Analogy, somewhat loose:
The sky above much data is dry. Macroinformation forms like a cloud over some data: if the data generates associative dynamics: a mental cloud. The data is of the earth: stones and bones; the macroinformation is of the sky, incorporeal, and tends toward the cosmic.
The cloud may be dark, may be fluffy as cirrus, may have a silver (or black) lining. The cloud may be more luminous than the dry sky. The cloud may be incandescent.
Sunday, April 30, 2006
Saturday, April 15, 2006
Informational World
The "world" is far more informational than material. And the information that concerns us relates far less to objects than we realize: to our immanent danger.
Macroinformation is my offer of what's intended as a giant step toward survival: toward self-defense against the manipulators: both deliberate and merely conveniently conscious: aware only enough to guide the lies, deceptions, misinformations. To protect us against governments, churches, schools, parents, used car salesmen, all the purveyors of deception, the victim-victimizers.
We're not as bright as we pretend. Some is deliberate, some is unnecessary. If we could step up in informational sophistication, if the consumers of information had some of the same tools of awareness that the manipulators had, we might thrive better: and less kleptocratically.
Macroinformation is my caution to those who would mature from kleptocracy, or at least those who sympathize with the victims of rapacious civilization (and that's all of us) to resist the civilization's convenient naivte about complex information.
The reigning epistemology encourages associating information with data, as though the word spoken, the word, written, is the thought meant: and that's all.
No, information, real information, the important information, though it cannot exist without data, has no more to do with data than "you" have to do with the atoms in the molecules in the cells of your body. Certainly you cannot exist without them; but you are so much more (and so much less) than they are. Sure, we're attoms and molecules and cells ... and also what made us vote for Hitler, for Nixon, for Bush, what makes us weep in La Strada, what makes us fall for the gypsy repairing our car ...
We live in a conceptualized world far more than in the physical world. we live in the unspoken world as importantly, more importantly than in the spoken. Information mixes data with implication with inuendo with lie with mistake ... with eidetic information.
Macroinformation is my offer of what's intended as a giant step toward survival: toward self-defense against the manipulators: both deliberate and merely conveniently conscious: aware only enough to guide the lies, deceptions, misinformations. To protect us against governments, churches, schools, parents, used car salesmen, all the purveyors of deception, the victim-victimizers.
We're not as bright as we pretend. Some is deliberate, some is unnecessary. If we could step up in informational sophistication, if the consumers of information had some of the same tools of awareness that the manipulators had, we might thrive better: and less kleptocratically.
Macroinformation is my caution to those who would mature from kleptocracy, or at least those who sympathize with the victims of rapacious civilization (and that's all of us) to resist the civilization's convenient naivte about complex information.
The reigning epistemology encourages associating information with data, as though the word spoken, the word, written, is the thought meant: and that's all.
No, information, real information, the important information, though it cannot exist without data, has no more to do with data than "you" have to do with the atoms in the molecules in the cells of your body. Certainly you cannot exist without them; but you are so much more (and so much less) than they are. Sure, we're attoms and molecules and cells ... and also what made us vote for Hitler, for Nixon, for Bush, what makes us weep in La Strada, what makes us fall for the gypsy repairing our car ...
We live in a conceptualized world far more than in the physical world. we live in the unspoken world as importantly, more importantly than in the spoken. Information mixes data with implication with inuendo with lie with mistake ... with eidetic information.
Wednesday, April 05, 2006
Macroinformation:
Concrete versus Eidetic Information
Macroinformation is my term for that part of information which is constructed in the mind, varyingly implicit in the data. Some information is explicit in the data, the data and the information are the same, coextensive: c-a-t, cat. The bulk of information however is emergent from data but is not at all coextensive with it: the meaning of Shakespeare's salad days, for example.
Some macroinformation is "real" in the sense of relating to physics (illustration in a moment); the bulk of macroinformation is eidetic: existing entirely in the mind, wholly and solely in the mind (illustrations ubiquitous at Mi.org).
A. When kids chant nyah-nyah at someone, universally and without the need of musical instruction, they are chanting the fifth and third of a chord, the root, or tonic, of the chord left unchanted.
Orchestrated, the C would be present in the bass, in the continuo. Silent, on the playground, our minds hear it anyway. The relationship to C is not fanciful, not imaginary; Pythagoras established it in the overtones of any vibrating string: and the vocal chords are vibrating strings.
B. In contrast the hypocrisy that movie-goers hear in Captain Renault's utterance, "I am shocked, shocked, to discover that there is gambling going on in here," is wholly eidetic. The macroinformation emerges from the discrepancy between the police chief's utterance and his behavior, cashing in his chips from the roulette wheel he professes not to know the existence of. A C chord can be constructed in the lab; but not morality. Ethics exist only in human talk about things. We weave data and more data, macroinformation and more macroinformation, but it's eideticaly-based first and last.
Some macroinformation bridges the "real" and the eidetic. In the joke where the woman has a B tattooed onto each cheek of her buttocks because her husband likes her "beautiful buns," she strips and bends over, he asks, "Who's Bob?" The "B"s are explicit in the data of the joke; the "O" is seen in the mind of the hearer of the joke. The "O" relates to human anatomy which can be established in the lab, but unlike the root of a chord where the relationship is necessary, relating a sphincter to a letter of the alphabet is not necessary: only sentient creatures in a literate culture would do it.
I expect that dolphins would hear the root in nyah-nyah; I doubt if they would get the joke about Bob.
I select macroinformation's prefix to relate my concept to scientists' concept of the macrouniverse where the bulk of the contents of the world are mental constructs. We see light -- we construct "sun," "stars," "galaxies," a "universe" ... each other ... our selves.
"Cat" can refer to a specific organism; more often we mean a concept. Even with "cat," data gets left far behind.
Some macroinformation is "real" in the sense of relating to physics (illustration in a moment); the bulk of macroinformation is eidetic: existing entirely in the mind, wholly and solely in the mind (illustrations ubiquitous at Mi.org).
A. When kids chant nyah-nyah at someone, universally and without the need of musical instruction, they are chanting the fifth and third of a chord, the root, or tonic, of the chord left unchanted.
Nyah | - | nyah |
Tonic | Fifth | Third |
C, for example | G | E |
silent | uttered | uttered |
Orchestrated, the C would be present in the bass, in the continuo. Silent, on the playground, our minds hear it anyway. The relationship to C is not fanciful, not imaginary; Pythagoras established it in the overtones of any vibrating string: and the vocal chords are vibrating strings.
B. In contrast the hypocrisy that movie-goers hear in Captain Renault's utterance, "I am shocked, shocked, to discover that there is gambling going on in here," is wholly eidetic. The macroinformation emerges from the discrepancy between the police chief's utterance and his behavior, cashing in his chips from the roulette wheel he professes not to know the existence of. A C chord can be constructed in the lab; but not morality. Ethics exist only in human talk about things. We weave data and more data, macroinformation and more macroinformation, but it's eideticaly-based first and last.
Some macroinformation bridges the "real" and the eidetic. In the joke where the woman has a B tattooed onto each cheek of her buttocks because her husband likes her "beautiful buns," she strips and bends over, he asks, "Who's Bob?" The "B"s are explicit in the data of the joke; the "O" is seen in the mind of the hearer of the joke. The "O" relates to human anatomy which can be established in the lab, but unlike the root of a chord where the relationship is necessary, relating a sphincter to a letter of the alphabet is not necessary: only sentient creatures in a literate culture would do it.
I expect that dolphins would hear the root in nyah-nyah; I doubt if they would get the joke about Bob.
I select macroinformation's prefix to relate my concept to scientists' concept of the macrouniverse where the bulk of the contents of the world are mental constructs. We see light -- we construct "sun," "stars," "galaxies," a "universe" ... each other ... our selves.
"Cat" can refer to a specific organism; more often we mean a concept. Even with "cat," data gets left far behind.
Tell the Truth
"Tell the truth."
Huh? "Tell" means use symbols, manipulate them, utter (or record) speech.
Incompatibly, "truth" symbolizes the actuality, the raw territory: that which Korzybski (Bateson, pk ....) insist is unutterable. Make the map BE the territory. Impossible. A fools errand.
Exactly the kind of instruction a kleptocracy issues so irresponsibly, so destructively: to keep us all off balance: and the truth far from our apprehension.
Charitably, we interpret "Tell the truth" to mean "Don’t lie." Don’t knowingly misrepresent facts, events, interpretations.
But carry it to its absurd implications: imagine the mortal demanding of the god, "Use my shaggy finite symbols to inform me about infinities, the cosmos: ... all time, all universes, all forms of being: and non-being. Convey to me your essence: and the essences of all the meta-essences beyond you."
Why turn the mortal into a pillar of salt? The mortal already is a pillar of salt.
Information "is" any difference that makes a difference; macroinformation "is" any and all of the differences between the data and the information.
Simplifying my
already simple
spectrum of information:
To master information rather than be its victim existential distinctions must be plumbed at depths not supported by the culture. Get further than an inch and no bureaucrat, no priest of the kleptocracy, will understand you: or permit you to talk unimpeded.
For the half-dozen years in which I’ve been developing my theory of Macroinformation I’ve harked to one of the complex images in Shakespeare that first made me lust to develop such a theory: "salad days." The data seems simple; the information is more complex than scholarship since the early 1600s has exhausted. I also added examples where key data is implicit rather than explicit: the tonic to the chord chanted by "nyah-nyah"; the "O" in the joke "Who’s Bob?" ... Today an example I’ve dealt with at Knatz.com, but not yet at Mi.org, shoves itself upward, demanding inclusion at the top:Tell the Truth Review the opening remarks.
The common phrase -- tell the truth -- is an oxymoron: of a type similar to "Jesus Christ": contradictions built-in.Jesus is a name; Christ is a title: Jesus is a man; Christ is a God: Jesus is natural; Christ is magical ...
"Tell" means utter by symbols, by the patterning of language; the "truth" is the actuality. The imperative to tell the truth demands an act which is impossible: to make the map BE the territory.
Huh?
Incompatibly, "truth" symbolizes the actuality, the raw territory: that which Korzybski (Bateson, pk ....) insist is unutterable.
Exactly the kind of instruction a kleptocracy issues so irresponsibly, so destructively: to keep us all off balance: and the truth far from our apprehension.
Charitably, we interpret "Tell the truth" to mean "Don’t lie." Don’t knowingly misrepresent facts, events, interpretations.
But carry it to its absurd implications: imagine the mortal demanding of the god, "Use my shaggy finite symbols to inform me about infinities, the cosmos: ... all time, all universes, all forms of being: and non-being. Convey to me your essence: and the essences of all the meta-essences beyond you."
Why turn the mortal into a pillar of salt? The mortal already is a pillar of salt.
Information "is" any difference that makes a difference; macroinformation "is" any and all of the differences between the data and the information.
Simplifying my
already simple
spectrum of information:
I0 The possibility of difference Informational universe | I1 Any difference that makes a difference Information, including data | In N dimensional differences Macroinformation |
To master information rather than be its victim existential distinctions must be plumbed at depths not supported by the culture. Get further than an inch and no bureaucrat, no priest of the kleptocracy, will understand you: or permit you to talk unimpeded.
For the half-dozen years in which I’ve been developing my theory of Macroinformation I’ve harked to one of the complex images in Shakespeare that first made me lust to develop such a theory: "salad days." The data seems simple; the information is more complex than scholarship since the early 1600s has exhausted. I also added examples where key data is implicit rather than explicit: the tonic to the chord chanted by "nyah-nyah"; the "O" in the joke "Who’s Bob?" ... Today an example I’ve dealt with at Knatz.com, but not yet at Mi.org, shoves itself upward, demanding inclusion at the top:
The common phrase -- tell the truth -- is an oxymoron: of a type similar to "Jesus Christ": contradictions built-in.
"Tell" means utter by symbols, by the patterning of language; the "truth" is the actuality. The imperative to tell the truth demands an act which is impossible: to make the map BE the territory.
Wednesday, February 15, 2006
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
