Macroinformation Now

I had the idea of macroinformation in the back of my head in the mid-1960s. In February 1999 I started writing it out. A couple of years later my son created Macroinformation.org for my birthday. A bit later still I created this blog to draft new material, post easy notes ...

Everything has moved, and moved again: I'm recreating all pk domains at pKnatz blog. I'm recreating Macroinformation there! I'm building a Information / Macroinformation Menu there!

Once that's done, or even 90%, I'll dismantle this blog, making sure all parts are relocated at pKnatz (the new Knatz.com) (or are deleted, deliberately, by the author).

Macroinformation Brief

Articulated online starting February 1999
(conceived in the mid 1960s)

Mission: responsibly to explore informational complexity

2005 11 03

Information issues from difference:

the more improbable, the more information.

Powerful information issues from differences among metadifferences:

the more metadifferences,
the more complexity among them,
the greater the potential of the information.

(This piece is an "entrance" of sorts to Macroinformation: I'll keep re-posting it each month so it will always appear near the top of the menu.)

Macroinformation is my term for the information that emerges from our mental processing of informational complexities.

We don't just process data: there's data, and more data, and tons of information already in our heads: and we process parts, and wholes, in an informational environment. The real information, the whole of the information, the macroinformation, must be seen to interact in an ecology of information.

Macroinformation

synergistic

information

The kids chant Nyah-nyah. They're chanting the fifth and third of a chord: where's the root? The root remains unchanted, but it's "there," we hear it.

The wife gets "B"s tattooed on her rump because her husband loves her beautiful buns. She strips, bends over, and her husband asks, "Who's Bob?" We have data for the Bs; where did the "O" come from?Well, we have that information too, but it appears in our processing of the joke, there's no data for it in the joke.





The movie shows Captain Renault being handed a wad of cash from the roulette cashier's cage. The sound track has Captain Renault saying, "I am shocked, shocked to learn that there is gambling going on in here," and closes Rick's casino down.The information that follows us home from the theater wasn't in the pictures and it wasn't in the words. Neither was it in the music. The information that haunts us emerges from inter-playings, even conflicts, among the constituent information complexes: words, pictures, actions, sound effects, music ... all processed in minds that already know something about the world.

Information begets information.

The most important information emerges as meta-patterns that rise above data the way a flock of birds rise above the earth. Without the earth, there are no birds; without the birds there is no flock. But their beauty is in the metapatterns.

The meaning of information is in the metapatterns.

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Claude Shannon, Norbert Wiener ... defined information in terms of the inverse of the probabilities. There's more information is the string 2, 5, 13, 87 ... than in the string 1, 2, 3, 4 ... There's more information in Steve Allen's "Roses are red,/ Violets are blue,/ You thought this would rhyme,/ But it doesn't" than in any of the familiar Roses are red jingles.
Probability is wonderful, and dangerously counter-intuitive, and I make use of it; but Gregory Bateson defined information as





Any difference that makes a difference.
Difference is a concept that fits the non-mathematical human right down to the ground, and if you can follow me into meta-difference, we shall flock like birds in the stratosphere of complex, emergent information.

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What started me on this path may be of some relevance and interest. By college age I was beginning to get fragmentary explanations for seeming-informational contradictions I'd been aware of since childhood. During WW II, from the US, Hitler was the bad guy. So how come the MovieTone News coverage of his rallies was so exciting? Because our documentary makers were using footage from Leni Riefenstahl, the genius of filming mass rallies.

The documentary that showed our bold leader, President Truman, firing the miscreant General MacArthur, showed Mac marching like a hero, while sunlight flashed annoyingly from the elected haberdasher's eye glasses. Whose side were the documentary makers on?

Marlon Brando had a skull that could star in any museum. Elia Kazan filmed him in naturally contrastive black and white, looking one moment like a brute ... but change the camera angle one millimeter, change the lighting one candle-power, and Marlon looked like a Roman god. Complex information exploded from these minute differences.

Then in graduate school I first heard of information being stored on some medium for a computer. Fine. Then I heard that one could count the bytes involved. Fine. Then I heard that this was regarded as giving a quantitative value for the information! Balderdash.

First, the data will be very different depending on how you've "spelled" the data. English is far from efficient, even among natural languages. But far more important, data is being equated with information! No, no. The data is this bird and that bird. The information is the flock flying in what we see as a "formation."

I had a thesis to write, then a revolution to foment. I put my 1960s thoughts on information on a back burner. It wasn't until I decided to heat the subject up a bit early in 1999, starting writing that soon got posted as Macroinformation, that I learned that Norbert Wiener had said that there was more information in a good poem than there was in the phone directory for a major city. Had I known that in the 1960s I would have assumed that the information theorists were taking proper care of their business. As it was, I long believed them to be missing the core of the point. Now; whatever they do, I don't know. Macroinformation is what I do.

And I've noted some patterns in emergent information that I believe are essential to wisdom on the subject.

When I heard that some computer people thought they were quantifying information I was indignant, but not because I believed that information could not be quantified. I do believe it. I still believe it. I think I am taking the correct steps in that direction. The more steps I take however the more I see that particular goal as still very distant. That doesn't mean we can't get there, or at least get closer. But however close we get, however far we remain, efforts at quantification will remain more like quantifying the electricity in a thunder storm than weighing a cabbage on the grocer's scale. Meantime I say that a hypothesis I hope to develop toward theoryhood believes that the quality of information will prove to be directly proportional to the quantity, not of the data, but of the complex information, the deep meta-information. No, not meta-data! Not the information-about-the-information that's mere directions for style: read top to bottom, left to right, put the margin at the left ... And not meta-information a step up from meta-data: grammar: the noun is different from the verb, the unmodified noun is different from the modified noun ... the pronoun is different (and not different!) from the noun ... No, meta-information a step more complex and abstract still: the macroinformation which challenges to think of what kind of a government bureaucrat Captain Renault is: taking payola from Rick's crooked table night after night, then closing Rick's down, protesting his innocence the while ...

Try synformation as a synonym for macroinformation, the synergy of the information: meaning identical.

The more overtones, the more that is implicit, suggestible, between the lines ... the better the poem, the painting, the tune, the speech ... The greatest literature will prove bottomless.

My attempt the other day at a new Entrance for Macroinformation resulted in an emphasis on my Spectrum of Informational Complexity. [Link temporarily down.] I must relate that to my concept of informational dimensions, which relates to my concept of Extension / Intension (now posted here as of 2009 03 26), and non-spatial dimensions. Which relates to ... and so forth. I'm getting it all here the best I can.

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To hunt for macroinformation on your own, focus on nature versus culture, surveying the informational scree from that conflict. (A post offering details follows.)

pk Online

I had five domains, several blogs, thousands of essays and other text files, thousands of images on line. The fed destroyed all that, all but destroyed me.

I can't afford to repost, so I've been recreating some classic pk modules at blogs.

Here's what I'm going to do now: get all my files into a blog, sorting by blog specialty.
Then, reorder, as logically as I can, so visitors can browse by Knatz.com type categories: Teaching / or Personal /

I'm going to stop explaining all this every time I mount a new post.
Then I'm going to my five destroyed domains back up, restoring the original logic, improving on the original logic.

Email pk

Post a Comment: or,

EMail to:

pk@Knatz.com

Today's Emphasis

We live in a universe of information, thinking it's a physical universe. Perhaps we can't live without Pleroma, the physical universe, but we don't live in it; we live in the universe of information, which is minimally one level of orthogonality away from the physical universe.

Light transmits information about the physical universe to our retina where our visual cortex interprets the information. The light is data, but the information processed in our minds, though also employing data, is not data: it is macroinformation, abstract, multiple-level, complex, interpreted information.

All data is information. All metainformation is information. All macroinformation is information.
Not all information is data. Not all information is metainformation. But all macroinformation is interpreted.

There is no information in the human world (/ Creatura / Sentiens / Persona (/ Pathologica ...) /) that is not interpreted: and no interpretation is whole, complete, final ...

False True Information

My theory of macroinformation distinguishes information from data: information is the set, data is a subset.

Today I emphasize with a fresh example that false information (false macroinformation, macroinformation also being a subset of information) can be elicited in others via true data. In prejudice for example, racism for example, the Whatsoo can demonstrate hypocrisy in the Toozoo. The demonstration can be true. But better macroinformation would be elicited by the admission that hypocrisy can also be demonstrated in the Whatsoo.

The US of my youth laughed at Communists claims that some Communist had invented the telephone, the light bulb ... I today laugh at the US for its similar fabrications. (My offer of cybernetic libraries, cybernetic data basing, and cybernetic social networking ... implicit in my founding of the Free Learning Exchange, Inc. in 1970 not being taught by schools or universities around the world today is evidence, proof, that schools, media, and other institutions collude in fraud.)

OK. Here's some data, and false macroinformation, that pricked me to launch this post: Today's sports news blazons a new $100M baseball contract: for pitcher Lee and his Phillies. The other year Tiger was getting $100M for something. Last week Derek Jeter was getting $50M+ from the Yankees. I don't dispute the data. Neither do I scoff at Jeter or Tiger or Lee's quality, Neither do I scoff at Jeter or Tiger or Lee's right to such wealth; not in the absence of similar figures divulging the wealth of others. The Steinbrenner family's income (including capital gains, profits, earnings ... lagniappe, tips) may be at least in part a matter of public record: but it's the slave, Jeter, whose contract is blazoned publicly, not the owner(s): (the late) George Steinbrenner (and family, etc.)

In other words: there's important macroinformation implicit in what data an organ divulges and congruent macroinformation implicit in what data an organ does not divulge. Gender, class, ethnicity, and such may be expected to be involved: regardless or whether the ambient culture claims to differentiate by class or gender or ethnicity ...

We show our faces but commonly hide our tail end.
We make someone a celebrity, then show their wallet:
while not even acknowledging the existence of some millions of others.

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This post starts out in the style of Macroinformation.org (and this Macroinformation blog) but soon takes on the political flavor of typical other pk domains and blogs. True. Well, I accuse my culture of informational dishonesty. Civilized media are heavily biased to notice the farts of the unwashed while politely averting the gaze for identical behavior from the privileged.

Why do we tolerate Lee's salary being headline worthy while also tolerating an absence of information about the income of other figures? Further, what does it tell about us if we have figures estimating Bill Gates's estate without also displaying figures for Ivan Illich's estate: he who proposed that cybernetic information storage and retrieval could help humans become Christian (meaning convivial in Illich's lexicon) and without also displaying figures for pk's estate: me, pk, being the guy (one of several, first of several to go public) who offered to actually try to launch Illich's cybernetic information revolution: via my 1970 Free Learning Exchange, Inc. (Note: I mention Bill Gates because he founded Microsoft years after the public declined to support FLEX's offer to develop relational data-basing software for advertising resources. We preferred to pay, to pay a great deal, for software that did considerably less than we could have gotten for "cost plus.")

Informational Scree

My Macroinformation Brief suggests hunting for macroinformation on your own focusing on nature versus culture, surveying the informational scree from that conflict.

Here's a path I suggest that will keep you busy for millennia (if we're lucky enough to have millennia before us) (we're certainly not smart enough to deserve it!):

Look for metadifferences implicit in the major religion of the West for the past two millennia: one the one hand there's our judgment of ourselves; on the other hand, at Judgment, such judgments will be exposed as foolishness (or so Christians are supposed to believe.)

Now: think what else that might imply: an omnipotent deity might find the Temple of Jerusalem's self-image to be contradicted by in behavior: can we think of any other institutions where an omnipotent deity might find the institution's self image to be contradicted by its behavior?

In Casablanca Captain Renault lives in a secular heaven: he's in charge of the police, he gets payola every night ... After a macroinformational judgment, where would he be? Never mind the judgment of an omnipotent deity: how about in your judgment. In your judgment is any government what it says it is? Is any institution? Is your judgment the same in 2010 as it was in 2000? Do you expect it to be the same in 2020? (Do you see that those differences stimulate macroinformation?)

Never mind whether God is infinite; macroinformation is infinite. Its potential is infinitely infinite whether humans are here to think it or not.

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It's so funny: I thought much of this out around 1965. I started writing it in 1999. I'm editing it a bit here 2010 11 17. But I'm still using my examples from 1965! Do people still know Kazan? Brando? Casablanca?

Macroinformation is merely potential, not at all actual, if no one is actively processing the information. Once state-coerced schooling has discouraged our minds down to zero there will be no information of any kind: except data. And meta-data. And maybe grammar.

Information, Difference, Context

I have to treat this theme but can't at the moment. I place a quote to build around:

"Through Stockhausen I understood music as a process of elimination and addition. Like 'yes' only means something after you have said no." Miles Davis

Binaural Beats

For years I've used the Nyah-nyah chat of children to illustrate how macroinformation allows us to hear eidetic sounds: things that aren't physically there. Today's Straight Dope newsletter introduces me to an example I hadn't known.Binaural beats (BBs), embraced in recent years by the new-age crowd, are a scientific curiosity first described in 1839 by Prussian scientist H.W. Dove. They occur when two slightly different tones are played simultaneously, one in each ear, causing the brain to perceive a beat whose frequency is the difference between those of the two tones. For example, playing a 370-hertz tone in the left ear and a 380-hertz tone in the right yields a beat with a frequency of ten hertz.

You’d notice something similar if you simply set two tone generators side by side, but it’d be a monaural beat — you could hear it with just one ear. What’s different about binaural beats is that the mixing of the two tones happens in your head.See http://www.straightdope.com/columns/read/2949/can-binaural-beats-improve-your-mood

Multiple Perspective

The Macroinformation Brief, just above, gives a few brief examples of macroinformation. Here's another brief example, so fundamental I'm shocked that I hadn't used it long ago:

Look at a Cézanne still life.


Something like the following is likely to be true no matter which particular still life you've found: You see the "top" of the bottle to the right, you do not see the top of the bottle to the left; yet the bottle to the left seems to be behind as well as "higher" than the bottle on the right! How can that be?

Cézanne has forged multiple perspectives! Different views prevail simultaneously!

The image is powered by contradiction, by incompatibility of view, by impossibilty.

I Need To Know

Information "is" difference: significant difference, improbable difference: the more improbable, the greater the information. That's information theory from the 1940s: Shannon, Wiener ... the phone company: Gregory Bateson following suit: me, pk, following suit in the 1960s, writing about it starting in 1999.
My expansion reads complex information, what I term macroinformation — art, religion, politics ... — as emerging among different differences, meta-differences. I further emphasize that meta-differences, macroinformational contrasts, frequently extend into paradox, contradiction ... conflict.

One of my line dancing groups introduced me to the polyphonic salsa song, I Need To Know, by Marc Anthony: we do a neat line cha cha to it. I introduced the song and the dance to my girl friend. She, now on her normal summer vacation in the Smokies, tells me she bought the CD, mails me first the lyrics, and now Fathers Day, I get a DVD of Marc Anthony filling Madison Square Garden for an HBO special. Sure enough, I Need To Know was a headline song on that occasion. I live under a rock, so the song was new to me; but apparently it's been very popular, around for a decade: this audience seemed intimately familiar with it. Some of the macroinformation I here interpret from the song is true in extra dimensions thanks to the venue. The information is architectural, sociological, sexological as well as musical, lyrical.

I detail a few elements:The singer is male.
The singer is tall, slender.
The singer moves, striding so that his feet strike the stage, the gangways, the extensions of the stage into the audience, on the beat, precisely synched with the rhythm. The singer's body accents the accents, what's off the beat. The singer's whole being marks the divisions of the measures, the pattern binary, his shoulders and chest coming effectively into play at the structure's natural cadences while his footfalls remain precisely on the quarter notes (and on-beat eighth notes) of the Latin common time.
The singer is alone. The stage is the width of a basketball court: an erector-set jungle-gym of a stage. This is a sports venue, folks. The musicians are spread over it: and what musicians: Tito Puente, Bobby Allende, Angel Fernandez ... (It was Tito Puente who first introduced Marc Anthony to big stages at that world-renouned venue!)
The musicians are fixed in place: by the stage manager, coordinating with the band leader. The audience, by virtue of having brought a ticket specifying a particular seat, is fixed by that seat: though members stand and sway and wave ... Salsa!
But again: the singer moves. The "stage" is distinguished from the "audience," but the "proscenium" is more like a fractal coastline, the coast of Maine, than a clear border, like the California coast, or barricaded, like the Iron Curtain.
He ripples along the border, waving at the audience, blowing kisses, and, at one point, from a particular stage promontory, actually touches finger tips with reaching fans. The audience is seething but the touches are cool, kindling feeling, not igniting conceptions amid the females.That setting reinforces what I'm about to observe about the song's lyrics:They say around the way you've asked for me.
There's even talk about you wanting me.
I must admit that's what I want to hear.
But that's just talk until you take me there.OK, What's going on? The singer is a male: tall, slender, dynamic. His movements are precise, synched with the eighth notes of the music. He strides on the beat. His body accents the structure of the measures. He's not subdividing his body into 16th notes, then smearing the edges with thirds, with triplets, the way Michael Jackson does. No, this is salsa, not funk. Down-salsa, the whole production is rehearsed within an inch of its life. There are no accidents visible, nothing of the random.

The audience is of blended gender. It's not like 1,200 pubescent girls screaming over the Beatles on stage, anchored in civilization only by one silver-templed adult male who sits like he likes the damn crap (What did the theater have to pay him?) No: Marc Anthony is performing before a capacity crowd of salsa as well as Marc Anthony aficionados, male and female, young and adult, well distributed.
Understand, song lyrics are traditionally gender specific. Either a male or a female role is assumed. Where the lyrics are familiar enough the gender implications of the singer may be violated, the female singer may sing a man's song ... But if a male singer is going to sing, "Someday he'll come along, the man I love," he'd be well advised to alter the familiar lyrics to "Someday she'll come along, the gal I love,"

Now here's Marc Anthony, marching onto projections into the audience, leaning out over the edge toward them, blowing kisses, kisses that are clearly heterosexual. The audience screams and reaches mutually, the females reaching most enthusiastically. Now, what does he say?They say around the way you've asked for me.
There's even talk about you wanting me.The girl is asking around about him? Isn't that his business? not hers? Isn't the female supposed to stay put while the male sniffs around? This is backwards: he, the male, stays put, on the stage, beyond the proscenium; SHE's been sniffing around, asking for him!I must admit that's what I want to hear.
But that's just talk until you take me there.Say, what? He likes being on display? It's up to HER to quicken potential into actuality? The normal sex roles are reversed. Beaucoup macroinformation.Oh, if it's true
Don't leave me all alone out here
Wondering if you're ever gonna
Take me there.
Tell me what you're feeling
'cause I need to know.
Girl, you gotta let me know which way to go.

'Cause I need to know
I need to know
Tell me Baby Girl
'Cause I need to know

My every thought
Is of this being true.
It's getting harder
Not to think of you.
Girl, I'm exactly
Where I want to be
The only thing's
I need you here with me.

'Cause I need to know
I need to know.
Tell me Baby Girl
'Cause I need to know.

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I'm happy enough with the above as a first couple of drafts but check back, there's a great deal more to come: especially on the macroinformation automatically implicit in polyphony.

I love how in real time at the live concert Marc Anthony evokes the multiple voices of the recording though no double tracks are used. Linearly, he simply switches which voice or which alternate background accent he's singing. He maintains perfect balance, perfect poise the whole time. Amazing.

Actually I'm coming to love the live performance even better than the recording because at Madison Square Garden the stellar band really cuts loose while the singer strides around for curtain calls.

Literal Meaning

I've been busy posting my Thinking Tools from my destroyed Knatz.com. More than fifty are now up, a bit more than a third of what I'd sketched by 2006. Macroinformation is my most important as well as most entirely original thinking tool: I wish I could say that I've rescued even 10% of that pk domain by now, but one thing is all I can do at a time now at my age. Overextended multitasking has its dangers no matter one's age anyway. Meantime, there one point I look forward to developing here, especially in relation to my own fiction:

My best writing, my story The First Week, for example, posted at my PaulKnatz blog, has No Literal Meaning.
Much of the best humor has no literal meaning.
Stimulating macroinformation, stimulating your information processing: that's the meaning.

Informational Universe

Bateson distinguished the physical universe from the world of life by introducing his terms Pleroma and Creatura. I follow suit and further distinguish aspects of Creatura with my terms Sentiens, Persona ... (Dementia, Geekoma ...)

I see this activity as very much in line with Korzybski's efforts with semantics as expressed in his book of 1933. I see Bateson's Creatura-as-distinct-from-Pleroma as very much an extension of Korzybskian semantics: as indeed is my own Macroinformation, especially the Existential Sets aspect of Macroinformation — my informational cosmology.

this bald statement will expands shortly

The Soul

Immortality of the Soul? No, no. Listen:The soul is emergent. Informational. Macroinformational.Like life, it is substanceless. There's no thing there. But unlike life, which manifests in organisms — bodies — the soul —being informational, mental — doesn't exist when not being thought about: like a lap when you stand up.

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How I put it before:The soul is a synergy of synergies among synergies: a synergy between the synergy stack of the individual organism and its relation to the aggregates of the aggregates of synergy stacks at large.
(I have also called god the synergy of synergies.")

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I copy this post from my IonaArc blog where I first put it.

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.

Extension vs. Intension

This piece was written for pk's home page where it appeared among the Thinking Tools. I recreate it here because of its special relevance to Macroinformation.

Extension vs. Intension: that is, Physical versus Abstract
(and related, critical, epistemological liabilities)

"Ninety-nine"% of the things in our minds have no physical referent.
99% of reality is invisible.
R. Buckminster Fuller

One of the reasons why religion seems irrelevant today
is that many of us no longer have the sense
that we are surrounded by the unseen.
Karen Armstrong

Many of those things have no intensional (non-physical) referent either (other than that created by our "seeing" them).
It's those things in our minds that have no physical referent but that do have non-pathological intensional referents:

Those are the things that should get 99% of our attention.

The words "intension" and "extension" already have multiple appearances and explanations at pk's domains. But they're important enough to deserve their own file, especially now that I want to add a new illustration. (2000 08 03: These important concepts are now getting concentrated attention as part of the Allied Concepts aspect of my theory of complex information: "Macroinformation."

"Extension" is easy. It refers to whatever extends, whatever is quantifiable in space as well as in time. ("Extensional" is the adjective.) Your body is an example.

"Intension" is hard. Note the spelling. It does not refer to will, volition, desire, plan ... Do not confuse it with its homonym "intention."
"Intension" is merely the antonym of "extension." It refers to that class of existence which may be quantifiable in time but not in space. ("Intensional" is the adjective.) Your "self" is an example.
(You were conceived at such and such a time. You were born something like nine months later. When was your "self" born?

Your body changes with each breath. One oxygen atom that was in you twenty years ago may be in you now, but it may also have been in me in the interim. [That same atom may also have once been in Julius Caesar: more than once.] How often has your self been reborn? Is your present self the same one you "had" at puberty?)
Different cultures have different handicaps with regard to confusions of logical type. In the "West" we're practically crippled. I know of no one before Count Alfred Korzybski who wasn't utterly confused on this particular issue. Prior to civilization, it didn't matter much. Prior to industrialism, it mattered, was lethal, but not fatally for all. Now it's a matter of extinction: not just for those species draining down the hole mankind has widened (we didn't make it, but we have accelerated the downward flow), but for us as well.

We're crippled in the West because of certain peculiarities of the dominant theology. Hindus, for example, believe that existence is a game that cannot be charted from within. The ground of being is playing hide and seek with itself. Shiva is Vishnu. Or rather, neither is either: both are IT playing roles in the game. Alan Watts has written beautifully on the subject. Check it out.
Information is apparent, not "real." In contrast, the monotheism of Judaism and its sub-sets, Christianity and Islam, posits existence to have a beginning, middle, and end, an inside and an outside, a creator (an owner, law-giver, boss, king ...) ...: all with supposedly objective reality.

One can only see what one observes,
and one observes only things
which are already in the mind.
Alphonse Bertillon

(My story Judgment Day has that awesome event begin with a benign Jesus at the apex of a Mannerist triangle of existence: life at the broad bottom, saints and angels amid clouds, one tier up, and Jesus at the very tip of the top (devils lurking below the bottom). As he hears our confessions, his brow darkens. He is replaced by a fearsome Jehovah. The devils erupt and everyone is tormented. (If I rewrote it, I'd have even the saints cast from the clouds.) In the hubbub, the Chief Tormentor forgets his mask and is revealed as a baboon. It's Satan, having fooled us again.

(Christian theology posits the Devil as being able to fool any human. So why doesn't Christian theology see that he could fool everyone, Pope, Virgin, and all? The "voice" of the true "God" comes in at the end and tells Satan to cool it. At the time of composition, I thought my story was Christian; now I see that it was incipiently Hindu: there is no "real" difference between Satan and God, between Pope and devil: there is no reality but masks. My discovery of science converted me from theology of any flavor.

(How hard should it be to guess why my fiction has been admired but not admitted to print except for my typewriter and this HTML? All my work is religious, but it's also all critical(/satirical) of the prevailing Religions! Success seems reserved for those who notice one flaw (like Luther) but swallow the bulk of them.)

We don't live in the blueprints, we live in the house.

So what's the problem, and how is it crucial? We tend to think that's there's "one" of things. Maybe there's more than one, but only one counts. Jehovah isn't the only god, but He is the
God. Man isn't the only species; but we are the only one that matters. There are thousands of college football teams, but "We're Number One!" ... Awareness of those tendencies is no longer rare: but how about this one? We are inclined to think that there is such a "thing" as reality, and moreover, that there's only one of it! (The problem is with the "thing," not the "reality": and with the simplistic "oneness" of it.) We are inclined to disregard experience to the contrary. (Kurosawa's immortal Roshomon takes the dilemma to a daring extreme, but any of us know that the argument you just had with your wife was two different arguments: the one you experienced and the one she experienced. Bring it before a jury, be as thorough as you care to be: but the jury will soon have its own reality (sub-dividable into six or twelve) of your argument. How can they be so wrong? It's so clear: to you.)
(Even Sino-scholar Donald Ritchie thinks he can figure out for us which "one" version of the "truth" in Roshomon is the "real one.")
But what's the truth? The truth is unutterable. (The truth may also be multiple.) Occidentals tend to reject both those statements. We pay for it more than we can see.

Those of us with these habits also abnormally reify the intensional and confuse it with the extensional. Our primitive minds have difficulty with the stark abstraction of Judaism, so we have Jesus to give "body" to the spirit God. Our primitive minds have difficulty reifying what we can't see, hear, and touch. So we imagine that all important "things" have "body" that we could see, hear, and touch in the right circumstances.

Can you see your self? Look in the mirror. That's (a reflection of) your body. Maybe you're smiling. That's evidence of your self, but it's evidence manifested in your flesh: lips, cheeks, what flesh is relaxed, what in tension, the amount of white showing in your eye.

Am I saying that your self is imaginary? Yes, to some extent. Am I saying that what's imaginary isn't "real"? Not at all. I'm saying that the intensional is a distinct class of reality. (Neither am I suggesting that all things in that class have equal status: the moon being green cheese is imaginary and doesn't correspond to anything verifiable; your smiling self does correspond to something verifiable: just not measurable in space.)

(So which religion is "true"? See? You didn't learn the above: you're still looking for one.)

Elsewhere I've already illustrated that North America is extensional, Mexico, Canada, and US, intensional; that the church building is extensional; the "church" itself intensional; the Capital Building extensional, the government intensional ... Christians and most other religious want God to be extensional; I am a religious who insists that god is intensional.

Think of this: God is real in exactly the same way the United States is real. That is, lots of people worship God: lots of people pay taxes as US citizens. Mars is real in exactly the same way the Cathay, Arcady, or Gaul are real. The latter have no citizens though they once had many. The former, if Mars still has any worshippers, do so in hiding or no longer outwardly use that name.

But God and gods are emotional subjects. Let me switch to one you can deal with more objectively. In biology, the phenotype is the individual organism; the genotype is the abstract group. Your blue eyes are in your head: extensional. Your family or tribe's blue eyes are intensional: coded in your genes. Your genes are extensional; their code is intensional. Do you imagine that I'm saying that the code is imaginary? Actually, maybe it is. But do you imagine that I'm saying that blue eyes (as a trait) aren't real? that they don't "exist"?

I'm trying to broaden our acknowledgment of existence and, additionally, trying to get us to exercise care in distinguishing types. Deceits and deceptions got us here; now only honesty can save us. A difficult transformation. Scientists have made it. I've made it. Will enough of the rest of you joins us for us to have a future? I'm not optimistic, but my work is based on belief in the possibility.

We steal and degrade a continent, a world. Then we say we represent law and order. Does that behavior having a past ensure it a future? Open your eyes. Open your mind.

There: mind! Your brain is extensional; your mind is utterly intensional.

The drunk's pink elephants leave no usable fertilizer.

Something I scribbled elsewhere this morning:
Species are sets of new regulations, but only for that species. Each genus encodes sets of new regulations: for those species in that genus. Physics is sets of new regulations for that universe. What regulations are cosmic we can't know until we have commerce with other universes. Imagining that our physics is the physics is like assuming that life originated on Earth.
Which came first: the chicken or the egg?
The egg, of course. The question was insoluble only so long as we lacked the concept of "mutation."

Which comes first: extension or intension?
Ah, now we're into theology, cosmology, etiology ... Answers that claim to be final are fraudulent. But we're the kind of species that likes to answer anyway. I'm that kind of phenotype. ("Kind" of "phenotype": there's an oxymoron!) But: I keep doing my homework. I may do it late, I may do it slowly, but I do it. And seriously. Responsibly.

The code has to precede the example.
The physical universe could not have come into existence without the code preceding it.

The intensional universe has no expression without the material instances. Time may have come first. (That's wrong: time didn't come; time was, is, and will be.) god may have come sometime after, possibly soon after. (Possibly simultaneously?) But what god wants is you!

I just interjected some points I'd left out. How jumbled I've made it I can't know till more time passes. Second drafts may say more than firsts but seldom read as well. Give me time for a third.

Given time I'll blend in analogies such as extensional as hardware and intensional as software. Humans have aspects of both: wetware.

I've heard a series of churchmen distinguish the church from the church building just as they distinguish God as a "spirit," denying the God is a person. I followed the distinction, differing in that I've come to put huge sets of other "things" into the "spirit" class, calling it intensional, and generally avoiding the word spirit as too misleading, too tied up with superstition. A series of examples just came into my head and I scribble them prior to finding time to blend them above.

You pass your old dentist's office. The dentist retired, eloped, absconded, died ... That office is now Off-Track Betting. So, they changed the rug, put up a couple of posters. But you still see the dentist's office: till gradually it fades: and it's Off-Track Betting. The fade will not occur at the same rate in any two individuals. I still call the neighboring trailers in my park by the names of their 1989 owners, though the titles may have changed hands several times over the decade. The trailer itself is extensional: ownership is wholly intensional, wholly abstract. It's our (abstract) application of "ownership" to extensional objects that confuses us. We think the church is the church.

The dictator lives in the palace. After the coup the usurper lives in the same palace. The communists' buildings are Tsarist. "Democracies" have militaries that are utterly feudal in structure: in epistemology, etc. Maybe the usurper changes the rugs, puts up a few posters ... And the "spirit" has clearly changed: to an insider. How clear is the change to an outsider?

You're baptized, then confirmed into a Church that represents God. Then one day you learn about Galileo: or Luther: or Abelard, Scotus, Francis, Illich ... The building is the "same" (so long as you don't notice the flow of time, the entropy, the oxidation ... or the new wing: whether there's a thousand and fifty termites in it instead of a thousand and thirty ...). But can the "church" be the same?

My fellows look at the DC Mall, the Capital, or "the Presidency" and see something grand, inspiring, awesome; I look and see something shabby, shameful, degraded ... In both cases what we're seeing is in our head. It's macroinformation! As Bateson observed, whether you salute the flag or burn it, it's still a symbol more than a "thing."

No two sentiences live in quite the same macroinformation. I call the neighboring trailers by the names of their owners of a decade ago. My dear Catherine calls them by the names of the owners of two and three decades ago: when she can remember any names at all.

If I play you a recording of Billie Holiday or of Miles Davis, there's no way in hell we can be hearing the same "thing."

The US president is supposed to have a red button in his office that he can press if he doesn't like the political weather, thereby launching nuclear weapons targeted across the world. Those weapons will do extensional damage, rearranging Pleroma: and also harming Creatura. The fear, quite real, is that if he doesn't, some "enemy" may do the same first: or already has done just such a thing two seconds ago. All that is beyond my power to control or even influence.

I wish that I, that every member of Sentiens, had a little button that I could press and destroy some entity intensionally: dissolve the government, turn things back to nature. pk's domains are loaded with personal justifications for such an act. Here I'll emphasize one that concerns my son, thus far reported only one place. Brian was teaching at his alma mater, Haverford College. A student of his wanted to practice her journalism with a story on Philadelphia street people. She asked Brian if he'd advise her. He agreed: from his own private time and her own private time. The student was over eighteen: legally "of age." Her parents found out she intended actually to visit Philadelphia, alone, at night. The stink they put up reached the Haverford president's office. He threatened Brian and the student with every totalitarian device he could think of. Brian would be fired. The president masked his threats with a cloth of righteousness. His rhetoric suggested that he the president was the martyr, the revolutionary, under the circumstances. Now, if the president was arrested and lost his presidency for interfering with the private affairs of the pair (in their publicly conscientious roles), I'd have sympathy for both sides. As it was, I would have liked to have pressed my little red button and disestablished Haverford as an institution of learning, under the laws or Pennsylvania and the United States. The campus would have remained. The man who had been president was have remained: disempowered.

How would kleptocratic institutions behave if they knew that any citizen could pull the intensional rug from beneath them? They'd see their doom. And rightly so. Free institutions should depend on 100% support, 100% of the time.

We should learn to distinguish between predation and intensional conflict. Politics are intensional: their conflicts should need no extensional results. It's laws, names, and titles that we are in conflict about; nothing physical. One can gather leaves or berries without killing the source. But not if we eat the root. So: poor potato. We eat; the potato loses. But there are lots of potatoes: normally. How many biospheres are there? If we really liked Russian meat, or German meat, or Japanese meat, maybe the recent wars would have had some justification. But how much meat could we gotten out of Dresden? Out of Hiroshima? Fresh? Preserved? Delivered to our door? It's no accident the "waste" is a preferred jargon for killing. It's bad enough to spill half the champagne: or pour in onto sweaty heads under the TV lights.

I'm not suggesting that man could become sane; I plead for us to be less insane:
or — prefering Korzybsy's term — unsane.

1997 February
Yesterday brought an email from someone brought to pk's domains by an interest in Korzybski and also in distinguishing between extension and intension. Richard writes:
One feels less alone after reading you.


Extension vs. Intension Notes

Decades Ago:
The directions said to bear right at the library. We drove and drove without seeing a library. "Oh, I should have said the Simpson place." Who the hell are the Simpsons? We've never been in this part of the state before. "Oh, I should have said bear right at the airfield."
It was just a country road, forking at a field. At night, in a blizzard. We latter came to learn that the last house on the right before the fork had been owned by the Simpsons. Last Simpson died forty years before. Thirty years ago, the structure had been used as a library: no traces of such a use remaining. Ah, but it had been only fifteen years earlier that a Piper Cub had made an emergency landing in the field! How come we didn't recognize any of these several landmarks?
When I moved to Maine I quickly learned that places, lakes, roads ... had at least three names: the name on the map, the name on the Chamber of Commerce brochure, and what the people actually called it. If it was the state who put the sign up, the name matched the map. If it was a developer, the name matched the brochure. Ask the farmer ... and its was any of a new set of names. Oh, and of course the lakes, no matter the size, were ponds.
You can't put your toe into the same river twice. You can't put your mind into the same meaning twice. It all flows.

Mannerist Universe:
I recently added more on this utterly intensional structure in my piece of Chabrol's Le Boucher. [link not yet added]

---

Extension Scrapbook

1999 02 08
I just interjected some points I’d left out. How jumbled I’ve made it I can’t know till more time passes. Second drafts may say more than firsts but seldom read as well. Give me time for a third.
1999 03 13
Given time I’ll blend in analogies such as extensional as hardware and intensional as software. Humans have aspects of both: wetware.
2001 08 18
I’ve heard a series of churchmen distinguish the church from the church building just as they distinguish God as a "spirit," denying the God is a person. I followed the distinction, differing in that I’ve come to put huge sets of other "things" into the "spirit" class, calling it intensional, and generally avoiding the word spirit as too misleading, too tied up with superstition. A series of examples just came into my head and I scribble them prior to finding time to blend them above.
You pass your old dentist’s office. The dentist retired, eloped, absconded, died ... That office is now Off-Track Betting. So, they changed the rug, put up a couple of posters. But you still see the dentist’s office: till gradually it fades: and it’s Off-Track Betting. The fade will not occur at the same rate in any two individuals. I still call the neighboring trailers in my park by the names of their 1989 owners, though the titles may have changed hands several times over the decade. The trailer itself is extensional: ownership is wholly intensional, wholly abstract. It’s our (abstract) application of "ownership" to extensional objects that confuses us. We think the church is the church.
The dictator lives in the palace. After the coup the usurper lives in the same palace. The communists’ buildings are Tsarist. "Democracies" have militaries that are utterly feudal in structure: in epistemology, etc. Maybe the usurper changes the rugs, puts up a few posters ... And the "spirit" has clearly changed: to an insider. How clear is the change to an outsider?
You’re baptized, then confirmed into a Church that represents God. Then one day you learn about Galileo: or Luther: or Abelard, Scotus, Francis, Illich ... The building is the "same" (so long as you don’t notice the flow of time, the entropy, the oxidation ... or the new wing: whether there’s a thousand and fifty termites in it instead of a thousand and thirty ...). But can the "church" be the same?
My fellows look at the DC Mall, the Capital, or "the Presidency" and see something grand, inspiring, awesome; I look and see something shabby, shameful, degraded ... In both cases what we’re seeing is in our head. It’s macroinformation! [link not yet added] As Bateson observed, whether you salute the flag or burn it, it’s still a symbol more than a "thing."

No two sentiences live in quite the same macroinformation. I call the neighboring trailers by the names of their owners of a decade ago. My dear Catherine calls them by the names of the owners of two and three decades ago: when she can remember any names at all.

If I play you a recording of Billie Holiday or of Miles Davis, there’s no way in hell we can be hearing the same "thing."

2001 09 05 The US president is supposed to have a red button in his office that he can press if he doesn’t like the political weather, thereby launching nuclear weapons targeted across the world. Those weapons will do extensional damage, rearranging Pleroma: and also harming Creatura. The fear, quite real, is that if he doesn’t, some "enemy" may do the same first: or already has done just such a thing two seconds ago. All that is beyond my power to control or even influence.
I wish that I, that every member of Sentiens, had a little button that I could press and destroy some entity intensionally: dissolve the government, turn things back to nature. Knatz.com [was] loaded with personal justifications for such an act. Here I’ll emphasize one that concerns my son, thus far reported only one place [link not yet added]. bk was teaching at his alma mater, Haverford College. A student of his wanted to practice her journalism with a story on Philadelphia street people. She asked bk if he’d advise her. He agreed: from his own private time and her own private time. The student was over eighteen: legally "of age." Her parents found out she intended actually to visit Philadelphia, alone, at night. The stink they put up reached the Haverford president’s office. He threatened bk and the student with every totalitarian device he could think of. bk would be fired. The president masked his threats with a cloth of righteousness. His rhetoric suggested that he the president was the martyr, the revolutionary, under the circumstances. Now, if the president was arrested and lost his presidency for interfering with the private affairs of the pair (in their publicly conscientious roles), I’d have sympathy for both sides. As it was, I would have liked to have pressed my little red button and disestablished Haverford as an institution of learning, under the laws or Pennsylvania and the United States. The campus would have remained. The man who had been president was have remained: disempowered.
How would kleptocratic institutions behave if they knew that any citizen could pull the intensional rug from beneath them? They’d see their doom. And rightly so. Free institutions should depend on 100% support, 100% of the time.
We should learn to distinguish between predation and intensional conflict. Politics are intensional: their conflicts should need no extensional results. It’s laws, names, and titles that we are in conflict about; nothing physical. One can gather leaves or berries without killing the source. But not if we eat the root. So: poor potato. We eat; the potato loses. But there are lots of potatoes: normally. How many biospheres are there? If we really liked Russian meat, or German meat, or Japanese meat, maybe the recent wars would have had some justification. But how much meat could we gotten out of Dresden? Out of Hiroshima? Fresh? Preserved? Delivered to our door? It’s no accident the "waste" is a preferred jargon for killing. It’s bad enough to spill half the champagne: or pour in onto sweaty heads under the TV lights.
I’m not suggesting that man could become sane; I plead for us to be less insane: or, using Korzybski's term, less unsane.

2006 06 29 Yesterday brought an email from someone brought to K. by an interest in Korzybski and also in distinguishing between extension and intension. Richard writes:
One feels less alone after reading you.

A piece on "Extension: Entity" coming soon. and I'll be back to code this layout ASAP

E4: Persona Geekoma draft

Sentiens is my term for the universe of self-awareness: sentience, intelligence. Sentiens is a subset of Creatura, the universe of life.

Note that this taxonomy differs from the universe we inherit from past (and still-present philosophies, cosmologies, theologies. Our culture has to date accepted cosmologies in which sentience, God's, precedes life and awareness. In conventional Christianity the universe is a subset of God and God's awareness. In my present model, being developed here, all sentience is a subset of life, which is a subset of existence as we know it, which is a subset of time. Note further that I grant "objective" existence to Pleroma, grant that the organisms of Creatura have a Pleromic aspect — "bodies" — but insist that the fundamental reality of Sentiens is informational: symbolic: abstract: immaterial (intensional).

---

draft line

I say immediately that these qualities depend of semiotics: symbols, signs ... maps, models; and that anything that can symbolized can be symbolized well or ill. Thus, Sentiens necessarily represents a qualitative spectrum whose two poles I shall call Scientia and Dementia: the pole of accurate, intelligent, truthful modeling and the pole of erroneous, mistaken, un-sane symbol use.

Though the terms are mine, I follow Korzybski: all that is epistemology I class under Scientia; all else I class under Dementia. For example, Galileo, doing an experiment, participated in Scientia; the Church, the University, condemning him, participated in Dementia. Today, I, Paul Knatz, theorizing macroinformation, participate in Scientia; academic science and philosophy, the New York Times, not discussing it with me, participate in Dementia. The federal government, jailing and censoring me, participate in Dementia.

Thus Sentiens has a light side and a dark side.

Whether Pleroma has a Janus nature I am not ready to consider: but a minimally two-sided nature is likewise essential for an additional subset I propose with Creatura / Sentiens: Persona.

Creatura is made of of ecologies, environments, organisms. The macro-universe we inhabit has us seeing "things" in Pleroma we call stars, and galaxies ... The macro-universe which includes Creatura has us seeing "things" we call "individuals": this bacterium, that loon, this "person" "named" "Paul" ... We, the self-aware, call ourselves "human," attribute to ourselves "dignity," "intelligence" ... "rights" ... But this too has a dark side. We are social individuals: and no two societies agree on who has how much dignity, how many rights. The limits change over area: Mbutu was a "slave" in "Virginia"; Mbutu was "free" in "Ohio." The limits change over time: Mbutu was a "slave" in "1859"; Mbutu was "free" in "1869." "Women" were "property" in that "year"; "women" are "individuals" in this "year" ...

Notice: I use quote-marks to emphasize the wholly conceptual nature of the concepts suggested by the words. Pleroma may contain "things"; Sentiens contains only concepts and symbols. The informational universe is composed entirely of information.

There can be no "murder" in Pleroma. There can be no murder in Creatura except in that part of Creatura which is Sentiens: and which is also Persona.

Persona is the universe of "right": meaning that

Macroinformation and Things Spiritual

I suggest that the spiritual dimension of life and consciousness that has made people willing and even anxious to kill each other, rule each other, is actually a hitherto unarticulated sense of macroinformation: a confusion of Pleroma (energy / matter) and Creatura (organisms (energy / matter) stimulated by information: difference, probability, meta-difference ...

With a theory of Macroinformation, Hamlet doesn't have to be confused when he sees his father's "ghost"; Macbeth needn't run chill when he sees an eidetic dagger point the way to regicide. I don't need to be confused when God tells me this or that ...

Number series

We're all familiar with our culture's ideas about space, we all have the basic vocabulary: There's length, width, depth ... Almost anyone can see that this can be expressed as a series: space₁, space₂ ...
or, dimension₁, dimension₂ ...Let's not get into the trouble the Christian calendar did though by starting with one: geeks these days start with that Arab invention, zero:space₀
space₁
space₂Einstein got people thinking of time as a fourth dimension. Hawking and others have followed suit thinking that time and space came into existence together, rejecting any idea that a God or anything else knowable by humans preceded space. Prigogine broke ranks, assuming that time is infinite. I join Prigogine's break of rank (scoffing at Hawking et alia): space came into existence within time. Space is mortal, time is not.

You may agree with this, disagree with that ... No matter what we agree or disagree on, I further assume that the truth will still be the truth, no matter what we think or say. (Mortals! While we've got the chance! To spew symbols!) Regardless, get this: these _subnumber-series are handy, vivid ... They simplify, they teach.

Let's do spatial dimensions again, with a bit of care: First (that is, 0^th), there's space₀ (location), then there's space₁, length (or width, or depth), then space₂, width (or depth, or length), and then space₃, depth (or length, or width) ... and then there's time.

Except according to Prigogine (as thought about by pk) time came before space, so it actually should go:space_-1time
space₀location
space₁length
space₂width
space₃depthwith plenty of room for Klein's (or Kaluza's) multiply-more dimensions: dimensions numbering eleven or twelve (since the early Twentieth Century!)

I first noticed how neat such series could be with Gregory Bateson's presentation of Learning_N. Learning ₀ represented a species' genetic or inherited intelligence: the insect knows how to grow its leg, its eye ... the insect knows how to move its wings ... Learning ₁ for Bateson represented the kind of learning humans are so proud of, where baby learns to say "Ma," then "Mama," then "mother"; or we learn not to touch the hot stove again; or we learn anything not in our DNA which the phenotype may retain through life, possibly teaching the "thing" learned to family, friends, allies ... Now we know that Learning ₁ is not unique to humans: the bird learns to hold a stick so that termites will grab the stick and the bird can then transfer them from the termite mound to it mandible, and from its mandible to its mouth ...

Learning ₂ for Bateson was meta-learning, learning to learn: what geniuses do (in more than one species), what schools delude themselves to think they do. (Note: that latter point is Bateson's And mine; not just mine.)

So: here, theorizing Macroinformation, I apply Number_series to levels of metainformation, drawing careful analogy with space; but now, further, I've also been presenting pk cosmology in exactly such a series: Existence₀ ...

Note: when I say "category" I mean what previous philosophers mean, but also introduce new categories. When I say "level," such as in "logical level," I mean much the same thing. Ditto when I talk about sets and subsets. Read category, level, set ... as likely references meta-differences.

Informational Cosmology

Informational Cosmology: Existential Categories

I defined macroinformation as complex information emerging from frictions among categories. I've given illustrations of grammatical frictions, usage frictions, logical frictions ... To go deep with me you must know something of my existential categories, sets and sub-sets. I name them, then introduce them:

Existence₀Time (Prigogine's infinite time)Existence₁Pleroma (the "physical" universe)Existence₂Creatura (the universe of life)I further divide Creatura:Existence₃Sentiens (the world of sentience)Existence₄Persona (the world of self-dignifying informational entities) (from "man" to "god")The latter two categories are themselves complex, each having a negative pole. Sentient organisms use semiotic tools to model their experience and their ideas; but anything that can be usefully modeled can also be incorrectly modeled. At best Sentiens deserves the synonym Scientia; commonly a subset is better named Dementia, or, same idea, Pathologica.

Similarly, sentiences such as civilized humans dignify some individuals, bestowing Personhood on them. On the dark side, personhood can also be denied. Go to any prison and you will see some of civilization's rituals for stripping personhood. Some such distinctions we'll agree with: I don't agitate to extend the franchise to dogs; others any among us may disagree with: was Jesus really a felon? or a god?

Sentiens is a true and meaningful subset of Creatura; I acknowledge that my further dividing both Sentiens and Persona between their obverse side and a dark side is moot.

---

Earlier draft(s need the more revision):

Shannon (and Wiener) defined information in terms of probability. Bateson emphasized difference. Bateson also spoke of emergences at new levels of complexity, unpredictable from any component level. I wed all that into Macroinformation. Macroinformation is complex information which emerges from frictions among categories. Grammatical incompatibilities, such as Shakespeare's noun cluster "salad days," initiated my illustrations nearly half a century ago. Here I build my understanding of "categories" from the "ground" up.

Modern physics imagines time and space being born together. Theology had previously distinguished time from eternity: the world and time were evanescent; God's Eternity was, well, eternal. Ilya Prigogine assumes that time is infinite. I try to follow what Hawking is up to, I've always liked theology, but when it comes to "understanding" experience, I follow Prigogine: or try to. The shoes Bateson helped me put on help there too.

Understand: what I say here is NOT received wisdom. My understanding is incompatible with conventional understanding. To see my macroinformation you must see the difference between my macroinformation and conventionally understood information.

Categories

Once again, I'm talking about macroinformation emerging from friction among categories. Here I'm establishing what I mean by categories. A few basic existential distinctions are essential.

Gregory Bateson emphasized differences between the physical universe and the universe of life, chiding his fellow scientists for routinely confusing them. Predicting what will happen after you hit the cue ball is different from predicting what will happen after you hit the dog. I add a distinction within the universe of life: and find I must add a Prigoginean distinction before we even get to the physical universe: time. And with time I add a distinction I may wind up seeing as a synonym for time: existence: existence as potential. Before existence can exist it must be possible for existence to exist: before there can be information, there must be difference. Before there can be difference, difference must be possible. So: time is infinite, possibility exceeds actuality.

Theologians had one thing right: you can't go too far into any serious philosophy without bumping up against cosmology. pk information can't be understood without pk cosmology.

pk Cosmology: Time, Space ...

Originally there was time. Space came into being within time. Time is the set; space is a subset. Time is the set, the universe is a subset. Space and the universe cannot be separated. Time and the universe can be separated: though not in the time in which the universe exists.

When I talk about "existence," you may take it as current with time. Possible existence precedes actual existence. Alternate existences may exist long after actual existence ceases. If time is infinite, then so is potential existence.

This universe Gregory Bateson divides into two different categories of existence. He calls the physical universe Pleroma: the better to distinguish the universe of life, Creatura. Scientists of Pleroma talk with great confidence about predictability, Newtonian mechanics ... what the billiard ball will do when treated precisely, in precise conditions. Bateson studied the universe of life. I hit the cue ball, the 8 ball goes into the side pocket. If I hit the dog, the possibility referenced above, in the same way that I hit the cue ball, the dog may cringe, the dog may run, the dog may bite me. It's a different world, it needs a different science.

Shannon, sponsored by the phone company, developed his information science "in Pleroma." It's about characteristics of a signal transmitted over a wire. Wiener said that there's more "information" in a great poem than there is in the Manhattan phone book. Wiener's information took account of Creatura.

However Shannon was dealing with Pleroma, he was doing it in Creatura. We are humans, talking about our world. I follow Bateson, but find I must further divide Creatura, distinguishing among life, aware life, and self-aware life. (Note here that Bateson understood concepts such as "intelligence" and "learning" to apply more widely than merely to individuals. He found intelligence and learning in a red wood forest, in a sea coast, in a species, as well as in you and me. Me too: I follow Bateson very much there too.) I mark this further distinction with my term Sentiens: the universe of sentience.

Sentiens

Thus we have Time: or Existence₀. And we have Existence₁: Pleroma, the physical universe. (An alternate univere might have a universe with different characteristics, it might even not have a Pleroma!) Still in Bateson's universe, slightly modified, we have Existence₂: Creatura, the universe of life. Now, pk cosmology: very much a Korzybskian, Batesonian, Prigogenean universe: I add Existence₃: Sentiens: the universe of self-awareness. Qualitative differences can become quantitative; quantitative differences can become qualitative.

exploration and revision proceeding simultaneously