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.
Friday, January 07, 2005
Saturday, January 01, 2005
Macroinformation Brief
Articulated online starting February 1999
(conceived in the mid 1960s)
(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.
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 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?
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.
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
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.
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.
To hunt for macroinformation on your own, focus on nature versus culture, and its informational scree.
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.
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.
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.
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