If anyone has understood me properly I remain unaware of it. (The same holds in all of my creative endeavors: the society seems determined to preserve kleptocracy by not allowing independent or creative thought.) Trying to tell an old friend about my efforts recently, I decided to try a different term: "synformation." Same concept; different primary image: synformation was coined to suggest "informational synergy." (Hallelujah, Bucky!)
Below I repeat something recently revived for any home-page I can get reestablished:
My original appellation for synformation was meta-information. (That was before I ever heard of meta-data.) Once I did hear of meta-data, I questioned my choice. I didn’t want readers confusing meta-information with meta-data. I further didn’t want readers confusing meta-information with the silliness of centuries called "metaphysics." But those objections pale beside what remains my main reason for the renaming: "macro-" suggests to me the macro-universe.
2002 11 22 I intend the prefix "macro-" to suggest that the information is composite: it is assembled. Even more important, note that such assemblages exist in the mind (and only in the mind).
You can’t go to the city of Casablanca and ask a taxi driver to take you to the "irony" (not and be recognized as speaking a human language sanely). The irony resides in the mind of the audience viewing the movie of that title.
Before the invention of post-Renaissance optical instruments, people thought that what they saw was the "world." With microscopes and telescopes we see both inwards in scale and outwards without finding any "end" yet. Previously assumed boundaries have been breached again and again. The atom has been divided theoretically (and actually split). The divisions have divided. Our "Sun" has become a star among stars. The Milky Way has become a galaxy among galaxies. New super-structures are being imagined. Even modern telescopes don’t see those structures: like quarks, they’re "seen" only with the mind. The Hubble Telescope gives us no universally recognized image that all can identify as a "bubble." Neither did the movie Casablanca give us data which we could identify one-to-one as "the irony of Captain Renault’s corrupt hypocrisy." We can show each other sheet music for someone’s arrangement of Amazing Grace: but seeing all the notes, even all the notes with all the chords, as in a fake book, does not show either of us the "music." The symbols for the notes may form on my retina. Some understanding about the meta-relations of the notes may begin to form in my optical cortex, but something has to stimulate my auditory cortex and the whole mix and blend (or lump and mix) in my mind before there is music. Synformation, like a macro-particle, or like the macro-universe, is a wholly mental phenomenon.
Once astronomers saw that they were assembling models more than "seeing" "things," it became easier for other thinkers, thinkers from more than one specialty to begin to sense the humiliating but irresistible concept of semiotics: a science in which your own hand before your own face is also a mental construct: there are no bones, skin, or fingers in the brain; even what we see directly is an image.
Our reifying mental images as concrete things may be inevitable. Psychologists tell us that humans are congenitally incapable of maintaining distinctions between map and territory. Trouble escalates, perhaps quantumly, when we forget, or—worse—deny, that we are fuzzing our categories. Roughly a millennium ago some thinkers were treated very badly for saying the obvious: that our categories are categories. (Nominalism became a heresy; the confusion of ontological categories was called "Realism.")
These points were fairly well along in their development at Knatz.com before I embarked on developing Synformation. I have labored as much as I have toward essays like Mental Modeling because I don’t see that people (including academics) (including (a majority?) of scientists) "get" it. It isn’t just the thinking in the marketplace or in Washington DC that’s still medieval: stuck in Realism: that is, in believing their own metaphors.
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