mind into focus. We also surprise ourselves frequently by coming up with new or unique (at least to us) information without ever consciously considering it. Most often this happens when speaking triggers connections between information components never before revealed to the self. Teachers, researchers, public speakers and comedians experience this frequently. They often surprise themselves with their sagacity or wit.

We are dumber than we think but smarter than we know.

We know more than we can ever say, more than we can effortfully recover from ourselves. We know things that there is no chance of our ever recovering from our heads; we know that we know these things. We just do not know what it is we know anymore. Words take us just so far in the world but never, never far enough. But how far away we are from where we want and need to be is never clear to us.

In dealing with information level and context are critical.

There is information and information about information and information about information about information. This is just not word play. The most important difference between the various species of information is their ‘level.’ When someone provides us information we need to know how valid the information is and we need to think about what information we are using to tell us how valid it is.

Information is a function of the context created around any facts and data. Understanding itself is nothing more than an achieved rung of complexity. Participation in context, composition of context is open.

In the past, in classical logic, context was bipolar. A particular element was either part of context or it is not. But modern fuzzy logic, fuzzy arithmetic, fuzzy set theory, leaves room for grayness, for partial belonging, for being here or there to some degree. As the context is graying, information itself becomes gray.

If information is at the heart of any relationship/connection then, if we come up with the right context, we can extract enormous amounts of information. Making ones way in the world is a matter of discovering the right context to extract just the amount of information needed from whatever you encounter. The level of information is a matter of context also. Here we speak of higher levels when data provides the context for other data. Notice that ‘level’ is a matter of slight of hand. There is nothing in the quality of the data that establishes its level. It is the way it functions as context that defines its level. Science is observation and context (theory.) By adding levels in the world we’ve changed our world.

Remember:

Information is not an object, it is not a distinct, identifiable thing although it often looks that way.

Information is not anywhere, it exists only in relationship with its surroundings, in a specific space and time; it is an arrangement, not an object. As such, it does not exist independently of its surroundings, nor of people using it.

The information which seems to be in the encyclopedia isn’t there anymore than the moving images on the screen are there as we see them. There is a pattern of light on the movie screen. When we watch a movie we are constantly making those patterns into information and constructing people from them. The apparatus of seeing, our eyes and brains make what appears on the screen into images in our heads. Think about the Guinness book of records or the Encyclopedia Britannica in some dead language for which we have no Rosetta Stone. What information is there, for whom? And what information is there after we find the Rosetta Stone?

And for exactly the same reason information is not ‘in’ anyone’s head, certainly not ‘in’ the head of the person who uses it to do things in the world. Whatever is in our heads becomes information only as we make sense out of a situation and use what is in our heads when we do something. Of course, one thing we can do is to set down what we know that we know on paper. But even here what is in our heads represents information only as we set it down and can then interpret what we have set and associate it with knowledge. A number of neurological abnormalities demonstrate that what appears to us normally as an essential connection is a contingent one.

Context should be thought of as an intellectual network in which specific pieces of information are nodes in the complex set of connections. Information cannot be transmitted without a common language or symbol system as part of the communication process. It can only be transmitted if the sender has enough of a grasp of the reality of a specific segment of the information species to form it into an acceptable projection.

As paradoxical as it seems, information —and data and knowledge—is nowhere in time and space.

What complicates matters more is that: There is no such thing as a single, unique communication; messages exist in a bundles or packages

What was true of language has become true of the world: meaningless sounds are the foundation of the deepest thought. To get a single message out of the bundle or package you must actively pull it apart. This can only be achieved by first putting the bundle or package in context and then extracting a message. Context takes on an additional role when we look at information for it acts as a filter that allows a single message to emerge. Multiple messages from a single bundle or package are possible with shifts in context. To get the right message you must have the correct context. That is both the problem and the solution. Since we are all unique individuals with our own world of “contexts” it is virtually impossible to think of a bundle or package that cannot deliver a message.

Information can only be communicated as data and understood as knowledge;

Data, information and knowledge are all facets of the same thing. They are bound constructs of the human mind connected to the world outside the mind and to actions of the agents whose minds they are part of. They shift their locus of activity easily from node to another.

Chapter 20

Obituaries

An abundance of new things must be accompanied by an abundance of deaths of old things. The earlier Chapters of the book dealt with births. This Chapter deals with the deaths.

Obituary 1: An information death.

The gender wars have a new victim. Male information is dying; female information is taking its place. A new common sense demands a different kind of information to make sense out of the world.

Male information is the ordinary kind of information we are used dealing with every day. It is information in the form of facts standing alone and facing the world. Male information is dying but not because it does not tell us about the world. It does. Male information is dying because it does not tell about the world in the way we need to know about it.

What we are calling female information has not fully developed yet. But the rough outline of the form it is taking is clear. It is dynamic information, information that does not appear to be fixed, information that is always reforming, adapting to the new environments in which it is used as information. Female information is information with its connections marked in bright colors. The new information—of which hypertext is a good example— will present itself to us with its connections hanging out. Its exposed connectivity will be its most endearing feature.

There are two reasons why the ordinary kind of information we use to navigate our common sense world— the kind of information we identify with maleness— is dying.

One reason is that as the glut of information increases, as machines manufacture and compile and distribute information, we move further and further away from the senses, our eyes and ears, as sources of information. We no longer see where the information we need to do what we have to do comes from. We no longer can use the usual sensory checks and balances we need to feel comfortable about our beliefs. Trust, intuition, and more intangible, higher order aspects of information become more basic in our understanding of the world. We increasingly depend on information about information and information about information about information to make sense of the world.

A second reason for the death of ‘male’ information is that the computer has digitalized information. The computer has reduced information to a common denominator; to electronic charges, to bits and bytes in the same way the brain reduces sounds and sights, and memories to electronic charges in cells. It has provided a basis for finding a common denominator in the diversity of arts and sciences. Commonality, belongingness, and inclusiveness mark information in our time.

Chapter 21

More deaths

Obituary2: The death of the machine as we know it.

Every project involves an input of information and an input of effort. You have to know something and you have to work to transform that knowledge into reality. Every plan requires effort to carry it out. Information and knowledge has never been enough— until now.

In the past machines were devices to amplify human effort. But even with machines, ever project required considerable human labor. In the past, humans had to babysit machines, supervise them, control them. Every machine required a human operator and humans to arrange the materials for the machines to work on. The accumulated labor embodied in machines was not enough. No matter how large, no matter how powerful the machines we had were, an enormous input of labor was required to carry out any action.

But this is no longer so. Our technology has developed to the point where the machines are now able to be controlled by other machines— by computers. This means that the actual human effort necessary to carry out any human action has been reduced.

The ratio of effort to knowledge in any action has decreased.

There is another way of seeing this. Machines have changed. What machines did in the past was amplify human effort. What machines do now is transform information into effort.

Where before machines multiplied human effort now they are transforming information into action, transforming human thinking and information into the effort of other machines. The nature of human action in the world has changed. One reason why the old common sense no longer makes sense of the world is that the nature of even the simplest machines has changed. The metaphor at the heart of the old common sense has changed drastically.

Chapter 22

Another death

Obituary 3: The death of a philosophy.

One consequence of the changes in the logic that governs the organization of things today is the death of Zen as a living philosophy. What is the connection of Zen to information? Why is Zen dead as a philosophy? Who or what killed it?

Beyond Zen.

Writers in the west have used Zen as the epitome of an odd rationality, a method of concentration and a purposefulness swaddled in contradiction. Zen pointed to viable, living paradox that crowns our lives. Zen was always used to reach beyond our normal rationalities.

Zen has also appeared as an attitude, a stance against normal life and against normal rationalities. Whereas the metaphors of clock and organism map out the center of our world, the continents and rivers, Zen exposes the boundaries, the edges of that world.

Zen represents a way of thinking about the world, a certain stance toward it. It epitomizes a reaching for a calm in the midst of the confusion of ordinary perceptions. Zen is a way of penetrating beyond the confusion of everyday life, a way of touching the simplicity that in the world that is always disguised, hidden by the normal noise in everyday life.

Zen has been held up as an ultimate way of non-thinking about the world; the ultimate anti-tactic. Zen stands for purpose through anti-purpose, concentration by dis-attention; For many of us in the West, Zen was a hidden escape route, a last resort. When things got hairy we knew there was still a way out.

One side effect of the contemporary changes in common sense and information is that Zen as a philosophy, as a fall back position for making sense of the world is dead. We have gone beyond Zen.

Our everyday lives, bobbing in a sea of information, have carried us beyond Zen. Our normal life forces on us the attitude that Zen forced induced earlier generations. Our daily realities impose an absolutely Zen like, non-linear mode of non-thinking. Information has brought us beyond Zen.

The changes in information have killed Zen by bringing it into ordinary life; Without meditation, without priests, without clapping hands, Zen has been absorbed into our everyday perspectives: it is dead as a separate philosophy.

Chapter 23

Levels

Every species of information is integrated into a full set of hierarchies, an integrated set of levels, a comprehensive set of contexts. We are always playing with a full deck; it is impossible to play with less than a full deck.

Two things make trouble. First there are always more than one hierarchy involved. Second, the deck we are playing with may be virtual. Like much of what we are saying this summary may appear ambiguous and obscure. But there is a very practical point it is making.

Whenever we see any fact, recognize any datum we are always using a complete frame of reference to locate it. To identify anything we need to provide a context for it, an framework in which it is set. We identify it using a certain vocabulary. We see it in the course of certain actions which have some context of purpose around it. This material is the full deck we are talking about. But this full deck is usually invisible. We use it without thinking about it. And the full deck is extensive. It has to handle all of the world that we are not dealing with at any time. Usually it is the default deck we work with. That is the only piece of the deck we are worrying about is the few cards in front and in back of where we are now.

The problem:

•We said that context is everything; context and hierarchy makes a piece of information determinate;

•We said that there are multiple contexts available for every piece of data.

•We said that the parts of a system change when they become part of a system.

•We said that when they are taken out of the system they are not what they are when they are in the system. Outside the system they have a virtual existence.

•We said that everything has become connected to everything else. That we are connected to more and more elements of the world. That we ourselves are members of more and more systems.

•We remind you that we are the parts of these systems.

Of course, the deck can be stacked against us; and, of course, the deck we are playing with may be the wrong deck. We can have trouble recognizing the relevant hierarchy or its subdivisions and we always have problems with context into which the hierarchy fits.

We call a deck stacked against us ignorance, lack of education, stupidity or want of good communication skills.

Some levels may be only sketched in or outlined. Others may be taken for granted, assumed, unconscious, out of awareness. Nonetheless, we are always playing with a full deck, with all of the needed equipment. The difficulty is making sure we are working with the right complete deck for our purposes.

A secret is information on its way up in the world; gossip is information on its way down.

Context is all. But an additional element is added which is value and validity. Value rears its ugly head once again for information decreases in value as more and more people receive the message. The value of information can increase if the context changes and boosts the relevancy information to the group. Information without a good context is gossip.

Today’s gossip is tomorrow’s secret.

Chapter 24

Chickens

As soon as you tell children what a thing IS, they bombard you with questions. If you tell a child what a chicken is, or point one out to them and name it, he/she immediately bombards you with chicken questions.

The more information you receive the more you need. The reflexive response to the receipt of information is a demand for more information. This is a need, a compulsion, not a desire or whim. Adults do not recognize the compulsion because it has been worked out of them on the road to adulthood. In modern society information is highly addictive. It is so addictive that a warning should be placed on it.

Warning! Information may be hazardous to your health.

One of the things a child immediately tries to find out when they are told for the first time that something is a chicken or what a chicken is, “Are there different kinds of chickens?”

Children rarely ask the question directly. They ask,”Is a horse a chicken?” then in rapid fire “Is a mosquito a chicken?” and then why, then, “How is a mosquito different from a chicken?” They will continue to ask for differences until the adult they are dealing with says, “Stop. Wait a minute!” which immediately tells the child that they have gone over a line. What line is it? The child has learned what the outer limits are, the far boundaries of the idea of chicken. Then they loose interest in chickens entirely and bother you about something else. The reason their interest falls off is that they have acquired the information they need to make sense out of ‘chicken.’

The point of this is that you need information to make sense out of information. You can only make sense out of information if you have and use other information.

You need both information and an information context to make sense out of information.

We will try to explain this behavior later, but here is a preview. To make sense out of anything children need a context and a context for the context. The identities the child proposes and the “Why” is a child’s request to you to define a context and contexts of contexts . The similarities to things they name as possible identities of an object, —mosquitos and horses in our example—identifies an immediate context for them. Once they have this, they have pinned ‘chicken’ down finely enough to go about their business.

When we are learning something new we are all children again, We expect you want to know what kinds of information there are. If you are really following carefully, you might be asking yourself how something that cannot ‘be’ in the usual sense, can have kinds. It is a good question. We admire your curiosity.

Chapter 25

Kinds of information continued

Instead of talking about kinds of information we want to talk about species of information. It is a maneuver, a tactic, a stylistic turn. Species are just a name for a kind but as you know from your reading so far we have qualified this a bit. One may ask: What different kinds of information are there?

Information differs by content, by what it is about. Some information is about lightning, other information is about lightning bugs. There is information about chickens, information about frogs, information about time and space. Of course there is information about information.

Information differs by level; there is information and information about information. Information about information (meta-information) appears as ideas or concepts or propositions. But almost every message is taken as containing information about itself; information is always reflexively used to establish its own level.

Information differs in terms of its source. The form of the original data that stimulates a message often dictates the level of inquiry and context in which the information is dealt with. Some information about a dead chicken may have come from killing it or seeing a chicken die. Other information may have come indirectly, from hearing from a friend that it died or from seeing Frank Purdue holding up a processed, cooked and packaged chicken on TV and making an inference. Thus, there is direct information gathered from first hand experience, and information at any level of indirection and distance from its source.

Information differs in terms of its form. Information may come as sense data, as a written message, a picture, a set of punches on cards or electrical or magnetic values on a chip. But it is critical to remember that once in the brain all information is in the same form. Digitalization mimics the way the brain handles information. No matter what the original form of information was, in the brain becomes a pattern of neural impulses; in a computer it is a series of charges on chips.

In the brain information is homogeneous and indistinguishable; in the brain information takes only one form. But outside of the brain information takes many forms. Each different form identifies a species or subspecies of information.

Information differs in value. Some information is invaluable, other information less valuable and other information is worthless. Why is this. The value of information is what it lets you do; action is primary.

Timeliness and scarcity affect the value of information While the basic structure of a piece of information is not affected by time, timeliness is what makes some information more valuable than other information. Scarcity is another aspect of information value. Sometimes, the more scarce the information, the fewer people who know about it, the more valuable information often becomes. But this is not always true; often, the more people know about it the more valuable a piece of information is. Scarcity in a positive or negative form is related to the value of information.

Information differs in the use to which it is put. There is information that is practically useful and other information that is practically inapplicable. And the information may be used for good or for ill. While we may attempt to put a value on information based on practicality we must remember the context yet again. For information that is impractical today may not be so tomorrow or in another context. Thus, the difference is based more on the time and place of use than on the inherent value of the information.

Information differs in the way it corresponds to reality. We consider some information to be true and other information to be false although it may have been true in the past, or may become true in the future. But true and false are only one kind of correspondence. True and false represent an association of information and source of information. What this means is that we accept some information —when it is contextualized by other information —to correspond to what we take as the source of information. But there are different ways of corresponding and these are also matters of information.

There are facts about the world; there is gossip, there is rumor and mis-information.

Chapter 26

Differences

Does all of this make a difference? If so, what difference does it make? Information calls our attention to a feature of the world that we have been able to overlook until now. Until now (with science leading the way) we have always solved big problems by breaking them into a collection of smaller component problems and solving each of the smaller problems in turn, individually as if it existed separately from the big problem of which it was a part. A solution to the big problem then consisted of splicing together the solutions to all of the little problems that we had solved separately. We solved the problems of the parts and get the whole for nothing.

With information we cannot pull off this slight of hand. We must come to terms with wholes as utilitarian objects. We cannot longer defer the issue of wholes until the problem of the part is dealt with. We cannot separate out a part from a whole and deal with it ignoring the whole from which it was taken. There are no longer simple parts; there are only part-wholes, The simplest unit we can deal with is a part with the whole of which it a part associated with it in some way.

We can no longer treat parts and wholes as practically separable entities. We cannot longer postpone facing wholes until we have explored and understood each part. It is now incumbent upon the culture to come up with a methodology and conceptual apparatus in which both the whole and the parts can only be dealt with in parallel. This means we must invent a framework in which, even though we focus and attend to the part, we must simultaneously conceptually manipulate the whole.

Information is an irreducible system, a constellation that cannot be broken down into parts and still retain meaning. This flies again common sense but only as much as the idea that there are as many points in the interval from zero to one as there are from zero to three flies in the face of common sense. What we really need is an outside (not of this world) consultant!

Chapter 27

Obvious things

Some obvious things escape notice, really escape it. They are so obvious they are virtually invisible to most of us; here is one.

Any communication carries an infinite set of messages

When we get a message from any communication, or from any event carrying information which is the same thing, we are not getting the message. What we are getting is one of an infinite series of messages carried by the communication. We receive our message correctly only when all of the other messages become invisible, have been filtered by context, which drops them out as so much noise. But our message is only one part of the spectrum represented in the information communicated.

We may receive information that Aunt Clara has just survived a 7.5 earthquake at her home in Santa Crista California. We are, obviously, pleased to hear from our dear Aunt. The message was clear, unambiguous and in context. Hooray! To a geologist there is much more information than we received. Given his/her context the geographical location and the intensity of the earthquake provides critical information on the event. To the telecommunications company that served as a carrier of the message there is quite different information; the earthquake resistant equipment and telephone lines operated to expectations at a critical moment. We hope that you get the message.

It is impossible to think of a communication event that does not provide someone with information about something. In fact, we want to restate that

Information is a matter of context

Given a piece of data we then construct a context so that the message is embedded with the desired information. The creation of information is the product of context. If that is true then something else is true also

rWe are always working with a full set of hierarchies, a complete set of levels, a comprehensive set of contexts

Some of the levels may be only sketched in outline while others may be fully developed and taken for granted, assumed, unconscious, out-of awareness. But we are always playing with a full deck, with all of the equipment that has been made available to us. The difficulty is making sure we are working with the right complete deck. If you are disturbed by what we are saying how about this question. Given any informational object, what is the maximum amount of information it can provide?

The answer is; we can’t say . Certainly, we can say that information is limited by the contexts the recipient can provide. Since we cannot determine all possible contexts that this, and all potential future minds can provide, we must assume an infinite amount of information is available. How much information does a person need? How many choices of action does the person have? Really! It is up to you to decide.

Chapter 28

Machines 1

Machines have been involved in the processing of information for a long time. The abacus, the printing press, typewriters, cameras, radio, television. But by the middle of the 20th century we began to demand more and more from our information processing machines.

We demanded more because we came to require more accurate and precise information more quickly to do the simplest things. For a while we were able to mechanically increase the speed and accuracy and efficiency of our machines. After we stumbled over the limit of the increases in efficiencies and effectiveness mechanistic fixes could accomplish, we realized some other approach was needed.

After a lot of thrashing about we realized none of the machines that processed information could use any of the information they processed and that the only way of getting information processing machines to increase the speed and efficiency and effectiveness of their processing of information we had to give them the ability to use some of the stuff they processed and to use information about how they processed it. It was a revelation.

To provide such intelligence we invented another machine that not only processed information but could use it to make decisions and married it to the machines that processed information. The machine we invented was the computer. After doing this we realized that if we could give other machines whose job was to do some useful work like weave cloth or wash clothes a bit of intelligence we could get them to do more, more effectively and efficiently.

We then took the little hybrid machines we developed use to process information and married them to every other machine we could think of and get to hold still long enough.

It was a stupendous achievement.

One of the consequences of this was of course more information more quickly produced but now managed in a form that a machine could process and identitfy and make sense out of. It was clear that our interests would be served best if the machines that used and processed information and used information to process information, did whatever they needed to do in the way they could do it best. It took us a while to realize that we required only that the output be useable by us; all of the information in the intermediate steps would work if we had no idea what was going on, if we were ignorant of what was happening. Of course once we lost control of the intermediate process we ultimately lost control of the beginning and the end of the process also. So as we became more dependent upon information we became dependent upon the machines that process information and the machines that blend this capacity to control information with the capacity to process information.

CHAPTER 29

Machines 2.

Machines and information

We live in what has been called the age of computers. This name is appropriate for we have become increasingly dependent upon information and information has become inextricably involved with, and dependent upon, machines— particularly a single machine—the computer.

Every entity which processes information encompasses a computer. No matter what the physical shape, the heart of every entity which deals with information, even a human being, is a computational device. No biological entity is coextensive with its computational part but the computational mechanisms are central to it.

In the past we could easily recognize computers by their outward appearance. At first they were room sized collections of tubes with flashing lights and wires hanging out of their guts. Then they became boxes that lived on desks and had slots into which flat disks were inserted, and were attended by monitors and keyboards.

As the technology has evolved into new forms however, computers changed. They are no longer recognizable by their outward appearance. The microchip, the heart of the computer and information revolution, is so tiny that it can be neatly embedded in a familiar device that, formerly, was not endowed with computer-like powers. Inserted in another device, it disappears. It always takes on the appearance of that to which it has been symbiotically attached. In the morphing of computer and non-computer it is the computer that always takes on the physical appearance of its partner. It no longer looks like what it is. Miniaturization has transformed our world; we are coming to exist in a chameleon like universe in which nothing is what it seems.

As long as we needed special procedures to communicate with the computer we could relax in our distance from it. Talking by holes in cards left no doubt that we were dealing with something that was not us, a form of alien power and foreign intelligence. But the longer we dealt with it, the more we insisted on  comfortable, rapid, and efficient communication. And the most effortless communication we are capable of is the kind of communication we have with others of our kind. We modified the computer so that we could input information and make choices with a pen, by touching the screen, by moving our eyes or by using voice commands, so that we could use every human sense to communicate our desires to it.

The more we insist that the computer respond to human modes of communications, the more human like it presents itself to our psyche. It is our demand that the computer be responsive to our needs that pulls us closer to it and drives it closer to us. Our insistence on convenience and speed and efficiency is generating a double bind. We insist the computer is an unfree, uncreative machine bound to its program; we insist the computer is not a person, not a mind, not really intelligent at all. Yet we insist on giving it the capacities that human beings use to mark human kind, the ability to speak and to understand, to respond to gesture.

The direction we are moving in is not encouraging. The modern refrigerator is becoming a computer as much as a box producing and containing cold; the digital watch is becoming as much a computer as an instrument for making and displaying the passage of time. The automobile is becoming as much a computer as it is now a machine for moving from place to place; and each of these devices is becoming more computer like as time goes on.

As computers are inserted further back in the chain of parts of all machines, as computers are being inserted as parts of parts, as soon as computer guides the motor which runs the refrigerator as well as the cold making mechanism, as soon as the dash board display of information is a function of the computer as well as the mechanism controlling the operation of the motor, as soon as the valves of the engine are have their own computer controlling them separate from the computer that controls the engine as a whole, the automobile, the refrigerator, the watch— every machine— and the computer become inseparable and indistinguishable.

Used to refer to the computer, the word “revolution “ is a misnomer. Rather than dealing with a cataclysmic force implied by the word, we are dealing with a tireless, constant, gentle, flowing force. It is a relentless, unyielding, uncompromising, implacable, gentle and absolutely passive force, infinitely complex because it is an extension of our will and desire.

Our world is being changed by machines that are becoming smarter and more responsive. The ability to process information is being added to whatever capacity for action on the environment the machine had. We are passing onto machines the decision making power that characterized human beings. We are changing the environment in which we live dramatically. We are creating an environment which is totally information sensitive. And we are making this change invisible.

Chapter 30

Freedom of/as/information.

Every action has an information component; every information component requires some mechanism to process it.

Information has always been a ingredient of every human action. What is different in our new age is that information has become so all pervasive, so massive and complex that we need help to use it. We have become so overwhelmed by information that it has become critical to develop, maintain and expand the abilities of machines that can assist us in manipulating and processing it.

Acting and behaving gives birth to intelligence which then becomes the source of information required to act intelligently. Information comes into the world with intelligence; with intelligence comes freedom. The smallest amount of smarts brings forth an equal amount of freedom.

Information is specific to individuals, groups and species because it depends on the actions they are capable of and which are habitual to them. Our level of intelligence, the ability to choose and the capacity to behave in selected ways, creates information. We seldom think about it in this manner but it is part of everyday living. It is not so far fetched to be able to consider:

Humans are biological forms of information

We are not only walking stores of information. We consist of active systems of information and information processes although the transformations of information into action and action into information is still a mystery.

It is not surprising that the world forever changed with the invention of printing. Literacy brought with it the thirst for information in all shapes and forms. From that base came a new kind of intelligence as people utilized literacy and information to improve their lives. But the real hidden conceptual element in this incredible cultural shift was freedom. Freedom is entirely imbedded in the concept of information as information is encompassed by the notion of freedom. Suppressing either one is impossible, as those who have tried have found out.

Information and freedom are alternative ways of describing the same reality. To be adequately informed is to be free. Information both constrains and forces choices and thereby generates freedom. That is almost all there is to it. But intelligence, choice, and the capacity to choose how to behave creates information. That is the rest of what there is to it.

What is Simple:

We live in a world of choices, more choices and more choices still. Worse, every choice we make requires us to discriminate more finely, more closely, today than yesterday. We must select from among more things that are less distinguishable from one another.

What is Less Simple:

Given any object there are more other objects to which it can be related today than yesterday; there are more sets today which can be assembled which include it, more ways today of choosing it than yesterday

What is Less Simple Still:

Today more choices are hidden from view. We think that we are specifically given a choice between a and b but, in reality, we are being forced to choose between c and d. so that it can be decided if we will get e or of. But many paths of entailment are hidden from us and the information chains are obscured from our view.

It takes more information to make exactly the same decision today than it did yesterday; and it will take more information tomorrow than it did today. One reason for this is that we require information to evaluate the information we are using to make our decisions, and information about this information. The more we demand precision, accuracy, and efficiency, the more we insist that choices be rational and informed, the greater the quantity and diversity of information we will need. As we accumulate more information, still more information must be used to orient and evaluate the information we utilize to make any decision. In light of Chaos theory, minuscule differences take on enhanced significance and need to be examined in light of information.

Our demand for information about information is increasing even faster than our demand for information about the world. In the future the demand for information about information about information will increase even faster. This absolute need for more, deeper and more various kinds of information can only increase our dependence on those smart machines which manufacture, create, maintain and access to all kinds of information.

Information flows through different channels and takes different forms and formats. We can not absorb much more information through the same old channels because they have become clogged.

The sheer bulk of information has created the crisis in decision making. Does this mean that we are in chaos? Does it mean that the concept of “choice” has finally contradicted the concept “freedom”? More importantly, does this mean that we will increasingly rely on machines for direct decision making or for vital assistance with ranking alternatives?

Will someone please pull the plug?

Impossible. Too late. Realistically, events have moved too far and too fast. Yet there is enough of a Luddite in all of us to wonder just what would happen if we did. There are unexplored consequences of our increasing dependence on this class of information machines. For instance, there is no doubt that we are becoming more like the machines we employ.

Of course, the machines we use are becoming more like us.

There are people who expect that some time in the not too distant future man and machine will merge into a new symbiotic being. Already, in science fiction literature, the war is being waged over the rights of machines, of robots, cyborgs, androids. There seems little doubt that we will see machines that are so smart that they will seize human characteristics. It is more likely that we will — for our own human convenience — force such characteristics on them. Perhaps our real fear should be that we will inadvertently implant in them, or encourage them to take on, human frailties and act irrationally. Then what?

Chapter 31

Choice and information

Information is choice: choice is information:

As we easily and quickly communicate routinely over wide distances we multiply choice. The population of objects in the world has increased and the connections between them have multiplied. In the same way as there are more people today, there are more objects and they are more densely connected today than they were yesterday. They impinge on one another more fully today than times past and it is the indirect connections that have multiplied most rapidly.

Not only do we have more choices in our lives but the consequences of each choice has multiplied. As the inter-connectivity of things becomes apparent to us we must consider more and more consequences of each choice. The consequences of our choices seem to be more rapidly felt than in previous times and the feeling that each of our choices has significant unknown, indirect consequences, of our actions is becoming pervasive.

Think about choice as something which unifies a set of alternatives by mapping that set of alternatives into a single alternative. E pluribus unum; choice makes one out of many. In this sense the critical issue is what are recognized as alternatives in a situation where choice is contemplated. There are an assortment of alternatives that can be chosen.  It is the composition of sets, or universes, which is critical in both choice and decision making. It is in the context of choice and the way the alternatives fit within context, that allows them to be put together. Today, universes of alternatives exist which could not have been sets yesterday. More will be available tomorrow.

There is only today— now; yesterday is history, tomorrow is expectation Here is today compared with yesterday.

•A manufacturer in a foreign country receives faxed plans and an order for a new product from the company research laboratory 10,000 miles away. The computer controlled machinery is quickly adjusted, produces the products and prepares them for shipment. A UPS truck picks them up, upon request, and they are on their way to the purchaser within twenty-four hours after they were ordered.

• A manufacturer in a foreign country receives mailed plans and an order for a new product from the company research laboratory 10,000 miles away. The machinery is stopped at the end of the shift and adjusted by hand. Samples are produced and the process is refined. Finally, the order is produced the products and prepares them for shipment. A local truck picks up the order and deliveries it to the local railroad depot from whence it will go by ship to the purchaser. If all goes well, the order will be in the hands of the purchaser in six months.

While the todays of the past were sufficient to their time we have seen a tremendous speedup in the content of today. We may have to begin borrowing ‘tomorrows’ to make ‘todays’ work. While it is impossible to accurately predict the future it can reasonably be expected that more choice will be available and the speed for the need of decision making, and production, can only increase. Information and the apparatus for processing information is a necessity in the modern world. But this necessity hides something else that is true also. As we move into the few remaining years of this century it is becoming increasing obvious that:

We are consuming information at an increasing rate; we have become information junkies.

In any history of the cultural events of the late 20th century there has to be a large portion of the analysis dealing with the addiction to information. Is it sinister? Certainly, information and freedom are inextricably intertwined yet we can also see that too much information has the potential to severely limit freedom.

If choice and/or decision making is stalled by a surfeit of information then it can be posited that it, in turn, limits freedom. The problem here is what is enough and when is it enough? The addiction to information is disguised as, or appears to us, as a matter of choice. We have elevated choice to our highest good. We celebrate choice, in its appearance and taste, even where no choice is involved. Choice is a precious good for us.

Choice has become an independent value which has been cut loose from its consequences. This is because, in the age of the television and computers, information is separated from reality or nature. It is also, though highly addictive, mainly inconsequential to daily living. We seek information, not for existence and basic survival but for entertainment.

Choice also has major consequences in our daily lives because it litters our path with decision making points. It is, frequently, forced upon us as so much noise; a trip to buy a box of cereal can turn even the most task oriented person into bowl of Jell-O. In the typical supermarket there are at least eighty different brands, or permutations, to choose from. If one wants an oat based cereal one then has to choose from oat rings, oat rings with raisins, oat rings with raisins and nuts, and oat rings with nuts only. Now one has to choose a size - super large, small, family etc. If you are concerned about ingredients like sugar content, fats, oils, fiber etc. this adds yet another layer of choice. Other possible areas of choice are brand, in-box gifts, sweepstakes, coupons, box information (continuing stories etc.), price, price per pound, price per serving etc. And all you wanted to do was buy a box of cereal!

The addiction to information is bad because information is a dangerous drug. The more we get, the more we want and the more intense the seeking after it. This problem will grow as the electronic technologies increase in their sophistication and become truly universal.

Chapter 32

Machines : Coda

Science fiction and mad scientists

YESTERDAY: Yesterday, the machine which threatened us was the mechanism embodying the perverse distorted ambitions of bent and twisted scientists.

TODAY: Today, the machines that appear in our dreams and nightmares are not the progeny of mad scientists but the offspring of the most sane scientific minds (and prestigious and well funded to boot.)

Until yesterday we were nearly in control. Yesterday we lost it. Before yesterday we depended on machines for the processing of information, for the display and movement of information, for the reproduction and distribution of information. Yesterday has come and gone. Today, we are becoming more dependent on machines for the manufacture, for the creation of information.

Machines have suddenly become the other against which our capabilities and potential becomes manifest and clear. The machines which are ground to the human figure are computers. It is against the capacities and limitations of computers that we measure our success and shortcomings as a species. It is against machines that see ourselves and our capabilities clearly.

Our demand for information about information is increasing even faster than our demand for information about the world. And our demand for information about information about information is increasing even faster.

We depend on machines to manufacture, create, maintain and access information about information but we are becoming even more dependent on them to manufacture, create, maintain and access information about information about information.

Often we are surprised by events which we actively participate in bringing about. To make something happen and then be surprised that it did happen is surprising. Why does this occur? Usually because we believe we are making one thing happen when in fact we are making another.

We shape these machines to do their job. Yet we are as uncertain of how they are accomplishing the tasks which we have assigned them as we are of how we accomplish the difficulty common sense tasks we accomplish. The uncertainty grows as we want machines to do more and make the machines more complex. This much is clear.

It is clear also that we must provide the first and second principles, the mode of operation to start computers doing their task. But after this, to accomplish what we want, to succeed in having the machines process information, we must pull back, absent ourselves, withdraw. For we can no longer tell in what direction the machines must evolve and change to accomplish the tasks we have assigned them. We recognize that it is the endowment with potential and the capacity to change that characterize machines today.

An Anthropological Challenge:

As we shape them to do their job we hold out the possibilities that those of us who can disguise themselves as one of them, who is willing to pass as a computer, to struggle to absorb and utilize the intelligence, the world view and culture of computers, might give us a hint of what they are doing. It is an new anthropological problem of the first order. Who will be the first to live among the computers?

To build them better we must try to put ourselves in their place. Some people will realize this aspiration. They will return with cautionary tales and tall tales and stories.

Something terrifying is happening. It may be one of those stages in the everything that makes up our world where the everything is becoming something entirely different, out of view, where so much is changing out of sight that we are incapable of seeing what is happening.

We ought to seriously consider the possibility that we are incapable of seeing what is happening. We would wise, in fact, to base all of our action on that premise. How far off can it be?

Information and Time:

The speed at which information is processed is a critical aspect of information today. The rate at which information can be accessed and extracted is a critical aspect of information; the ratio of information to dull clatter is another. Speed and rates are temporal things. Information is information in time. It has an intrinsically temporal aspect. Information is information only once. Received a second time it is noise. And once data has been transformed into information it is never possible to undo the process; nor is it possible to forget it.

The world of information is full of paradoxes; Quantum effects appear in the real world with the appearance of information. Quantum effect occur not only on the basis of what we know but on what is in principle knowable; Secrets, especially those sacred secrets that are so deep they are in principle unknowable keep the world whole.

Chapter 33

Potlatch

Information has become an unstated element of status

Before the advent of the electronic revolution money, property, family background and position counted in the world. Information was irrelevant to social standing or influence in the world. This has changed. We have begun to count our wealth in units of information.

Of course, in the past, information was not irrelevant; information has always be an element of power in the world. But in the past information was invisible, merged inseparably with capital and authority and indistinguishable from more tangible resources.

This has all changed because, essentially, the new age has democratized information. Community and society are being re-founded on information. Our new economics is the accumulation and storage of information, our new politics the control of information and our new status the display of information.

But, by that very fact there now is arising new ruling groups that measure power in terms of the control of units of information. Those who cannot get at information are treated as second class citizens. The problem of class is reborn again in a new and different guise. We are seeing the emergence of the information rich and the information poor as a new class division. As the emphasis on information grows the social distance between these two classes will increase exponentially.

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Chapter 34

Information Again

Information is:

non linear and circular in a number of dimensions; pathologically incomplete in an open set of ways yet capable of being completed in a number of different ways: purposed to affect some completion; poised to participate in some completeness yet always needing something to complete it; on the verge of being complete, or on the verge of being incomplete in a different way; always used to infer something from something else; always something to think from to something else; always capable of being extended, of being added to, complicated and complemented further.

As poetically realistic as this description is, it does not communicate the vital reality of information. The reason is easy to grasp: as much as we try to get our description of information to shake rattle and roll, as much as we try to animate a description of information, it remains static because our description carries the heritage of words in sentences; it is linear and one dimensional.

Information, is dynamic; it is much more dynamic than we recognize. Information is a sequence of curved motions, a succession of transactions, hence, a progression of transformations.

Information is anything that provides reachability. What makes information information? Anything can become information. Anything. A thing is information when some intelligence can use it, put it together with other things to reach and grab hold of still other things. Information is anything that can be inserted between other stuff so that still other things can be reached, so that things that were separated now are linked and conjoined. (The words we use to carry information can only carry us so far.) Information is a betweeness, always a relational, transactional thing. In fact information is always multi-relational and multi-transformational, meaning that it participates in and depends on a number of relationships and a number of transformations simultaneously. And, it is something else.

Chapter 35

The circle of information is unbroken

The something else is interesting.

Information can only be recursively defined, that is information can only be defined in terms of information. Something is information only when it is associated with information, in the presence of information, when combined with other information.

Information can not be created; it never comes from something that is not information. Information can only come from the transformation of old information; Information in one form only emerges from information in another form. Information can not be created; it never comes from something that is not information.

Recursion

The paradoxical nature of information derives from the fact that it is circular, self referential and recursive. Information is a series of transformations, potential and actual. Of what? Of information in other forms.

How can the world be made into information? It cannot. It only can be employed to alter and transform other information.

Common sense is not a good guide to understanding information.

Our common sense understanding about information is wrong. We usually think about a book, a set of instructions for making or doing something— a list a message, a data base, a formula— as information. None of these is information. It seems petty, peevish and a bit malicious to complain that our common sense, conventional understanding of information which treats a fact or a description or a formula as information is wrong. Even in this book we have used language that suggested at times that information is something out there. Yet the criticism of common sense is valid.

What are we doing wrong when we refer to things likes facts, descriptions, a book, a record, a picture or formulas as information? None of these things are information. They are information-waiting-to happen; they are potential information.

These things are information only

• as they participate in a set of transactions

• which involve some intelligence which utilizes

• information which they/it already possess that connects to

• objects in the world (including perhaps the intelligence whose knowledge it is)

• and permit choice and action.

And they become information ONLY WHEN they participate in a set of transactions with some intelligence that brings other information to bear on them and connects that information to objects in the world.

Common sense has grown comfortable ignoring the essential rest of the system to which the formula, the book, the list, the data base must be connected if they are to constitute information.

It is worth while repeating:

The idea that an object of any sort, a slide, a picture, a recording etc any physical object is information is just wrong The habit of isolating and identifying one part or one piece of the system-which-is-information and calling it information, is a dangerous, conventional, short cut which we all take too much for granted. If this seems a little overkill to you it is not.

Chapter 36

Forms of information: 1

Information can not be created. Information is never produced out of something which is not information. Information can only be fabricated from other information by transforming it: it takes information to make information; New information comes from old information in a variety of forms.

This idea that information can only come from other information via some transformation is very close to being a vicious circle enclosing a paradox. All information is self referential, explicitly or implicitly. Given information’s constant self reference, the only way we can escape from circularity and contradiction is to use the fact that information exists in different forms. Information can’t be produced from stuff which is not information. But information in a not particularly useable form certainly can be transformed into another form (which may be very, very useable) producing apparently more and different information.

When we encounter this paradoxical character of information we have the impulse to run away, retreat and completely reject the idea of information-as-connectivity as much to complicated. Let us try to anticipate some objections.

Here is an argument rejecting the idea of information-as-connectivity.

There is information. People become informed. There is no need to manufacture and import difficulties and paradoxes. We are making a cake but part of the recipe is blotted out. What is the missing ingredient, and how much of it do we need. We need to get somewhere. Where is Edgewood Drive? What bus should we take?

Someone knows; they have the information we need. If they tell us then we know, we become informed. They have given us information. They had it, we both have it now. The location of the bus stop or the street, the quantity of missing ingredient in this recipe is information. We need to know where the office is to which we must go to complete some transaction, to pay a particular tax bill. When the someone who has the information tells us then we are informed. It is simple.

Doctors need to know where the appendix is to be able to take it out when it needs taking out; and they need to know how to find out if it needs taking out. Where the appendix is, its location is information taught in medical school. The information is in medical books. Once we located the relevant book we can get at the information, acquire the information. The location of an oil deposit is information to an oil company. A map with the site of a pool of crude oil is all the information about a place that an oil company needs or wants. A geologist may organize an inquiry that provides that information.

Where your room mate has put the keys to the car— whether the dog has been walked or the bill paid, is information. Your companion can tell you. If they do, then you have the information.

The communication which identifies the bus stop or the street we are looking for, which establishes the location of the appendix or of an oil field or the keys, are seemingly information. If we want to be extra precise and careful — we say they are messages that ‘contain’ information. It would appear then that this notion of messages carrying information is a simple but clear cut and not overly complicated statement of what information looks like.

Information is in someone’s brain or represented physically in some way— in a book or file or tape or film— or all of these places at once. It is stored somewhere and someone knows it and someone else wants or needs to know it.

This seems quite enough. What is the problem? Why does this require a deep and seemingly esoteric enquiry to comprehend. We sympathize; but we repeat; there is no escaping the simplest fact:

Information is a paradoxical thing.

In these cases what information is seems to be transparent; the illusion is created that information exists as a collection of words and can be found in some statement, or in a book, or in a speech.

These examples assume a great deal that can not be assumed. They assume interest and need for the information. They assume communication is un-problematic and that the information is in form on which action can be based. They take the information to have a lexical or pictorial form that is intelligible. They assume all the information necessary to identify the relevant information as such and identify it as valid. Where all of these conditions are true then information becomes a rudimentary, uncomplicated thing. But these conditions can not be taken for granted: they do not generally hold.

Any piece of information can be put into different words. In fact, we do not need words at all to communicate information. Pictures will do— a picture of the street with the stopped bus picking up passengers communicates bus stop. But this means that words can not be some sort of box in which information is contained. But if information is not in the words in this way where is the information, what kind of location does it have? People who know what one needs to know may not know they know it or they may know it and know that they know it and not be able to communicate it. And the recipient of a communication may not have sufficient information about information to let them identify the information as valid and actionable.

If we want to see what information is really about we need to look at an example of information which does not hide the important properties that information has, an example that does not mask what is really going on, an example which expose the difficulties associated with the phenomena of information.

Here is a summary of the characteristics of information that make it paradoxical.

• We may have information and not know we have it.

Information may exist in a form that is usable one way but not usable in another.

• We may have information that we know is information but we can not use, information that is useless to us, but which extraordinarily important to others.

• We may have information but not when we need it. We may need information just after we had it and threw it away. Who the we is who possess the information, is not clear.

• We may not have information necessary to make sense out of the information we need to know.

Chapter 37

Forms of information: 2

It is not unreasonable that we should find not only science but paradox and enigma in the human genome. Humans manipulating the stuff that makes them human has great potential; but the attempt to exploit our basic raw material jams science against black magic and flirts with the motivations and attractions of witchcraft. It comes as close to provoking paradoxical, unexpected consequences as humans can afford to get and still not self destruct.

If we examine some of the issues about the way information is held in the genome we will have a clear introduction to the mysteries and paradoxes of information; we have a clear picture of what it is about information escapes our old common sense.

Human beings reproduce. The information necessary to produce a human being in the factory of a woman’s womb must be somewhere. The information necessary to control the process of production must be stored somewhere also. And so it is. The plans for making a human being are stored in the genome. The information on how to make a human being is both available and not available to us as conscious agents.

How can this be? How can something both be and not be information?

In one form, in the form of genetic patterns, it is the basis for our beginnings; Yet only our bodies can use the information. We, ‘the person’, do not have access this information in a form that we can recognize as information. We know how to use the information in some way — our bodies use that information. In this sense it is obvious that our bodies know how to use the information. Yet we (the person of us) does not know what and how we know what we know. We do not know it in the form that makes it available to our cognitive systems, in a form which would allow our minds to symbolically manipulate it, which would let us develop interventions that would control or cure genetic defects or use the information to create creatures like ourselves outside of our bodies. And there is always the question of how much of the information is stored and how much manufactured as the process of development proceeds.

Where is that information stored? How is it stored? What does it look like? How do we get access to it. How can we change it from the form it is in to another form that we (instead of the womb-reproduction factory) can read it?

We know more than we can say: we know more than we know we know.

There are other instances of information of a similar sort. We know how to make conversation. Yet the knowledge is only in the doing. And intuition is another good example in which knowledge escapes the doing entirely. A lot of the information we have we do not know we have, and can not specify in any conscious way. We often have a very accurate notion of what is going to happen in some circumstance. Intuitively, we grasp a persons personality the first few minutes we encounter them. Yet we do not know how we know this—and what is worse, we do not even know what it is we know, what constitutes our intuition.

Chapter 38

Forms of Information 3

A dialog with a clapping hand.

“One problem,” the Zen hand clapping says, “you are thinking about words and pictures and images. Think of a key,” the one hand clapping says, “a key. Is a key a form of information?”

Yes.

“A key then is a form of information?”

Given a lock the shape of the key is information. It might be better to say, physical shape is one form information can take.

“And a combination?”

Yes. A combination lock responds to its combination; The sequence of turns is the information. You put in information and it responds accordingly. In the future our locks will respond to information in a number of different forms: you will have locks with keys and combinations and probably smart cards.

“Perhaps voice latches?”

Why not? Information in the form of the shape of a key opens a lock; the lock responds to information in the shape of a key. And the combination to a lock is information. And here there is no simple shape that responds to it but a mechanism that information throws into states.

Chapter 39

Meta-information

Meta information is a bit more than a little bit more (of information.)

“What is information?“

I can’t rightly say, exactly.

“But this is a book about information.”

True, but I still can’t say.

“Can you help at all?”

Yes. I think I can give you a clear example of information, an example that no one will quibble over.

“O.K.”

A combination for a combination lock. You know the locks you open by turning a dial sequentially stopping at three numbers on the dial. The combination is information.

“Only if the lock is locked.”

Or you anticipate locking it and desire opening it again.

“O.K.”

The combination is information. I don’t know exactly what information is but I know the combination is information.

“By itself?”

What do you mean?

“I mean, is the combination pure information on its own?”

Of course not, there is no such thing. It is information only as part of a person who wants to open a lock and has the capacity to open the lock, knowledge about such locks, I mean how they can be opened, and so on. In this context the set of three numbers is information. Of course it is the stopping at the numbers, the hesitation, that is the information.

“I agree. You’ve said this before.”

I know.

“So, I was wondering.”

What?

“When are two pieces of information the same, identical, equal?”

Dialogue 3

“Can you say something that helps me understand information?”

Something very interesting I think. Actually a couple of things. First. Think about the combination as information. What other things are exactly the same information?

“I don’t understand.”

What other things are exactly the same as the information the three numbers provide?

“MMM. Well a banner with the three numbers would be the same.”

Good.

“And a list of numbers with the three making up the combination circled would be the same information.”

Good.

“And a recording with the three numbers spoken would be the same. And the three numbers encoded in secret cipher and the decoder ring which would permit the deciphering of the message together would be the same information. And the three number written in Chinese characters would be the same (if I knew Chinese.)”

O.K.

“And a mechanism that spun a cylinder in a sequence of certain distances and certain directions.”

Enough. Enough.

“And a sequence of three pictures of the lock in three different positions and a picture of it open. And perhaps a compulsion to move one way and then another and then another certain distances. “

Enough. Enough Enough! O.K. Stop.

“I can see you get the idea. Interesting isn’t it. All of these things are exactly the same as far as information goes. And all would be equivalent in a sense to a bit pattern in a computer if the bit pattern were accessible—if the computer was working properly. Things of absolutely different stuff, material different form, can be the same considered as information. “

What does this mean?

“I don’t know. I really don’t. I thought it was interesting though. I was thinking. What would you say would not be the same. All of the forms the combination can take are the same information. What would be not the same. I mean, what stuff that was connected in some way with the combination would not be equivalent to it.”

I think a message telling you where the combination could be found would not be the same as the combination. A message with the number of a locker which held the combination wouldn’t be the same information, nor would a message that the fifth triple of numbers on a page which followed was the combination be the same either. I mean both the set of triples and the message telling you which triple was the combination wouldn’t be the same.

“But it would be close.”

Yes. meta-information. Information about the information

“That means that there are forms of meta-information; Information about information is a varied as information itself. “

Would the codebook that let you decode the message that gave you the combination be meta-information.

“I’m not sure.”

What is the point of this?

“Common sense would say that objects in the world are the same only when they are equal in every particular, really the same, look and feel the same. In mathematics; things are equivalent if there is a one to one mapping from one set onto to another. One to one means different things connect to (map onto) different things forward and back, meaning from one set to the other and from the other to the first set, or when they do the same things to a set of mathematical objects, or when they let you do the same things perhaps to different objects. But information is the same in spite of the absence of a one to one map. Things are informationally equal when there is no one to one mapping at all between the things being set as equal. Rather things are equal if they function as equivalent connections: information is equal if it provides the same reachability.

Chapter 40

Agents

We live in modern times and things have changed. The day before modern times only people and a few animals could become informed; only people and animals were endowed with enough capacity for choice that it made sense to speak of “being informed.” But now, machines, in principle, have the same capability. In principle now, and in practice later — but not too much later.

Books and data bases, formulas and lists are that part of a process/arrangement that is potentially informative; these things permit someone or something —an agent— to become informed. Ultimately the capacity to be informative consists of the ability to be transformed and the capacity to transform. Both are necessary if something is going to function as part of a communication system.

Information has to do with becoming informed. But today, who becomes informed, about what, when and how — requires a lot of discussion. Yesterday things were clearer. Yesterday, humans and animals were the only agents who could function as the intelligent parts of communication systems. Today however, computers and machines derived from and blended with computers can function —even if imperfectly—as information agents.

Agents I

Human beings are defined as much by the information they can process, the speed with which they can process it, how they can process and use the information they extract from their environment, as by anything else about them.

And this is true for machines too: they are defined by the information they can process, the speed with which they can process it, how they can use the information they extract from their environment. The same hierarchy characterizes us both.

The capacity to become informed defines an actor or agent as much as information is defined as that which informs an actor. Of course this statement would be more true as well if what was said was: the capacity to become mis-informed defines an actor or agent as much as the capacity to become informed.

Chapter 41

Levels of Agency

As machines come to process information, information is bound to change. When we pursue the sense of information we must be prepared to speak of levels of agency. We must distinguish between at least the appearance of primary agency, of agency of the second order, etc.

Question: What does this mean?

ANSWER: We learn. We can learn to learn. With difficulty, great difficulty, we can learn to learn to learn. Can we learn to learn to learn to learn? At what point are we no longer capable of changing? At what point in the learning hierarchy is the program which governs change, fixed, unchangeable for us, for humans? And newts? And machines?

Alas, as a species, our capacities and the capacities of dogs and horses and newts have been fixed by evolution. But the evolution of machines is in man’s hands. This raises an interesting question. It is certainly true that the limitation of any machine is more severe than any animal. Is it true also that the potential of any machine to evolve is greater than any animal species including us?

AND, of course,

Machines evolve in human time; humans evolve in biological time.

Hurrah for mankind. Of course we are not entirely happy with where nature has left us and we are in the process of slinking away from our natural station in the evolutionary hierarchy.

Agents II

Certainly information comes into being as an agent becomes informed about that which is potentially informative. That which a person can come to know defines what information is for that person. That which they can become informed about is potentially information. The first order of business for a person bent on change is changing what they process as information;

That which people in general come to know establishes what information is for our species. Yet the capacity of a state of affairs to be translated into knowledge, to be brought into awareness must have something to do with the state of affairs. The known not simply the knower. Are there limitations on what can be known? If there are, do we know them? We are back to one of the Greeks. But which? Plato, Aristotle, Archimedes, Heraclitus?

We are back to real beginnings; The nature of what one is informed about is determined from that which is potentially informative at the moment of becoming informed. This is as clear a translation of the quantum situation as you could ask for. Information raises interesting problems in an interesting way.

Can we avoid impaling ourselves on the pointed sharp stick of paradox?

Chapter 42

Models and metaphors

Information is a new metaphor; a new metaphor for the way modern society and culture operate. Can we invent or discover a metaphor for information?

We are going to talk about information again as if have not spoken about it before. We have of course. But we will conveniently forget this for the time being. We suggest you do so too. (You must practice managing little inconsistencies so that you will be ready when the big one comes.)

Imagery and pictures

Information is the metaphor of our times, a metaphor for the processes and functions of modern, post-modern life. This much is clear. The question is can we find a good metaphor for information itself.

We want to be able to say: information is like a wave or information is like a spiral or information is like a map. We want to use a wave or a spiral a map or some other simple, direct, strong image as a metaphor for information. Can we do this? And if we can, which metaphor is best for information?

We want a metaphor for information. We need a metaphor for information because it makes talking about information easier, because it makes the idea more intelligible, facilitates handling it, gives a sense that something is known, something is graspable. It would be nice to have a metaphor.

It would really be nice; unfortunately no dice.

It can’t be done. Really.

It can’t be done for a very good reason.

A metaphor establishes a connection —provides a mapping— from one object onto a different object, such that one can manipulate one object mentally and induce the perception of the same or a similar movement of the other.

An effective metaphor or image also involves a compression; a mapping is accomplished from a subset of an object (a part of an object) onto (the whole of) another object; a part of one object is connected to the whole of the other object. For this mapping to be effective the subset of the first object must be producing many of the important effects one observes.

There is a real problem with this: First, the kind of compression and short hand that is involved in attaching an image, or picture to information and coming up with an image of it would involve us in the worse of self referencing paradoxes. If trying to relate information to something else we would have to pick a ‘something else’ that consists mostly of information. Talking about the first object would involve referencing the second which would involve referring to the first because. . . . Because? Because every model picture of information consists mostly of information.

There is no picture of information that does not consist mostly of information.

Any image of information will incorporate information, hence no image of information can be any simpler than information itself, or the information it attempts to represent. In the same way as information cannot be produced from stuff that is not information. Information cannot be reduced to anything that is not information.

We are up a very odd creek.

We suggested earlier that information could be thought of as a spring that could be tapped at different places or a spiral constantly returning to a displaced set of coordinates. Information might also be seen as a wave, or a complex of waves, more like an ocean on which a number of waves are rushing about. Although all of these images are suggestive, it turns out that it is just as useful, just as helpful (and almost as reasonable and effective) to suggest that Information might be seen as a chicken camouflaged as a poster of a chicken —or a chicken disguised as RUDDY VALLEE disguised as a message about chickens as anything else (like a spiral of DNA or, or a NO play or drama, or an arrest or.…)

It would be reasonable to suggest that information be thought of as nearly any complex object — a social system, a planetary system, a football game. We might be just able, if we try very hard, to forget about this. It is confusing enough that we might be able to conveniently ignore the fact that it ever came up and just hunt around for an image of information and use it quickly and ignore the paradox.

We have decided not to go that route. Life is complicated enough and we have already trampled very close to the line where nature’s tolerance ends and her wrath begins. You can try if you want.

Information is:

non linear and circular in a number of dimensions; pathologically incomplete in an open set of ways yet capable of being completed in a number of different ways: purposed to affect some completion; poised to participate in some completeness yet always needing something to complete it; on the verge of being complete, or on the verge of being incomplete in a different way; always used to infer something from something else; always something to think from to something else; always capable of being extended, of being added to, complicated and complemented further.

We speak of agents instead of persons. Why? The term agent leaves open the possibility that it is something other than a person that can become informed. What other? The computer, of course.

Chapter 43

Emotions and information

We tend to think in binary, either-or, terms. If an idea is irrational, it cannot be rational. If something is not a matter of thinking then it must be a matter of feeling. In this frame of mind way we associate information primarily with thinking. This is a very narrow approach to information. Worse still, it is a mistake. Information is more a primitive emotional project than a cognitive venture; but it is both.

If we escape from binary thinking, we fall into the thesis-antithesis synthesis trap which insists that change occurs by leaps of opposites and by constraints and foldings of opposites.

Modern reality is ambiguous, indeterminate and ambivalent; modern logics are fuzzy and multivalent. We should be thinking of modes and variants of rationality and irrationality. Rationality, irrationality, a-rationality, un-rationality and non-rationality populate our world.

To say that a statement or assertion or action is rational means that a logic can be discovered in which the statement can be deduced from true premises. Irrational means no such rational reconstruction has proved possible. Un-rational means every attempt to generate a logical context produces contradictions. Non-rational means that people are indifferent to the issue so that no one even tries to provide such an explanation.

The foundation of thinking is irrational. Some forms of thinking are a-rational as well as irrational. A thought may be rational and irrational in parts; both or either in different contexts; some of a rational thought may be non rational and other parts, un-rational. Emotion is certainly sometimes irrational but more often it is non-rational. Occasionally however it is very, very rational.

All rational processing of information rests on an irrational or non-logical base; before any logical processing of information can be done a wide range of quite deep processing of information must take place. We accomplish this pre-processing without knowing what we are doing or how we are doing it.

The only real advantage humans have over computers in the processing of information is that, in addition to using rule bound disciplines like logic and mathematics, humans can use emotions to process and store information.

Mathematics and logic are humans’ first line of defense against ambiguity, disorder, chaos and uncertainty. They are the disciplines we turn to first to make sense out of the information we have about the world and about the world about which it is information. But they will take us only so far—and, usually, not far enough. If, after we have used them to their utmost, they have not provided us a solution, we must turn to more powerful instruments like feeling. Emotional forms of information processing are one of the most powerful.

Unfortunately, although emotions may be more powerful instruments for processing information, they are much less compliant and acquiescent, less reliable and more difficult to manage. Human feelings about the information they are processing are an important part of the information itself.

Computers must be told about this component: and they do not believe it (they think it is a fairy tale human programmers made up).

Trust:

Trust is essential to information. It is only as we trust and through our trust that the world becomes data for us and data can become information. It is only as we trust ourselves and our perceptions, it is only as we trust the world which invites and encourages us to believe in it and translate that belief into information that we create knowledge. It is our conviction and belief made plausible by data that ultimately becomes information.

Liking and Desire:

We like some information more than other information: some information is more pleasing than other information. Sometimes this reflects the fact that some realities are more satisfying to us than other realities; we appreciate the information because of the reality it represents; But other times we prefer some information over other information for its own sake, not for the reality it represents.

The problem is that our feelings change the information. But information lost or gained as feelings change is recoverable by a change of feeling. Information changes desire as easily as desire changes information. Objectivity is a desire to let reality control our emotions and feelings rather than vice versa. This is not an entirely innocent craving. The want that controls the seeking out of information is seldom the desire for information for itself, but the desire to be correctly informed and the need not to feel stupid or taken in by reality or to feel as if one is not acceptably exploiting reality. In short, it is our impulse to control the world that is the central desire that is relevant to our processing of information. For us humans, the achievement of objectivity must ultimately be unsuccessful. It is the kind of beast we are.

But the attempt at objectivity is admirable. We are striving to be more honest as a species than we have been. Part of this striving is a desire to return to the whole of nature which we ruptured as we took off on our own. As part of the move to be objective, we are constantly driving feelings and emotions further back in the loop of living, we are constantly driving the place at which desire and emotions beginning to control an information further back in the cycle of thinking, feeling and behaving. We are demanding our feelings come to us distorted and hidden from view.

The role of feeling in the control of information is pushed into the background in the attempt and desire to be objective. We feel that we are objective when we take feeling out of the information loop.

Differences

But what is objectivity about? How can information about reality and reality be different? How can a difference creep in between reality and the information we have about reality? How can we pull apart reality from information about reality? ‘Are they the same?’ some voice in us asks. And another voice immediately answers, ‘How can they not be the same?’

Information frightens us, makes us joyful, excites us; in fact, only information can arouse our emotions. Reality very rapidly slips between the cracks of past and present; reality is just that, reality. Information, like a loyal friend, stays with us.

What happens when reality and the information we have about reality do not coincide? What happens when the information we have about reality and reality are not aligned? Unless we change our action on the world we never know we are in this situation.

rCommunity

Real information is always information—at least potential information—for someone else first before it can become information for us. This is just a restatement of the fact that information is truly relational. It is as we anticipate something as information for someone that it becomes information. There is an ir-resolvable paradox here.

There must be two people for whom any piece of information might be a piece of information; two people must be potential believers. Trust in at least one person for whom it is potential information is essential before a piece of information can be real for us. We can always fudge this by dividing ourselves in two.

This makes information a matter of community also. It has always appeared as if language was the critical determinant of community. Yet this is a mistake; it is sharing information that welds individuals into a community. It is the flow of information that binds people together. For the first time we can see this. Language is a tool in this process but it is sharing information that is crucial. Those who share information are fused together, socialized into the same world, made members of the same fraternity. When information is distributed people cannot be pulled apart from one another.

Play:

Humans receive as much information through playing as in any other way;

Art:

People who value information because it permits more effective action in the world are businessmen. People who use information to produce other information about the world are scientists.

Emotions are generated when information supposedly about the world is taken as not about the world. People who use information to produce pleasure are artists. Art comes into being when we enjoy information for its own sake and for the sake of nothing else.

Art and Science

Not only do we feel about information, not only does information about the world make us happy or make us sad, we feel some information instead of thinking it. It is artists who have brought us to the brink of new ways of managing information. It is the stress on pleasure, or feeling, available in information, that has pointed the way to a mode of processing information that anticipates new logics and new modes of understanding information. Yet although art had gotten us to the edge it cannot push us over the brink. Art is addicted to pleasure and does not want to lose it.

Indifference

Indifference about the reality of the world is not a habit that most of us cultivate. It would be easier if we could convince ourselves that the world and our information about the world were not the same thing. It is certainly true that coping with the world is quite different from coping with our knowledge about the world. Some information presents itself to us in the form of feelings.

There is a rush of adrenaline when you come to know something for certain, or when every part of you acknowledges the truth of some piece of information about the world.

We know what some things are because of the way we feel about them. Often apprehension is our response to perceptions we have not fully identified, have not fully acknowledged, and may not be able to acknowledge fully.

One of the ways of making love to the world is recognizing and acknowledging it, that is by embracing information.

Secrets

If you treat every piece of knowledge as a secret between the world and you, hidden from everyone else around you, your connection with the world becomes impossibly intimate. If you manage to do this, you will notice how real it feels also.

Imagine you could make explicit all of the hints and foreshadowing and intuitions you have about the world and you could figure out how you came to know all of this stuff you don’t really know that you know. This imagining generates a feeling of power and control.

The manipulation of information.

We are constantly trying to manipulate information, manipulate our access to information, control our own and others utilization of information. Sometimes we do this with pleasure, sometimes with pain. Pleasure paralyzes us; we get very little information from it. We get much more information from pain. Emotion and information is a very narrow street.

The processing of information.

We process information emotionally because information cannot be completely accomplished by the application of rules. Anyone who has stumbled across this fact about the world has raised the question: What does it mean?

What is being asserted is clear enough; it is that some kind of information processing cannot be done with rules applied individually or in some sort of sequence or in parallel. The processing of information using rules is associated with mathematics and logic: the processing of information without using rules, using something other than rules is associated with emotional information processing. But this is a limiting association. Now it is difficult to imagine why information resists the application of rules. And it is difficult to imagine what could succeed if rules were not adequate to catch and extract information.

The processing of information breaks down at the very first step, at the point at which the set of rules on the basis of which information is to be process gets selected. This cannot be done using a rule. A rule works whenever you have to generate an action or change of state. Whenever you generate anything else, you can’t use a rule. Is nonlinear the same as non rule bound? No, but what is comparable to not-rule-bound? Now we might look at the task of theory in science. Theory as an organization of rules does something quite different in the enterprise than laws (rules) do. But we have the feeling that there is still nothing in the center. If there was, we would have heard about it.

There is a kind of processing of information, any information that can be done by something other than rules. The question is then; can you identify something other than rules in processing information and can you describe this mode of processing?

Chapter 44*

* This Chapter was written with the assistance of Jim Egan.

Corkscrews

Every truth worth knowing can be said in no more than fifteen words. And any truth that can be said in no more than fifteen words can be said in six or less. Of course, any truth that can be said in six words or less is so obvious that it doesn’t need to be spoken of at all. (It is also clear that truths that are so obvious they don’t need to be spoken of, require no fewer than three volumes to write down.)

Corkscrew: 1.An instrument for opening bottles sealed with a cork.

2. An instrument for opening the mind to thought. 3. A self illuminating light; illumination in chaotic motion.

Almost anything can pass itself off as information and anything that is not information can impersonate information and anything that is information about something can disguise itself as information about something else.

Directions, junkmail and revelations.

Ordinary information (DIRECTIONS.) Information is usually about something you can almost grab hold of, something you feel you can touch. At its most ambiguous, this kind of information seems to be about some-kind-of-thing-in-particular. Most everyday, run of the mill information is of this sort—otherwise why bother.

Informationless information (JUNKMAIL.) Some information is quite different though: it seems to be information about nothing at all. After you come to know it, after you use it to become informed you seem to be in exactly the same position vis a vis the world that you were before you knew it. Much of the news on television seems to be of this kind.

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 same point at which adolescence turns into middle age.