Metadifference: Truth

If you tell the truth it’s going to be funny.
Richard Pryor

One of the more subtle aspects of Macroinformation manifests when sameness, the opposite of difference at the data level, registers as difference at meta-levels. Information is significant difference; macroinformation emerges from interactions among different differences, the more so as the different differences are mutually orthogonal.

I’ve long illustrated this point, long before coining the term macroinformation, with reference to the comic effect of character acting. When we see certain characteristics distilled to perfection we respond to the memesis as humor. Richard Nixon being perfectly himself was comic. A skilled actor imitating Richard Nixon being himself was comic. In the first case identity manifests as metadifference; in the second case the metadifference is more apparent. Sir Anthony Hopkins is not Richard Nixon, neither is the nightclub entertainer. But Nixon’s own behavior sparked metadifferences, his behavior being so complex, so conspicuously saturated with anomaly, discrepancy, double-standards, hypocrisy ...

But that’s just one instance. With an actor playing a pickpocket, acting it just right, the perfection stands out: metadifference.

When liars -- read that as all of us -- tell the truth, it’s funny. When a critic has a perception that leaves his normal medicrity in the dust, it’s funny. When an historian with an obvious agenda is momentarily objective, it’s funny. And humor, always, is proof that macroinformation is present.

Richard Pryor had it exactly right: "If you tell the truth it’s going to be funny."

For years now I’ve kept a folder of Examples of Macroinformation, the folder subdivided into sometimes subdivided categories: poetry, movies, painting ... A parallel attempt to organize illustrations of macroinformation by type -- irony, anomaly, timing, double-binds ... never got done well. I try again though with my new folder Meta, which is now beginning to illustrate metadifferences by type.

Of course many an instance of macroinformation embodies several types simultaneously. A play may employ literature, both prose and verse, music, painting, dance ... acting ... A joke may employ timing and discrepancy and irony ... And I don’t pretend that my own awareness of types is yet efficiently streamlined ... But I do intend to clone this and other similar new illustrations into the Meta folder.

Boobs

Mi.org has employed Captain Renault's corrupt hypocrisy in the movie Casablanca as a touchstone for metadifference which manifests as the macroinformation called "irony" in drama: what we hear on the soundtrack doesn't match what we see on the screen. It of course is one of an endless assortment of instances. Another just marched into my head.

George Carlin had a TV sitcom which took place in a bar. George is a regular. Also regular is a plastic surgeon. George, his father, his cronies, are salt-of-the-earth blue collar guys. The plastic surgeon is held in low esteem because he treats vanities, not diseases.

The plastic surgeon decides he's going to do something about his own image and exits the bar with missionary fervor. He returns with a homeless woman and announces what he'll do for this sorry example of fellow humanity. "Could I have a sandwich?" she asks. The plastic surgeon stands the object of his charity before the group. She's malnourished, she's dirty. She certainly needs some soup to go with the sandwich, a bath, fumigation ... clean, warm lodgings, a solid week's sleep ... Sculpting his imagined improvements with his hands around the sad female form, the surgeon announces his plans: he's going to pump her bust out to here, he's going to puff her bottom out the there, he'll liposuck cellulite from her thighs ... the tab strictly on him.

Information is triggered by difference. Metainformation arises from different differences. Macroinformation emerges where the metadifferences cross some threshold of complexity.

This doctor's sense of human service is as metadifferent from familiar ideals as Captain Renault's pocketing Rick's cash as he closes down Rick's casino is metadifferent from minimal standards for society working.

Simultaneously, if WWII was an example of civilization going rapidly to hell in a hand basket, and absurdity is still accelerating decades later in Carlin's sitcom, how come the world is still such a funny place?

Metadifference in Music

We’re all born to speak. Only severe defects, severe accidents, stop us.
Singing is natural, but not quite all of us take to it. Culture can see that few of us can afford to practice it.
Me, I’d rather belong to a tribe that sang indifferently, but together, than have perpetual seats at the concert hall. (And these days Id’ rather play Bach on my own keyboard, however poorly I perform, than listen to my old collection of Bach played by Helmut Walcha, Wanda Landowska, Richter ...)

When we speak our vocal chords vibrate. When any string vibrates, a tone, a complex tone, variable tones, are generated. As Pythagoras showed, a vibrating string divides along its length into sub-vibrations, producing sub-frequencies: overtones. Complex sound.

With a matched set of strings, as on a lute, as on a piano, the complex tones, selected played, produce complexities that stimulate us pleasurably but that are not so complex as to be beyond comprehension.

We "all" speak, fewer of us sing, fewer still pluck, blow, or beat instruments. But when competent pluckers, blowers, strikers ... singers get together, wow.

Macroinformational potential emanates with such vibrations, whether from one vocal chord or a full orchestra with chorus.

My efforts thus far to talk about music as macroinformation at Macroinformation.org have not developed satisfactorily. When I get an idea it thus far hasn’t developed as clearly or as far as my discussions of jokes, movies, drama ... poetry .. theology or politics. Now I try again:

Macroinformation Generated from Metadifference

Strike middle C on a keyboard. The single note is complex. (Delving the complexity must follow, but not in an introduction.) All the other notes, including notes not in Western music, are implicit in it; some aggressively implicit: the G, for example. Strike the C and the G keys more or less together. The result is more complex, the metadifferences more urgent. The "single" sound of a chord, even only two notes, has more macroinformational potential than the single sound of the C alone.

Play a standard C chord: C, E, G. Music theory tells us that the E is a major third above the C. The G however, already established as a perfect fifth above the C, is a minor third above the E. ! Minor as well as major is implicit in the simplest triad.
(If all notes are implicit in one note, are all chords implicit in one simple triad?) (Are all words implicit in one word? I don’t think so; but I see that all chords are implicit from a single triad, from a single two note chord.)

Had I been given standard music lessons, a teacher would have shown me a C chord: middle C, next E up, next G up. At some point the teacher would have shown me the first inversion of the C chord: E, then G, then C. Around then I would also have been shown the second inversion: G, then C, then E. Before I could play at all well I’d have to be able to play inversions of C all the way up and down the keyboard: with some sureness of hand, and some velocity. Long before that I would have been shown the F chord and the G7: and D major, G major, etc. And C7, and C major 7, and so forth -- diminished, augmented, suspended ... -- all of them invertible.
As it is I’ve picked much of this up from the REAL Book (some of the charts sketched from recordings (and live performances) by friends of mine: though they were my friends long before I ever had an actual copy of the REAL Book or tried a bit at playing myself). Benny Golson’s Killer Joe commences with measures which rock back and forth between the 7 chord of the Root and the 7 chord of the Root’s 7, the rocking quickening to within the measures as the form progresses. Joe Zawinul’s Mercy, Mercy, Mercy commences with measures which rock back and forth, slightly syncopated, between the Root 7 and the 7 of the perfect IV of the Root. As with the Golson piece, the measures increasingly pick up something of the companion chord. In both cases other complexities are soon introduced, but for the moment I focus just on the openings.

The Golson example rocks modally, the Zawinul example rocks right in the heart of standard Western harmony. Modes are very old, but standard harmony is more familiar: or was until Miles Davis.
Both examples start with seventh chords: typical jazz. My source, the Bb REAL Book, is already transposed: D7, C7 (not D, C!) for the Golson tune; C7, F7 for the Zawinul.

When starting, and ending, with seventh chords, what is the Root? Complex, complex, complex. Jazz typically plunges us into the middle of the sea: where some of us are comfortable.
However complex, this is not unreachable by analysis.

Now: a seventh chord, C7, for example, un-inverted, plays: C, E, G, Bb. That is: base note, major third, minor third, minor third.
A standard major triad sounds (ahem) complete to standard Western ears. A seventh chord, in context of nothing, implies something else. A C7 implies F major. Zawinul follows C7 with F7: implying Bb major! (And Bb is the 7 of C minor: and itself implies F major, which implies C7!) In other words jazz of this sort plunges us straight into the middle of ... we don’t know what! (Some people like being at sea; many don’t. But anyone will be stimulated by these complexities.)

Analyzing the metadifferences involved in imbalances subverting balances may prove to be as complex as looking at a pound of lard and talking hyperstring theory, but I hope you see: given enough scut work, it could be done. And should be done: at least once: just to show that it can be.

I’m not going far into the mine here. I’m showing that there is a mine: very deep.

Meantime, imagine for yourself, with just another tiny push from me, how many directions we could go from here: Rhythm complexities: four against one, three against one, two against one, two against three ... one against three, four ... Imbalances subverting balances, all generated from metadifference ... initially, from difference.

PS My examples of macroinformation thus far have primarily involved verbiage. Sure: I’m a speaker, a writer ... was involved in English. But it was music that ravished me before I spent much time as a kid reading Soroyan, or Dickens, or Keats. Ah, but then the culture also encouraged me to talk (and write) about Dickens, Keats ..., and smacked me if I tried to talk about Louie, Kid Ory, Count Basie, Duke Ellington. So: I grew up with my literature more stroked than smacked, my music more smacked than stroked. I was an adult before I acquired -- by myself

Emergence

Mitchell Resnick's programming and teaching with his Star Logo should help us shrug off some of our centralist assumptions. It's hard enough to see that a flock of birds is self-organized, that there is no leader, that there is no need for an instruction such as "fly in a V" in a bird's genes. Resnick suggests that instructions as simple as 1) "Fly close to another bird" 2) "Don't bump into it" might do.
I look forward to weaving related thoughts into Mi.org modules new and old.

One thing I expect to emphasize: all of the work helpful to my conception of macroinformation, especially of macroinformation as emergent from but not IN the data, comes from science. My own discipline of English has been utterly useless. No wonder my peers seldom had a clue what I was talking about: they'll generally illiterate in science.

Metadifferences: Mrs. Arnold

Mother-love is a corner stone of human values. It always has been.
Belief in judgment, in separating Chosen from goy, sheep from goats, believers from infidels ... is and has always been core in the foundation of the deisms most familiar to the world-wide West.

The Hellenes contrasted the land of the living with the land of the gods. They also contrasted the land of the living with the shadow place of the dead. So too did the Jews. Soo-too is now familiar throughout civilization: anyplace with excess supply, public records. Christians call it "heaven and hell": and so do I.

Now: We all agree that Benedict Arnold’s mother must have loved him. How sanguine are we about that love once he decided that his dignity as a knowledge capitalist (a civilized professional, a man of learning, a skilled soldier, trained for management) required that he get paid: preferring to get paid over dying broke for his rebelling kleptocracy? Will we tolerate Mrs. Arnold loving little Benedict after he’s been branded a traitor?

Lots of people stuck up for Nixon in 1971, ’72, ’73; how many stick up for Nixon in 2005? How are such loyalists treated by the turncoat majority who supported Nixon in 1971 but who don’t want to hear him mentioned in 2005?

If a mother burning in hell looks up past the brimstone and sees her little Willie shining from heaven, I don’t imaging people will object to her still loving him. But how about if she, dancing among clouds, beholds little Willie getting pitchforked from one cauldron to another?

When do we get to find out if Nixon is dancing among clouds or getting ’forked around?

I also want to know where we will be at the same time. And can there be any "we" if one portion is singing with the seraphs while the other is graduating among devils.

I love metadifferences. I love thinking up new ones.

PS Some themes come to infect Macroinformation.org. I hope you see the true relationship. K. has a Heaven and Hell section, though you’ll do better to just enter the terms in the Search field: because examples are scattered throughout. At Mi.org, this sort of material has thus far gone among the Examples, particularly under the concept of Double Bind.
The thing is though, since all pk domains are on the same server, the Search feature will find matches wherever they are.

Wither Macroinformation?

I’m pleased with my new Macroinformation Entrance, the more pleased with changes and revisions thus far, but there’s something I lost sight of in these early drafts that must find prominence in the next workings:

Complex information such as we find in the greatest art, such as my touchstone phrase from Shakespeare, "salad days," is not the end of macroinformation. I don’t say that Macroinformation will prove to be infinite in its mathematical sense, but it’s plenty infinite in its ordinary sense: no end in view.

Macroinformation emerges from interactions, frictions for example, among metadiffences. I’ve traced typical differences from I₀ to I₃, but marked I₃ as I_n: no end in sight.

What’s over the horizon of what I’ve said so far (in the new Entrance)? Interactions among any metadifferences we can think of. Consider for example:The differences between man’s view of himself before Darwin and after Darwin
The differences between man’s view of himself before Freud and after Freud
The differences between any view before any revolution and after any revolution.Consider the differences between how you might judge yourselfAnd how your wife might judge you
Your children
A judge
Stalin
Any theist’s god
Any new genius.If macroinformation seethes from Captain Renault’s hypocritical behavior in Casablanca, how much more macroinformation might seethe from a comparison of The Temple of Jerusalem’s records of Jesus’ trial, the Roman government’s records, and accounts found nearly a century later in the emerging gospels?

All that might pale beside macroinformation issuing from a rationalist (someone who performs well on the Wason Test) comparing any society’s view of itself and that view strictly falsified (which, in my view, is actually what the trial of Jesus could show us (and it doesn’t matter in this context how literally true any of the stories are).

Oh, and we mustn’t forget this one, one we can only imagine (and probably not imagine very well): consider the difference between the records that any society keeps and the evidence that any society doesn’t keep.What books don’t get published?
What evidence gets lost from the precinct evidence room?
What stories don’t get reported?I’ll have to reintegrate my examples once I work them into the current draft and into new modules. Understand, many of these points are already in old modules.

new top page notes

I'm pleased enough for the moment with Mi.org's new top page, but I note here some dissatisfactions and editing plans:

Macroinformation concentrates on complex information in the universe of Sentiens. Information -- difference, improbability -- I don't doubt are also essential in Pleroma (the physical universe). I don't doubt that differencee and improbabilty are how hyperstrings make different quarks, how different quarks, make different sub-particles, how different sub-particles make different atoms ... molecules ... How pretty much the same string of DNA makes worms, mice, or men ... Information drives how our bodies form, grow, operate ... whether or not we are conscious, no matter what we are conscious/unconscious of.

more in a minute, expect these things to appear in the next drafts.

Intension

coming next

Macroinformation is an intensional mapping of the intensional universe. Information extends in informational space, not in physical space. There are analogies between our models of physical dimension -- starting with the familiar concepts of length, width, depth; but we should also mark the differences. And the first difference to mark is that information is not physical. It manifests length and depth (and perhaps little curly dimensions too) by metaphor: all of which doesn't mean that informational dimension isn't just as "real" as physical dimension.

Don't be confused by the apparent physical manifestation of data: the character A on the chalk board. The board is physical, the chalk is physical ... but the letter A is not. It is intensional: has no spatial extension. The chalk may be two centimeters high, or ten meters ... the letter is neither. The sounds "salad days" linger in the theater for a second or so; but the macroinformation is waxing these hundreds of years later.

New Entrance

Macroinformation.org has a new top page. The first draft, nearly complete, is now up.
The next module created to develop the theme of the Information Spectrum toward its implications will be Intensional Extension: coming soon.

Stereo

I’ve used the concept of information in stereo as a metaphor for macroinformation at Mi.org for years. For the moment this is just a note pledging that I intend to develop it further: particularly in relation to the importance of the development of stereoscopic vision among primates. All primates and many another crittur have two eyes, but where the eyes are located in the skull changed among some primates -- monkeys, apes -- giving us vision with a much better developed awareness of location in three dimensional space: important if you live in and around trees. Now all sentiences process information, including macroinformation. My theory would urge us to relocated our theoretical eyes the better to process information multi-dimensionally. The bush baby sits in a tree, sees the other branches; the spider monkey sees the other branches better: can make more spectacular leaps with fewer falls, is better at thriving in the same three (four, five ...) dimensions. The spider monkey sees more possibilities, and more dangers, than the bush baby. The chimp, with a bigger brain, different wiring, sees more from that same more than the spider monkey, and the man sees more than the chimp. Macroinformationally astute man would see more, vastly more (and more dangers), than informational Flatland man.

Muddle

Muddles as lesser macroinformation:

My theory of macroinformation argues that as information emerges from the difference between background and foreground, "0" and "1" ... More complex information emerges from more complex differences.

When we say "Jesus" (a man) "Christ" (something numinous, divine, magical, impossible ...) we are invoking differences far more complex than zero and one, ordinary background and foreground.

I have been emphasizing that macroinformation, information complex (and abstract) beyond the first several levels of informational complexity (informational possibility, data, metadata, metainformation), often suspends, in tension, between polar opposites, between paired (and more complexly related) complements: data like the road bed, macroinformation like the (suspension) bridge.

But: the contrast between life and death, ordinary manhood and magical divinity, male and female, Yin and Yang, Eros and Thanatos ... in other words, paradox, is not to be confused with mere muddles. There are profound contradictions (which are invaluable) and there are mere muddled contradictions, which often combine stupidity with dishonesty. The latter may also be studied under Macroinformation; but they are not sterling examples.

When Shakespeare’s Cleopatra spoke of her former love for Julius Caesar as her "salad days," SHE was being stupid and dishonest: muddled (and trying to infect others with her muddle). Ah, but Shakespeare was stretching the envelope for poetry. Macroinformation at a new level.

Tension in Information

Macroinformation.org and Knatz.com both recount how I had once told R. Buckminster Fuller of my headache in trying to understand the structure of a tensegrity mast on display at MOMA. I confessed my bewilderment at what held it up. The hosts who’d invited him were late to that afternoon’s Meet Tonight’s Speaker and Bucky was well into his explanation of how humans are well familiar with compressional structures, as the crowd filled in to one side of us. Bricks sit on top of bricks, lintels on posts. But humans are typically at sea when it comes to universe’s parity with tensional structures. Newton had seen how the earth’s moon could "fall" and collide with earth. Newton had simultaneously seen how the moon could "fly" away from the earth like a shot from a sling. What Newton surmised was that in the case of the moon and earth the two forces happened to cancel each other, to balance: establishing an orbit. Falling and flying cancelling each other establish an orbital curve. Earth and moon are each compressional members: like "bricks." Newton’s gravity, in which all mass is mutually attractive with all mass provides the structural tension.

Universe uses both compression and tension freely. With few exceptions up until Ken Snelson’s discontinuous compression sculptures,
men have built by compression alone.
(*Exceptions include the Middle East’s ancient tripod chair -- with leather (tensional) seat and sailboats -- with lines, stays ... wind, sails.)
This is all wonderful in itself: but I am overdue to return with more and more specific informational analogies. The first thing that I wish to point out in today’s assay at the topic is that universe’s gravity seems to be a mono-tension: it’s all matter (compression), it’s all gravity (one force): it’s the spacing of the two that makes the tension. The informational tensions I shall first consider are all poly-tensions: they are minimally two sided. Male and female, for example.
I am confident that most will agree that matter, energy, velocity, gravity ... are objective things. I trust that male and female will follow suit. The first group is from Pleroma, the second from Creatura, but a bulk of us will recognize them both as real.

Universe is at least fourteen and a half or so billion years old. We know of no vacations that gravity has taken in that time. Gravity never drops either end of its rope. In Creatura, neither, so far as we can see, has either male or female dropped its end. Male and female wax and wane, forming complex sin curves over time. Gender differences are more conspicuous among baboons than among humans, more conspicuous among Muslims than beatniks, but neither anchoring end of the tension ever severs.
I supply additional examples, any of which may move further and further away from the simple objectivities of Pleroma: Yin and Yang ... Life and Death ... Eros and Thanatos ...
And, er ... how about: Yes and No? On and Off?
A key relationship I’ll develop in this vein will be between Bateson’s cybernetic buzzers, oscillating between On and Off, and my macroinformational buzzers: such as "salad days." (My head is still buzzing since I first encountered Shakespeare's noun-redundant oxymoron. Indeed, the buzzing has increased with time!)

I draft my plans here at the blog. I’ll be developing examples (into classes of example) over time. Gradually it will all get well developed at Macroinformation.org: as Informational Tension.

Information as Probability

Information has been the inverse of probability since the 1940s: that's how the telephone people saw it. That's how they needed to see it. Specifically, Shannon's definition is well known:

H = -∑p_i log_ep_i

Thus there's more information in the series "1, 15, 138 ..." than in the series "2, 4, 6, 8 ..." If you go to the movie and everything happens exactly as you would expect, if the blond looks like you would expect, dresses as you would expect, if the fiancé says exactly what you would expect, right down to the expression on his face, then the movie contains no information, it isn't very good, even fans of dullness won't like it.
Information is the spice: the only spice ever needed.
But how about considering information as related to probability in the following sense: cultures hear and understand only what they expect to hear and understand.

I've seen people listen to sermons; and hear only what they wanted to hear: read books; and understand only what they expected ...

I'm still fussing with the Mi.org Entrance, still don't have it quite right, and that must take priority; but when I can I must develop this wrinkle. Meantime, for example: if you take a people whose idea of god is a patsy for favors, you can then steep them in a literature of martyrdoms and non-communications, non-cooperations, you'll still have a people who believe in god as a lucky charm. Indeed, we do: Noah, Abraham, Moses ... Jesus ... make no impression.

Information as a Model of Experience

Different cultures, different disciplines, different agendas ... the same individual running an alternate agenda ... model the world differently.
Shannon / Wiener defined information in terms of probability. My theory of Macroinformation also utilizes probability. But Gregory Bateson defined information in terms of difference: any difference that makes a difference: and difference is my Macroinformation's main explanatory referent.
Zoroastrians pictured experience in terms of light and dark: and many a philosophy since has followed suit. Light and dark soon fuzzes with good and evil, God and Devil. Physicists modeled the universe in terms of matter: matter and force. Modern physicists revised the models so that matter and energy are the main players. Energy won: now they model the universe in terms of energy quanta, energy events: the idea of matter evaporated into energy. Anyone should be able to supply additional examples; I segue to my point: Macroinformation models the world, the universe, experience ... sentiens ... in terms of information.
In a limited sense my theory of Macroinformation is my theory of EVERYTHING.

First I urge readers to disabuse themselves of the notion that information and data are synonyms. Information cannot exist without data any more than blood can exist without iron atoms, but by the time we're modeling how blood clots, we've left iron atoms far below us. For example: my first sentence: if information is significant difference, and different cultures model the world differently, then new information issues from these differences.
Not data. Oh, there's data aplenty: already operating in the different cultures and their different models; no, new information emerges from comparing them. New data of course will follow, accompanying the new mapping. I am making more data here: to illustrate what I see. First I see it - new information; then I describe what I see with new data.

To talk about what I see I invoke a concept of levels of information. To a limited extent, levels are already familiar with regard to information: any HTML document distinguishes between data and metadata. The data is what I'm saying; the metadata holds instructions on how the data is to be displayed. For example, the mechanism on a typewriter that stops the carriage return at a left margin is a form of metadata, and in this case, it's "hardwired" into the typewriter. If at the left margin, I press the letter A, that's data. If instead I press the tab key, that's more metadata.
Macroinformation requires more than two levels.
First, a perception of difference must be possible. To see the photon - to notice it, it has to be dark. Foreground must be distinguishable from background (and an artist, like Degas, who will occasionally blur them, is making very complex new information!)
Second there's data, marking the simplest differences. The character 1 is distinct from the character 0, the character A is distinct from the character B, The number 1 is further distinct from the letter A; the capital A is distinct from the lower-case a ... There's more than one level within a level, there are differences between Kingdom and Phylum, Phylum and Class ... and further differences within Kingdom, Phylum, and Class. Still, so far, it's all data.
Third, there's metadata, already introduced. Centered text is distinct from text justified left, test justified right is distinct from both; italic text is distinct from Roman ...
Fourth, there's metainformation. The way that a noun is distinct from a verb is different - at a higher (more complex) level - from the way that the noun "salad" is distinct from the noun "days." Language, grammar ... meaning ... would not be possible without metainformation. Without metainformation all the data in the universe would be so much sand on the beach. There could be no sentience.
I repeat: sentience is 100% dependent on the possibility of metainformation.
Fifth, there's macroinformation. Fifth, sixth, and seventh, there's macroinformation. "Fifth" here is more complex "to infinity."
(Is it actually infinite? It's premature to say.) (For the moment, I use the word infinity not the way a mathematician does, but the way a photographer does: "further away than my present equipment can make meaningful distinctions about": in the distance.

When, with our eyes (and our visual cortex), we see a tree, we don't (and can't) count the photons. Neither do we count the medium between us and the tree. Neither do we count the carbon atoms, the nitrogen, the hydrogen ... atoms in the tree. No: we "see" the "tree." Neither do we estimate all the quarks, neither do we estimate all the hyperstrings. We see a mental construct - tree - in the macrouniverse: the universe of the sense that we make of common human experience. But the photons, the atmosphere, the carbon, nitrogen, hydrogen ... atoms, quarks, and maybe hyperstrings too, are there; or there wouldn't be any tree; neither would there be any "we."

Thus, initially, I discuss and analyze macroinformation the way we discuss and analyze the oak: knowing that I'm omitting huge essential bulks of things.

The modules at Macroinformation.org, more than three hundred of them to date, go into as many of these things - as I've yet dealt with. Some are well composed; some are just sketches, many unfinished. Many repeat the same illustrations similarly. In other words, Macroinformation is a theory in progress of being formed, and written. The need for the theory has been in my head for several decades; the actual work is now entering its eighth year.

Even from this brief introduction I trust the newcomer can see that I am arguing that new information may issue from cross-cultural examinations. This information will all be macroinformation: quantumly more complex than metainformation. Art has always done that: generated macroinformation. The musicians set up rhythm here, melody there, a bass here, a soprano there, on the beat here, off the beat there ... The musician's hearers will hear in all cases, however differingly from individual to individual, new information, in their own audio-cortex, emerging from differences between the parts: and the parts will sometimes seem to blend, other times seem to produce friction ...

Above I cited two nouns as distinguishable: salad and days. I pointed out that their distinction is different from, of a lesser order than, the distinction between any noun and any verb. Ah, but the way Shakespeare used them, in the mouth of his Cleopatra, the distinctions become greater. "Salad days" transcends its grammatical classification, leaps beyond a sub-category of metainformation, straight into sublime, unfathomable, macroinformation. The phrase has been analyzed in literature for five centuries, going into a sixth. But to the best of my knowledge what I say about it at Macroinformation.org has never been said before.
It's a noun cluster. That's been said. Fowler's English Usage discouraged noun clusters. Should we red pencil it? Delete it from the play? Tell everyone that our greatest poet didn't know proper English? Or should we recognize that the solecism is essential to this example of the highest reaches of literature?
This part I don't believe has been said: the two nouns, grammatically, in usage, fight each other. It's like shoving President Bush up against a Muslim. They function like two magnets forced together, same poles facing. They repel each other. They are a minimalist, euphonious oxymoron.
But, saying that they're of the same grammatical class, and that English normally likes to distribute classes, put different classes between similar classes, is misleading. (The rest of this I guarantee has never been said or written except by pk.) Existentially, salad and days are very different. Days are a measure of time: a comfy, familiar measure, common to all human experience. Time, however real, is abstract. It measures in only one of the familiar dimensions. It has length, but no width, no depth, no height. Time comes from forever and goes toward forever, but it has no substance. Time merely endures. Time cannot be stopped from enduring. Days follow days follow days.
Salad contrasts; yet there are similarities. Salad does occupy space, has dimension, has weight. Ah, but very little weight. Pick up a tear of lettuce, and more people will say it weighs "nothing" than will offer some decimal fraction of a gram with a lot of zeros after the zero point. And indeed, for Elizabethans, salad was the nothing dish: insubstantial, not satisfying, of nourishment not worth considering. (We differ: but that's a different macroinformation!)

That's enough for the moment: except to say that the way salad fights with days is highly complex, as is the way that salad agrees with days.

Criticism, all the criticisms, have arsenals of tools. English criticism has irony, anomaly, discrepancy ... I say that there isn't a one of those tools that wouldn't benefit from an informational review. And I say the same about music, painting ... and politics, economics, theology ... The entrepreneur sees a difference between price and value: and exploits it. This, all, is analyzable as information.

Macroinformation is, certainly in potential, a theory of "everything."

At least in the universe of conscious thought: which I call Sentiens.

To what extent that universe is exclusively human remains to be known.

2005 06 02 I have converted this post to HTML and incorporated it at Macroinformation.org as the new Entrance. Any changes will go there, not here.

Macroinformation Precedent

From Howards End, by EM Forster, 1910
Love and Truth--their warfare seems eternal. Perhaps the whole visible world rests on it, and if they were one, life itself, like the spirits when Prospero was reconciled to his brother, might vanish into air, into thin air.I see macroinformation everywhere. I see the briefest glimpses of parallel understandings, such as when the Marsalises, Wynton, for example, say that jazz blends the combat of a devil with an angel (I paraphrase). But that Forster passage comes the closest, by far, of anything I've read, to my theory of the universe of Sentiens being constructed of macroinformation.
Light and dark model experience one way. Energy and matter model it more precisely. Macroinformation, information in conflict, coexisting, mutually forming discrepancies, properly developed--with feedback from thinkers--could model it with unprecedented completeness.

Further from Howards End:... the vague yet convincing plea that the Invisible lodges against the Visible ...I'll explain further another time.

Spectra : Orthogonality

The Flatlander is well aware of things pushing and pulling along length. Politically, Flatlanders have left and right. (Those on the right see valuation in their label: they're right!) (Those on the left are sinister. (A mere redundancy.))
What do we do with orthogonal forces?
Well, in Flatland, we're simply not aware of them. (Or, we generalize them all as divine. God is pulling us upward. The devil is pulling us downward.) But of course by then we're no longer in Flatland. A little better, we're in 3-Dland.
more coming
and this will be placed in my Spectra folder: though of course it relates to much of the rest of Macroinformation.org.

Data Transmission / Information Filters

I hope I've been clear enough about macroinforamtion to date to try to elucidate an important set of arcs around the core of my real purpose. Phone company engineers, military technicians, etc. understand a great deal about problems of data transmission: noise, for example. Though all data is information, not all information is data. Macroinformation, though it cannot emerge without data (just as there can be no mind without at least one organism with a physical body) is wholly distinct from data: as close to independent as possible.

Any society will assure that some information transmits without interference. Indeed, society will subsidize, augment, amplify some information. At the same time that same society, any society, will under no circumstances countenance other information. Every society will have an informational black hole, sucking up, holding onto, not letting go, of a near infinity of other messages.

The problem isn't with the data. It remains nevertheless an informational problem: one that no society will allow any budget for solving.

Jesus wowed the countryside, got stifled in the city. Abelard knocked people's socks off: until he addressed certain deep philosophical and epistemological (and ontological) issues. Thereafter, Abelard got stifled. His messages still haven't transmitted. The data is still there, not all of it lost; the information goes a-begging.

There are hosts of important messages that simply will not transmit through the medium of society.

James Joyce got published. He submitted manuscripts to publishers. The publishers published stories, novels. But by the time he got to Ulysses, Joyce knew better than to waste his time with publishers.
pk submitted stories, novels. I don't doubt that the data arrived in the mail. But the relevant information never got through: not to the public. I doubt that the publishers saw more of the information than just enough to know: that buck stops right here. Of course I know this latter only in my imagination, since no intelligible discussion ever took place.

This problem is the undiscussable problem. And dealing with it rationally would require my theory of Macroinformation: or at least some other theory that distinguishes data from information: or rather data within information, important information being beyond data. (Could that be why not one scientist has yet discussed my theory with me? No feedback, no healthy theory.)
Scientists record the songs of whales. We have data; we don't have the whales' information. We can't read the song.

Christian stories dramatize the phenomenon. (So did Jewish stories.) God's messages don't arrive: not uninterferred with: not even through the church.

Some literature doesn't arrive through the publishers. Many a thesis doesn't arrive through the universities. Wouldn't it be a kick if all messages to the White House got published? (pk's FLEX would have done it: provided that everyone who wrote the White House also cc'd FLEX!)

I'm just painting the house. I'm in the middle of a gross of projects. Nevertheless I intend to continue this theme, in these terms, here at Macroinformation.org (as indeed I long have: in my fiction, in my theses: especially at Knatz.com: especially under the rubric homeostasis.

Macro Shakespeare

pk's theory of Macroinformation I repeat has interbred with pk's "meta-oxymoron" reading of Shakespeare's Sonnets. To date Macroinformation.org has referred to that relationship but specified little of it. To date Knatz.com's section on the subject has languished underdeveloped, attention having been siphoned off to Macroinformation.org, pk regarding the general expansion of his ideas as vastly more important than the specific applications to Shakespeare from which it developed.
That state of things may be on the verge of changing. pk is beginning to precis his Shakespeare thesis of the 1960s in a series of emails to a professor of modern literature. (That recipient may be identified once her wishes are better consulted.) The monologue (invited to become dialogue once the basics have been laid down) will appear in a restart of the subject at Knatz.com.
I've mounted some of Shakespeare's sonnets online for close to a decade: now I'm whipping myself along to get them all up. My efforts will be much aided by another site that's posted them nicely (though I haven't yet edited their editing). The plan is for visitors to be able to link back and forth among the sonnets without comment, the sonnets with some general notes, and the sonnets with pk's reading in the margins.
I'll add a link here once there's more to see there.

March 2005

I'm initiating a description of details from Tarkovsky's The Sacrifice to which I will add macroinformational analysis in time.

February 2005

Macroinformation.org has a new Entrance.

Later I'll note other changes at Macroinformation.org.

pk's IonaArc Blog

Thanks to bk, pk now has a blog.
bk had named it "macroinformation" as a tip of the hat to my Macroinformation.org.

2005 02 28 The blog has budded into three blogs:
this, macroinformation,
InfoAll blog, and
Iona Arc blog.

(All my domains were a casualty of federal censorship. I was arrested in 2006, censored in 2007. My family paid all my bills except my IS bill, my IS destroyed what they were ordered, plus all else: five domains, only the blogs remain. 3000 text files gone: till I can rescue them, if possible.)

I'll try to reserve this blog for macroinformational notes and drafts. Materials on public information, on Ivan Illich, on deschooling, and on my 1970 offer of a now-tech, PC free, internet will go to the InfoAll blog. All Knatz.com-type posts have now been moved to the Iona Arc blog (and sometimes to Knatz.com as well).

Iona Arc is a portmanteau reference both to Ireland's preservation of learning during the Dark Ages at Iona and Noah's preservation of dry land life aboard the arc.

Macroinformation Brief

Articulated online starting February 1999
(conceived in the mid 1960s)

Mission: responsibly to explore informational complexity

2005 11 03

Information issues from difference:

the more improbable, the more information.

Powerful information issues from differences among metadifferences:

the more metadifferences,
the more complexity among them,
the greater the potential of the information.

(This piece is an "entrance" of sorts to Macroinformation: I'll keep re-posting it each month so it will always appear near the top of the menu.)

Macroinformation is my term for the information that emerges from our mental processing of informational complexities.

We don't just process data: there's data, and more data, and tons of information already in our heads: and we process parts, and wholes, in an informational environment. The real information, the whole of the information, the macroinformation, must be seen to interact in an ecology of information.

Macroinformation

synergistic

information

The kids chant Nyah-nyah. They're chanting the fifth and third of a chord: where's the root? The root remains unchanted, but it's "there," we hear it.

The wife gets "B"s tattooed on her rump because her husband loves her beautiful buns. She strips, bends over, and her husband asks, "Who's Bob?" We have data for the Bs; where did the "O" come from?Well, we have that information too, but it appears in our processing of the joke, there's no data for it in the joke.





The movie shows Captain Renault being handed a wad of cash from the roulette cashier's cage. The sound track has Captain Renault saying, "I am shocked, shocked to learn that there is gambling going on in here," and closes Rick's casino down.The information that follows us home from the theater wasn't in the pictures and it wasn't in the words. Neither was it in the music. The information that haunts us emerges from inter-playings, even conflicts, among the constituent information complexes: words, pictures, actions, sound effects, music ... all processed in minds that already know something about the world.

Information begets information.

The most important information emerges as meta-patterns that rise above data the way a flock of birds rise above the earth. Without the earth, there are no birds; without the birds there is no flock. But their beauty is in the metapatterns.

The meaning of information is in the metapatterns.

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Claude Shannon, Norbert Wiener ... defined information in terms of the inverse of the probabilities. There's more information is the string 2, 5, 13, 87 ... than in the string 1, 2, 3, 4 ... There's more information in Steve Allen's "Roses are red,/ Violets are blue,/ You thought this would rhyme,/ But it doesn't" than in any of the familiar Roses are red jingles.
Probability is wonderful, and dangerously counter-intuitive, and I make use of it; but Gregory Bateson defined information as





Any difference that makes a difference.
Difference is a concept that fits the non-mathematical human right down to the ground, and if you can follow me into meta-difference, we shall flock like birds in the stratosphere of complex, emergent information.

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What started me on this path may be of some relevance and interest. By college age I was beginning to get fragmentary explanations for seeming-informational contradictions I'd been aware of since childhood. During WW II, from the US, Hitler was the bad guy. So how come the MovieTone News coverage of his rallies was so exciting? Because our documentary makers were using footage from Leni Riefenstahl, the genius of filming mass rallies.

The documentary that showed our bold leader, President Truman, firing the miscreant General MacArthur, showed Mac marching like a hero, while sunlight flashed annoyingly from the elected haberdasher's eye glasses. Whose side were the documentary makers on?

Marlon Brando had a skull that could star in any museum. Elia Kazan filmed him in naturally contrastive black and white, looking one moment like a brute ... but change the camera angle one millimeter, change the lighting one candle-power, and Marlon looked like a Roman god. Complex information exploded from these minute differences.

Then in graduate school I first heard of information being stored on some medium for a computer. Fine. Then I heard that one could count the bytes involved. Fine. Then I heard that this was regarded as giving a quantitative value for the information! Balderdash.

First, the data will be very different depending on how you've "spelled" the data. English is far from efficient, even among natural languages. But far more important, data is being equated with information! No, no. The data is this bird and that bird. The information is the flock flying in what we see as a "formation."

I had a thesis to write, then a revolution to foment. I put my 1960s thoughts on information on a back burner. It wasn't until I decided to heat the subject up a bit early in 1999, starting writing that soon got posted as Macroinformation, that I learned that Norbert Wiener had said that there was more information in a good poem than there was in the phone directory for a major city. Had I known that in the 1960s I would have assumed that the information theorists were taking proper care of their business. As it was, I long believed them to be missing the core of the point. Now; whatever they do, I don't know. Macroinformation is what I do.

And I've noted some patterns in emergent information that I believe are essential to wisdom on the subject.

When I heard that some computer people thought they were quantifying information I was indignant, but not because I believed that information could not be quantified. I do believe it. I still believe it. I think I am taking the correct steps in that direction. The more steps I take however the more I see that particular goal as still very distant. That doesn't mean we can't get there, or at least get closer. But however close we get, however far we remain, efforts at quantification will remain more like quantifying the electricity in a thunder storm than weighing a cabbage on the grocer's scale. Meantime I say that a hypothesis I hope to develop toward theoryhood believes that the quality of information will prove to be directly proportional to the quantity, not of the data, but of the complex information, the deep meta-information. No, not meta-data! Not the information-about-the-information that's mere directions for style: read top to bottom, left to right, put the margin at the left ... And not meta-information a step up from meta-data: grammar: the noun is different from the verb, the unmodified noun is different from the modified noun ... the pronoun is different (and not different!) from the noun ... No, meta-information a step more complex and abstract still: the macroinformation which challenges to think of what kind of a government bureaucrat Captain Renault is: taking payola from Rick's crooked table night after night, then closing Rick's down, protesting his innocence the while ...

Try synformation as a synonym for macroinformation, the synergy of the information: meaning identical.

The more overtones, the more that is implicit, suggestible, between the lines ... the better the poem, the painting, the tune, the speech ... The greatest literature will prove bottomless.

My attempt the other day at a new Entrance for Macroinformation resulted in an emphasis on my Spectrum of Informational Complexity. [Link temporarily down.] I must relate that to my concept of informational dimensions, which relates to my concept of Extension / Intension (now posted here as of 2009 03 26), and non-spatial dimensions. Which relates to ... and so forth. I'm getting it all here the best I can.

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To hunt for macroinformation on your own, focus on nature versus culture, and its informational scree.

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Here's a path I suggest that will keep you busy for millennia (if we're lucky enough to have millennia before us) (we're certainly not smart enough to deserve it!):

Look for metadifferences implicit in the major religion of the West for the past two millennia: one the one hand there's our judgment of ourselves; on the other hand, at Judgment, such judgments will be exposed as foolishness (or so Christians are supposed to believe.)

Now: think what else that might imply: an omnipotent deity might find the Temple of Jerusalem's self-image to be contradicted by in behavior: can we think of any other institutions where an omnipotent deity might find the institution's self image to be contradicted by its behavior?

In Casablanca Captain Renault lives in a secular heaven: he's in charge of the police, he gets payola every night ... After a macroinformational judgment, where would he be? Never mind the judgment of an omnipotent deity: how about in your judgment. In your judgment is any government what it says it is? Is any institution? Is your judgment the same in 2010 as it was in 2000? Do you expect it to be the same in 2020? (Do you see that those differences stimulate macroinformation?)

Never mind whether God is infinite; macroinformation is infinite. Its potential is infinitely infinite whether humans are here to think it or not.

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It's so funny: I thought much of this out around 1965. I started writing it in 1999. I'm editing it a bit here 2010 11 17. But I'm still using my examples from 1965! Do people still know Kazan? Brando? Casablanca?

Macroinformation is merely potential, not at all actual, if no one is actively processing the information. Once state-coerced schooling has discouraged our minds down to zero there will be no information of any kind: except data. And meta-data. And maybe grammar.

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This blog began 2005 Jan 5. Macroinformation.org had the main files, this blog just added comments of the moment. But now this blog is all there is currently online by me on the subject. So I place my Macroinformation Brief as a current post and as though it were the original post for this blog: like book ends.