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.