Difference is the essence of information. Macroinformation emerges from meta-difference: different differences: discrepancies among categories. Conflict is close kin to macroinformation. Ah, paradox.
The following passage from Gregory Bateson is integral to my Theory of Macroinformation:
In discussing metacommunicative propositions, we land ourselves at once in this position because metacommunicative statements are of a different level of abstraction from the simple objective statements upon the stream of which they are carried.
A considerable amount of inquiry in the last twenty years has gone into the attempt to unravel these difficulties, which came to the fore in the twenties. It was then hoped that the whole of mathematics and logic might be made self-contained and unified without recourse to "self-evident" propositions, and Russell and Whitehead labored in the Principia Mathematica to establish such a unity between mathematics and logic. It was found, however, that any such attempt involved asking, "What is really meant by the 'self-evident" axioms on which any mathematical system rests?" and that the statements which would define the axioms and give them logical foundation must always be statements of a different order of abstraction from the axioms, as the latter are contained in the theorems which are built upon them. The statements explaining the axioms are in fact metacommunicative as compared with the axioms themselves, and the latter are metacommunicative as compared with the theorems. The status of the axioms therefore becomes ambiguous, since they are used at two levels of abstraction, one relatively metacommunicative and the other relatively "objective"; and the total system of statements thus becomes comparable to the electric buzzer which must oscillate between the "yes" and "no" positions.
Since the days of the Principia Mathematica the matter has become even more difficult and more directly relevant to the questions with which we are here dealing. Godel has now demonstrated with rigorous proof that no system of statements can be self-contained in the sense of explaining its own axioms and not self-contradictory; that always—as a result of the very nature of communication and metacommunication—contradictions of the Russellian type must creep in. This statement of Godel's—and there is apparently at present no reason to doubt his proof—means in fact that psychology and the study of human communication can never hope to build a self-contained and coherent system which will not be self-contradictory.
In brief, we have to face the fact that when we deal simultaneously with both objective communication and metacommunication, contradictions will arise within the very field of our own inquiry.
Of course I had read Bateson's Communication before inventing Macroinformation, at least in its present form. But then I responded to Bateson's teaching because he had gone so far in the meta-dimensions I was interested in: the bride knows what fertilizer to look for: I was trying to invent Macroinformation. But once I had invented it, years had to pass before I found it: spelled out under my eyes, decades ago. (I would have read Communication around 1980: after the publication of Mind and Nature but before I conceived my first novel, By the Hair of the Comet: based as it is on a note in Communication.
PS: Have you ever seen a more succinct treatment of Godel?
Contradiction is what powers the stars.
This file is prerequisite to all of Macroinformation.
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