Saturday, November 12, 2005

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 In: 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.

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