No Trespassing

Complex information, macroinformation, emerges from discrepancies between and among informational complexes.

Humans are social creatures, there are few to no things we can do on our own. Even the group depends on predecessors: even when we build a road, animals had already beaten a path there, showing us the way. The No Trespassing signs a young woman wants respected around her emerging female nature were put there by the culture before the young woman herself wants them respected, enforced ... or trampled over. (And of course they were put there by "biology" before there could be a "culture.")

What's the information content of such signs? Understand: the signs are basically macroinformational. The nubile breast, hip, face, belly blares a bedlam of signs, but the signs, with rare exceptions, display no data; they depend on information and interpretations in the minds of the members of the society. There's the girl: her budding breast screams "look at me!" "touch me!" "adore me!" The society covers such macroinformational signs with other macroinformational signs: Adore, but from afar, Look but don't touch: not until you're proved yourself a breadwinner competing against other breadwinners for the privilege of housing and feeding her future children.

Macroinformation is most quintessentially macroinformation where there's paradox, even outright contradiction. At some point the Don't Touch sign has to be either taken down (by the girl, by the society) or ignored.

Come in on a different tack: The store window displays a sign: "No Trespassing." Another sign says "Open." Can either sign be true? if they're both there? All complex information depends on interpretation. One adult sees both signs and understands that the store is open to the public and that it sells a variety of items, including signs, including "No Trespassing" signs. OK. In that case both signs were put there by (or at the direction of) the store owner. Each bears its "literal" meaning, each also bears meta meanings. All of the latter are subject to interpretation; but all of the former are too. Now add a third sign: another type of sign.

One sign says "Open," another signs says "No Trespassing," but the signs are charred, the glass in the store window is broken, the window frame is charred, there's charring where a roof once was. The adult passer by interprets still other signs to decide that the fire happened years ago, the whole town burned, this is a ghost town, the signs in the window don't mean "anything." The store's owner is dead, or gone. The "No Trespassing" sign is merely damaged and abandoned merchandise, it marks no protected property.

Normally one might expect Captain Renault's words, "I am shocked, shocked to learn that gambling is going on in here," to mean that he is shocked, that he is doubly shocked, that he didn't know that there was gambling going on in Rick's casino ... But in the context of the movie audiences for Casablanca know from what's preceded that Captain Renault gambles in Rick's place every evening. The cashier's gofer approaching the Captain with a wad of cash indicates that not only did Captain Renault know that gambling was taking place, but that he himself was gambling, that he himself won a considerable sum. ... Captain Renault is lying. .... But even that interpretation becomes subject to reinterpretation when Rick, the alcohol-raddled gambler-entrepreneur in the white-dinner-jacket with the heart-of-gold, tells a young refugee trying to leave Casablanca to play #8 black. She does, 8 comes up, Rick tells her to let it ride. The bet, increased by 36, is now increased by 36 again. If her bet was $1, she now has $1,296: if $10, she's now got nearly $13,000! So. Rick's wheel is crooked. Rick's wheel has been crooked all along. Captain Renault's "winnings" have never been winnings; they've been payola, all along. Rick, with the heart of gold, didn't reach into his pocket and give the refugee five figures in cash; no: the money he's "given" her is stolen from the other gamblers: all of whom see Rick's heart of gold, and don't seem to mind the entrepreneur stealing their wagers and giving the cash to someone else.

Light the scene by one candlepower more, or less, and the character of the protagonist can seem to change, to reverse: Marlon Brando's Stanley Kowalski is a brute; no, Marlon Brando's Stanley Kowalski is a Greek god. The data has changed only incrementally; the macroinformation has changed at the quantum level: meta-change.

Now: your date's boob broadcasts "Touch Me!" Cultural taboos cable-cast "Don't touch, Not in public, Wait till you're alone, married, blessed by the kleptocracy's bureaucrat, by the kleptocracy's church's bureaucrat ..."
You touch. Your date says, "No." What does she mean?

Well, one group of fund raisers, who don't even know your date, say that she means "No." How can these agenda imposers know what your date means when they've never met her? Does your date have to mean what they want her to mean? Or can your date mean what she means? (It's like a priest "knowing" what the little boy will want before the little boy is conceived.)

And what does "no" mean anyway?

Mister, that's for you to decide. And take the consequences.

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Ha! It just occurs to me: Shelley's Ozymandius sonnet suggests the same points as I've tried to raise above. Shelley was of course talking about the vanity of temporal power, but he makes the point macroinformationally: comparing two views of the same turf: Ozymandius' view from the height of his power and Ozymandius' words in Shelley's day when no one has heard of Ozymandius. And that discrepancy is the soul of my point: of all of my points.

The movie The Planet of the Apes fashions a device almost identical. Charleton Heston lands on a planet. The camera pulls back. We see an artifact protruding from the planet's ground level. We recognize what we presume Charleton Heston's character doesn't: that the artifact is the head and arm of New York's Statue of Liberty. Liberty has sunk into mire, listing to the side. The United States is no more.

What's the information content of today's newspaper?
What's the information content of yesterday's newspaper?
What's the information content of a newspaper we've never heard of from a city we've never heard of printed in a language we don't know blowing across the desert of a planet we've never visited before where there's no sign of current civilization?

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Points come up too fast to cover. Above I mocked a priesthood's believing its own dogmas: the faith says that we all suffer from original sin, therefore the priest will know what the boy's sins are before the boy confesses them, before the boy is born ... But a moment later I'll respect a scientific prediction or my own prediction ... Any dogma may once have been a scientific hypothesis. But over time the habit of falsification erodes. Dogma is the residue. Faith is mockable when it keeps its eyes closed. "Science" is admirable only when its eyes are open.

(Government funding, like church patronage, will result in all eyes shut.