metainformation more complex than both metadata and basic-natuaral-language-with-grammar
Thursday, March 05, 2009
Information4: Macroinformation
Information4macroinformation
metainformation more complex than both metadata and basic-natuaral-language-with-grammara product of metadifference Additional comments will follow.
metainformation more complex than both metadata and basic-natuaral-language-with-grammar
Information3: Metainformation
Information3metainformation one level beyond metadatagrammar, for example: where a noun functions differently than a verb Additional comments will follow.
Information2: Metadata
Information2metainformation of the simplest kindmetadata: information about the information Additional comments will follow.
Information1: Data
Information1any perceived difference
dataforeground / background
zero / one Additional comments will follow.
data
zero / one
Information0
Information0the possibility of perceived difference Energy frozen out as "matter" must be different in Pleroma, the physical universe, but (monotheistic theologians aside) it can only be perceived as different in Creatura, the universe of life, and, additionally, can only be understood as different in Sentiens, the word of sentience, intelligence, self-awareness. For information in our sense, Bishop Berkeley's universe applies: the falling tree has to be heard: not by the squirrel, but by a philosopher. Thus Information0 requires Existence2, Sentiens: where Pleroma is Existence0 and Creatura is Existence1.
I need to edit this as well as to develop it further, rescuing old posts from Macroinformation.org, but right now I've distracted myself by deciding to number levels of Existence too.
I need to edit this as well as to develop it further, rescuing old posts from Macroinformation.org, but right now I've distracted myself by deciding to number levels of Existence too.
Informational Dimensions
from 1999, recap
Information can usefully be analyzed as multi-dimensional: on analogy with space (and time). I relegate data to one dimension, metadata to a second dimension, see grammar as minimally three-dimensional, and macroinformation as minimally four-dimensional.Information1
zero / one
Information2
Information3
Information4
Note that my numbering system is borrowed from Gregory Bateson's Learning0, Learning1 ...
Physicists since Einstein have talked of time as a dimension, convention making time "the fourth dimension"; except that Kaluza-Klein space (initially resisted by Einstein) offers a dozen or so dimensions without needing to mention time. Time is certainly essential for macroinformation, and, following Prigogine, I posit that time existed before space came to exist (contradicting physicist-mathematicians such as Hawking). But for the purposes of this introduction I leave time and macroinformation for later development, in other Macroinformation modules.
Individual information dimensions I develop in posts to follow immediately: but while still here, consider my concept of multi-complex multi-dimensional information in relation to the multiple levels of existence I just discussed in terms of Bateson's universe-subsets: Pleroma, Creatura ... Difference may exist in Pleroma: energy frozen out as matter is different from energy just whizzing about; but information by Bateson's definition (and by mine) can only exist in Sentiens. That is, information is perceived difference. An observer is required. To talk about information we must live in Bishop Berkeley's universe: the falling tree has to be heard by something self-aware.
Tuesday, March 03, 2009
Dementia
Dementia: The Universe of Being Wrong!
Note: I'm in the midst of revising not just the prose but the categories. Sentiens is a double universe, an ambiguous universe, divided between incompatible worlds I shall call Scientia and Dementia: a semiotically responsible, sane component and a pathological, un-sane component.
I've changed these terms, editing has yet to catch up.
Dementia (AKA: Pathologica): The World of Un-Sane Models: The Universe of Being Wrong!
Development Scrapbook
Could Sentiens exist without Pathologica? I don't think so.
And how much of Sentiens is occupied by Pathologica will determine how long Sentiens can survive. Survival needs accurate representations, honest and intelligent models. Jesus may be a group-fiction, but Socrates seems to have lived: the good teacher who gets executed for his qualities. Socrates died, that Athens died.
Whether or not a Jesus of Nazareth got crucified, the Romans did crucify lots and lots of folk: you can just bet some of them were candidate reformers. Rome lived on and on, and so has Jerusalem. But should the biosphere flouish while major decisions are made my kleptocrats who shove dissenting voices aside?
Should an America endure that arrests its reformers, no accurate report of the arrests being made by the press?
In jail an ex-MLB star told me of yachting top-speed all over the Hawaiian Pacific, paying no attention while smoking cocaine. That's civilization: Look, Ma! No hands! No uncompromised brains either.
We humans call ourselves "intelligent," attribute self-awareness to ourselves. I agree, without reservation: provided that we recognize that those attributes are spectra, have a range; they are not absolutes (Yes / No, On / Off ...) We'll have a better sense of how intelligent, and how self-aware, we are when we meet another intelligent, self-aware entity: another species ... or a meta-entity, a god. Maybe we'd think the Martians were a can short of a six-pack, maybe we'd think the god was Wow-Zowie!, maybe the god would think we were a few cards short of a deck.
Trouble in Sentiens' Pleroma
I repeat a post just made at my IonaArc blog:
The other day I noticed that I'd made my usual points about the trouble Galileo got into with the Church and the universities over his discovery of Jupiter's satellites. Years ago Knatz.com and this blog established a post or two on common pk symbols: god, Jesus ... Galileo, Abelard ... My Galileo point also jibes with important points made thus far principally at my Macroinformation blog. Gregory Bateson distinguished between the universe of Pleroma, the physical universe, and Creatura, his name for the universe of life. I extend his point to distinguish between Creatura and his sub-universe Sentiens, the universe of consciousness, of intelligence, of self-awareness.
Now: Galileo's difficulty was with establishing a fact about Pleroma within a self-satifisfied authoritarian society, wrong in its map of Pleroma. Imagine how much more difficulty he would have had had he tried to establish basic truths about the Church, the universities, about human society!!!
People like facts to be flattering, not true.
Note: I'm in the midst of revising not just the prose but the categories. Sentiens is a double universe, an ambiguous universe, divided between incompatible worlds I shall call Scientia and Dementia: a semiotically responsible, sane component and a pathological, un-sane component.
I've changed these terms, editing has yet to catch up.
Dementia (AKA: Pathologica): The World of Un-Sane Models: The Universe of Being Wrong!
2006 06 24
With Sentiens comes symbolic processing. Awareness is representational. With representation comes the possibility of misrepresentation. Pleroma cannot be wrong. Creatura cannot be insane: not until Sentiens emerges. With Sentiens necessarily emerges Pathologica.Development Scrapbook
2009 03 03
Pleroma could for all we can tell exist without Creatura, Creatura could not exist without Pleroma, Creatura could exist without Sentiens.Could Sentiens exist without Pathologica? I don't think so.
And how much of Sentiens is occupied by Pathologica will determine how long Sentiens can survive. Survival needs accurate representations, honest and intelligent models. Jesus may be a group-fiction, but Socrates seems to have lived: the good teacher who gets executed for his qualities. Socrates died, that Athens died.
Whether or not a Jesus of Nazareth got crucified, the Romans did crucify lots and lots of folk: you can just bet some of them were candidate reformers. Rome lived on and on, and so has Jerusalem. But should the biosphere flouish while major decisions are made my kleptocrats who shove dissenting voices aside?
Should an America endure that arrests its reformers, no accurate report of the arrests being made by the press?
In jail an ex-MLB star told me of yachting top-speed all over the Hawaiian Pacific, paying no attention while smoking cocaine. That's civilization: Look, Ma! No hands! No uncompromised brains either.
We humans call ourselves "intelligent," attribute self-awareness to ourselves. I agree, without reservation: provided that we recognize that those attributes are spectra, have a range; they are not absolutes (Yes / No, On / Off ...) We'll have a better sense of how intelligent, and how self-aware, we are when we meet another intelligent, self-aware entity: another species ... or a meta-entity, a god. Maybe we'd think the Martians were a can short of a six-pack, maybe we'd think the god was Wow-Zowie!, maybe the god would think we were a few cards short of a deck.
Trouble in Sentiens' Pleroma
I repeat a post just made at my IonaArc blog:
The other day I noticed that I'd made my usual points about the trouble Galileo got into with the Church and the universities over his discovery of Jupiter's satellites. Years ago Knatz.com and this blog established a post or two on common pk symbols: god, Jesus ... Galileo, Abelard ... My Galileo point also jibes with important points made thus far principally at my Macroinformation blog. Gregory Bateson distinguished between the universe of Pleroma, the physical universe, and Creatura, his name for the universe of life. I extend his point to distinguish between Creatura and his sub-universe Sentiens, the universe of consciousness, of intelligence, of self-awareness.
Now: Galileo's difficulty was with establishing a fact about Pleroma within a self-satifisfied authoritarian society, wrong in its map of Pleroma. Imagine how much more difficulty he would have had had he tried to establish basic truths about the Church, the universities, about human society!!!
People like facts to be flattering, not true.
Persona
Persona: The World of Conscious Entities
Humanity, for example
(Cheese, green or otherwise exists only in Creatura/Sentiens anyway;
Green cheese moons may be abundant in Pleroma/Creatura/Sentiens (Scientia / Dementia).
Dementia: the set of mental things that have no possible correspondence in Pleroma or that part of Creatura without self-awareness)
In Pleroma, "we" "are" matter/energy. It's in Creatura that we are alive. Still, in Pleroma we can burn, get radiated, blow up ... So what? so can anything.
It's in Creatura that we "want" to stay alive, not get burned, blown up.
Only in Sentiens are we aware that we may in future get burned, blown up.
Only in Persona do we think it's "wrong" that we should get burned, blown up.
...
While I work on this I enclose the note as I first scribbled it:Pleroma, Creatura ... far older, more stable than Sentiens, Persona. Pleroma seems always to be there, here. Creatura takes no vacations that we know of, though on earth, life has been nearly erased more than once. But Sentiens? like a ghost. sometimes there seems to be awareness. Persona? When my wife kidnapped our son, was I living in Persona? If I were living in Persona shouldn't there have been due process? Shouldn't someone have paid attention? put us both on trial?
Oh, there are trials galore: just in Creatura. But for Persona to be valid, not just illusion, shouldn't there be some review process? If the shaman gang up and convict Newton of blasphemy shouldn't some god step in and demonstrate that the shaman had no idea what they were dealing with, were not proper members of Persona?
I believe that Persona is just beginning to get established: as a subdivision of Sentiens: which is just beginning to get established. We're living in the attic of a house whose ground floor is not yet installed.
Now the concept of macroinformation fully applies.
Persona Scrapbook
In 1970 lots of groups were talking about "consciousness raising": blacks, women, fruit pickers ... I was handing out Free Learning Exchange information, inviting the public to help me create a free marketplace for learning resources, teachers who could be fired as well as hired (with the teachers, all individually, privately contracted, having the right to expel any student at any time for any reason) ... I talked from my soap box of raising consciousness for all groups, potentially for all individuals.
This movie which bored and annoyed me more than it stimulated me was good, even subtle, in how it first showed the protagonist's husband and doctor making decisions that vitally concerned her without informing her let alone consulting her. The husband and the doctor here were both bestowing personhood on themselves (granting themselves the right to make decisions, including illegal decisions) while denying any similar right to her. She's annoyed, her husband doesn't see why. Good. Applause here: except the movie showed no awareness of how very common that behavior remains, including among women! Women now exempt themselves (from being exempted) and the society at large half-agrees; but neither women nor the society recognize the range of other unconsciousnesses I was referring to thirty-nine years ago. The society routinely makes decisions without consulting of informing those concerned.
For example, in a scene shortly before the scene in the doctor's office where doc and hubby withdraw to another room to discuss abortion and to make the decision free from interference by the wife and mother, the protagonist is emceeing her TV show for kids. A little girl has drawn a giraffe. "And what makes it a giraffe?" asks the monitor. "It's yellow," answers the cute little blond girl, and it's got a big long neck ... and great big brown balls." "Oh, brown spots" (!) corrects our ideal mom: and she wouldn't have kept her TV job long if she hadn't. The movie protests the non-personhood of adult women, but goes along with the non-personhood of the children.
Don't mistake me: I'm not arguing for children getting equal time; I'm pointing out that even those who object to getting dismissed dismiss them.
No issue is more important within Sentiens than determining the limits of Persona: and then taking responsibility for those limits! In other words, if we grant personhood to women, but still deny it to philosophers we choose not to agree with or listen to, watch out: the philosopher may have been trying to warn your about the cliff in the dark.
If society continues to torture and starve creative, honest thought, mislabeling it wild, whose fault is it when we all choke and fall down dead?
I challenge you to find a single instance of any of my schools or universities understanding a single original thing I said from 1962 onward. (There were examples before, but there are no counter-examples since!)
In other words, we are responsible for our actions, our decisions, our awareness, our non-actions ... whether we know it or not.
As sentience forms a spectrum between sane and pathological poles, I observe that human sentience' claims about personhood are imperfect and perhaps essentially so. We have classes of individuals we deny personhood to and rituals for stripping personhood from selected individuals.
A geek was the guy at the freak show who'd stand for humiliation: swallowing live goldfish, for example. The geek was commonly some alcoholic, some kind of junky, who'd do anything for another dose of his drug. But society can treat anyone it choses like a geek. The victim can be a genius, or saint. The victim doesn't have to be a junky at all. The Christian story has Roman justice turning a god into a geek. Socrates Athens turned an elderly philosopher into a geek. A church supposedly respecting that god turned the scientist become astronomer named Galileo into a geek. (I was turned into a geek long before the FBI arrested me!)
Humanity, for example
2006 03 19
Formerly I called this basic existential set Humana. First, I didn't distinguish it, not out loud, not at Macroinformation: I just added Sentiens to Bateson's category of Creatura. I want to distinguish the world of awareness from the world of ahem instinct: and I further subdivide to emphasize the necessary fuzziness of borders, and, importantly, to avoid human chauvinism. I wish to divorce my thinking from any assumption about human exclusivity: the same as I wish to avoid assumptions that life began first on earth. I don't say it didn't; I say we don't know: and there's no reason, other than parochial vanity, to assume it.Persona may have any number of "moons" made of green cheese.
Pleroma may have none.
Pleroma may have none.
Green cheese moons may be abundant in Pleroma/Creatura/Sentiens (Scientia / Dementia).
Dementia: the set of mental things that have no possible correspondence in Pleroma or that part of Creatura without self-awareness)
2006 05 24
Persona is the universe in which we have ideas about our nature, our individuality, our importance ... Platonic Forms ... or absence thereof.In Pleroma, "we" "are" matter/energy. It's in Creatura that we are alive. Still, in Pleroma we can burn, get radiated, blow up ... So what? so can anything.
It's in Creatura that we "want" to stay alive, not get burned, blown up.
Only in Sentiens are we aware that we may in future get burned, blown up.
Only in Persona do we think it's "wrong" that we should get burned, blown up.
...
While I work on this I enclose the note as I first scribbled it:
Oh, there are trials galore: just in Creatura. But for Persona to be valid, not just illusion, shouldn't there be some review process? If the shaman gang up and convict Newton of blasphemy shouldn't some god step in and demonstrate that the shaman had no idea what they were dealing with, were not proper members of Persona?
I believe that Persona is just beginning to get established: as a subdivision of Sentiens: which is just beginning to get established. We're living in the attic of a house whose ground floor is not yet installed.
Now the concept of macroinformation fully applies.
Persona Scrapbook
2009 03 03
Last evening I bailed out of a DVD with Sissy Spacek as a pregnant mother who's been dealt thalidomide being treated as a non-person by male establishments who have no reason to consult her: just give her an illegal abortion, send her back to the other children, and go about their business. Sissy Spacek is a wonderful actress, great to look at across the decades, and she wasn't the only thing in the movie with eye-appeal (Carla Gugino, for example!) But the movie's sexual politics were so obvious, so limited to its own concerns, so far from real penetration .... that I bailed: but not without still thinking about it: after decades and decades of thinking about it: after being impoverished and finally arrested and officially censored for trying to do something about it: by offering a cheap cybernetic data base for all voluntary public information.In 1970 lots of groups were talking about "consciousness raising": blacks, women, fruit pickers ... I was handing out Free Learning Exchange information, inviting the public to help me create a free marketplace for learning resources, teachers who could be fired as well as hired (with the teachers, all individually, privately contracted, having the right to expel any student at any time for any reason) ... I talked from my soap box of raising consciousness for all groups, potentially for all individuals.
This movie which bored and annoyed me more than it stimulated me was good, even subtle, in how it first showed the protagonist's husband and doctor making decisions that vitally concerned her without informing her let alone consulting her. The husband and the doctor here were both bestowing personhood on themselves (granting themselves the right to make decisions, including illegal decisions) while denying any similar right to her. She's annoyed, her husband doesn't see why. Good. Applause here: except the movie showed no awareness of how very common that behavior remains, including among women! Women now exempt themselves (from being exempted) and the society at large half-agrees; but neither women nor the society recognize the range of other unconsciousnesses I was referring to thirty-nine years ago. The society routinely makes decisions without consulting of informing those concerned.
For example, in a scene shortly before the scene in the doctor's office where doc and hubby withdraw to another room to discuss abortion and to make the decision free from interference by the wife and mother, the protagonist is emceeing her TV show for kids. A little girl has drawn a giraffe. "And what makes it a giraffe?" asks the monitor. "It's yellow," answers the cute little blond girl, and it's got a big long neck ... and great big brown balls." "Oh, brown spots" (!) corrects our ideal mom: and she wouldn't have kept her TV job long if she hadn't. The movie protests the non-personhood of adult women, but goes along with the non-personhood of the children.
Don't mistake me: I'm not arguing for children getting equal time; I'm pointing out that even those who object to getting dismissed dismiss them.
No issue is more important within Sentiens than determining the limits of Persona: and then taking responsibility for those limits! In other words, if we grant personhood to women, but still deny it to philosophers we choose not to agree with or listen to, watch out: the philosopher may have been trying to warn your about the cliff in the dark.
If society continues to torture and starve creative, honest thought, mislabeling it wild, whose fault is it when we all choke and fall down dead?
I challenge you to find a single instance of any of my schools or universities understanding a single original thing I said from 1962 onward. (There were examples before, but there are no counter-examples since!)
In other words, we are responsible for our actions, our decisions, our awareness, our non-actions ... whether we know it or not.
As sentience forms a spectrum between sane and pathological poles, I observe that human sentience' claims about personhood are imperfect and perhaps essentially so. We have classes of individuals we deny personhood to and rituals for stripping personhood from selected individuals.
A geek was the guy at the freak show who'd stand for humiliation: swallowing live goldfish, for example. The geek was commonly some alcoholic, some kind of junky, who'd do anything for another dose of his drug. But society can treat anyone it choses like a geek. The victim can be a genius, or saint. The victim doesn't have to be a junky at all. The Christian story has Roman justice turning a god into a geek. Socrates Athens turned an elderly philosopher into a geek. A church supposedly respecting that god turned the scientist become astronomer named Galileo into a geek. (I was turned into a geek long before the FBI arrested me!)
Sentiens: The Universe of Self-Awareness
Sentiens: The Universe of Self-Awareness
Pleroma is Bateson's term for the physical universe, Creatura is his term for the universe of life. All universes, according to Prigogine, come into being in time.
Now, according to me: space applies to Pleroma. All extension that I can conceive of (other than duration, in time) occurs in Pleroma. Creatura and its subsets, Sentiens, for example, are Not material universes. Creatura is an informational universe. It extends in time only, not at all in space. Life has no weight. Information has no weight. Creatura, Sentiens (and its dark pole, Dementia), Persona (and its dark pole, Geekoma) are purely intensional universes: they have no extension. They exist in time, but Not in space.
My body has mass. These days I reach nearly 5' 8" and weight not quite 160 pounds. That body exists in Pleroma. It is subject to gravity, to momentum / inertia ... But my life is not subject to gravity: except by metaphor. It is not subject to momentum, except by metaphor.
My essays on Extension and Intension were posted at Knatz.com in the later 1990s. With all my work online destroyed, I recreated at a blog which Google then froze. Now I repost them here. Look for Extension, dated 2009 03 26.
The Universe of Self-Awareness: Homo sapiens, for example
Creatura is Pleroma multiply-intensified: in multiple dimensions (including multiple meta-dimensions).
Where a creature has a brain stem / nervous system complex enough for feedback, for multiple-referencing, something new happens. Information takes multiple leaps into informational complexity.
Right now I'm just creating files in which to gather notes on information at different levels of existential complexity: Pleroma, Creatura, (Gaia,) Sentiens, Persona. (These rooms are yet only partly furnished.)The macroinformational universe exists entirely within Sentiens. Difference applies in Pleroma. Difference certainly applies in Creatura. But macroinformation, interpreted difference, processed information exists solely in the universe of mulled awareness.
Sentiens seems to be a late developer within Creatura. Both physical and organic complexities need a bulk of experience before awareness emerges.
Astronomer Fred Hoyle saw cellulose amid the star dust, light year long strands of it.
Men have long seen mind in the universe but science has yet to.
But then science is even younger than Sentiens.
Pleroma is oldest and most extensive. Creatura is less old and less extensive: unless we're wrong about that too. Sentiens is I believe just getting started: has a lot of growing, catching up, to do.
With Sentiens the concept of macroinformation begins to apply.
Continue to Persona: The World of Personhood
Note: I'm in the midst of revising not just the prose but the categories. Sentiens is a double universe, an ambiguous universe, divided between incompatible worlds I shall call SanoPathica, made of a pathological component and a semiotically responsible, sane component. I'm sure of the concepts, I'm confident in the truth, but I'm still thinking about the names to coin for them.
2009 03 26
I must insert, coordinating the prose later:Pleroma is Bateson's term for the physical universe, Creatura is his term for the universe of life. All universes, according to Prigogine, come into being in time.
Now, according to me: space applies to Pleroma. All extension that I can conceive of (other than duration, in time) occurs in Pleroma. Creatura and its subsets, Sentiens, for example, are Not material universes. Creatura is an informational universe. It extends in time only, not at all in space. Life has no weight. Information has no weight. Creatura, Sentiens (and its dark pole, Dementia), Persona (and its dark pole, Geekoma) are purely intensional universes: they have no extension. They exist in time, but Not in space.
My body has mass. These days I reach nearly 5' 8" and weight not quite 160 pounds. That body exists in Pleroma. It is subject to gravity, to momentum / inertia ... But my life is not subject to gravity: except by metaphor. It is not subject to momentum, except by metaphor.
My essays on Extension and Intension were posted at Knatz.com in the later 1990s. With all my work online destroyed, I recreated at a blog which Google then froze. Now I repost them here. Look for Extension, dated 2009 03 26.
The Universe of Self-Awareness: Homo sapiens, for example
2006 03 19
Information, any difference that makes a difference, complicates as we move toward complexity among the universes distinguished here. Photons radiate Pleroma, the physical universe: that's information. In Creatura, the universe of life, the louse climbs a tree, smells no blood passing below, and drops off to try another tree. The louse takes no information over timet to be a trigger. No information = information. Rain falling on a seed in a fertile setting has a different effect on the seed from no rain. Rain on the seed in an infertile setting has a different effect, and no rain over timeprolonged has a still different effect.Creatura is Pleroma multiply-intensified: in multiple dimensions (including multiple meta-dimensions).
Where a creature has a brain stem / nervous system complex enough for feedback, for multiple-referencing, something new happens. Information takes multiple leaps into informational complexity.
Right now I'm just creating files in which to gather notes on information at different levels of existential complexity: Pleroma, Creatura, (Gaia,) Sentiens, Persona. (These rooms are yet only partly furnished.)
2006 05 24
Sentiens seems to be a late developer within Creatura. Both physical and organic complexities need a bulk of experience before awareness emerges.
Astronomer Fred Hoyle saw cellulose amid the star dust, light year long strands of it.
Men have long seen mind in the universe but science has yet to.
But then science is even younger than Sentiens.
Pleroma is oldest and most extensive. Creatura is less old and less extensive: unless we're wrong about that too. Sentiens is I believe just getting started: has a lot of growing, catching up, to do.
With Sentiens the concept of macroinformation begins to apply.
Continue to Persona: The World of Personhood
Note: I'm in the midst of revising not just the prose but the categories. Sentiens is a double universe, an ambiguous universe, divided between incompatible worlds I shall call SanoPathica, made of a pathological component and a semiotically responsible, sane component. I'm sure of the concepts, I'm confident in the truth, but I'm still thinking about the names to coin for them.
Creatura: The Universe of Life
2006 03 19
Information, any difference that makes a difference, complexifies in Creatura, the universe of life. Photons radiating onto the plant leaf can trigger things that photons radiating onto a rock don't. The leaf may photosynthesize, the rock doesn't: not in any way that we've noticed: we in Persona, subset of Sentiens, subset of Creatura.The best we can tell, nothing happening in Pleroma is nothing happening. It triggers nothing. Ah, but nothing can be a trigger in creatura. The louse climbs a tree, waits to smell blood. If it smells blood, that's information, a trigger. The louse lets go of its hold on the tree, drops toward the forest floor. It lands on the source of the blood, it may then score some blood. Success. But if it smells no blood, information, after a certain time, the louse drops anyway: and searches for another tree to hunt from. In creatura zero information is not no information.
Information in Creatura is very different from information in Pleroma. And that in itself is a source of metainformation.
My example of the louse is from Gregory Bateson. The terms Pleroma and Creatura are likewise from Gregory Bateson. My terms Sentiens and Persona I add myself: extending. Clarifying, developing further.
But: here's an additional complication: Creatura occupies Pleroma. We know of no way Creatura could exist without a physical universe to exist in, on, with, around ... But Creatura transforms what it touches. Where there is life, the life tends to spread: everywhere. Gaia is not a rock with a plant sitting on it. Plants merge into the rocks, penetrate some.
The other day I was wading in my favorite fishing lake. It wasn't me standing in water: one creature occupying part of Pleroma; the water was a rich soup of life. Algae, growing and reproducing by the second, layered the surface, rippling in the wind. The bluegill leapt for my popper. And before it did, uncounted creatures were nibbling on my ankles, taking up residence under my skin. Ho boy, a breeding ground!
2006 05 24
Creatura seems to have emerged naturally within Pleroma, though the issue is by no means settled. I doubt if it ever will be. (Settlements are for people with pressing other business; uncertainty is the permanent state of intelligence.)We have no more idea of the extent or age of Creatura than astronomers had of Pleroma until recently. Creatura exists on earth: of that we are sure; where or how it originated we have no idea ... but astronomers for decades have been finding complex chemistry among the stars. When biologists are in a position to explore off-earth, who knows what they'll find. Personally I believe that life did not originate on earth but was seeded here.
Nevertheless Creatura seems to be less old, less widespread, than Pleroma. Creatura follows from, and within, Pleroma. The potential for life exists in matter/energy.
(See my corresponding statements for each of the others.)
There is no letter "A" in Pleroma, no Shakespeare, no Mozart, and there is no letter A in Creatura either: until Sentiens, and then Persona, develop. The beetle occupies Creatura before the whale, the chimp, or Marie Curie. A beetle encountering a letter "A" written my Marie Curie may crawl all over it, defecate on it, deposit its eggs on it, but it will not read it: not ever, ever, ever; unless it evolves to somehow join Sentiens.
In a Philip Wylie novel stars (Pleroma) changed position, beginning to form the letter "F" as seen from earth. (Note that those stars might not look like an F from some other vantage point.) Instantly, we think, not accident, but design. Some "person," some intelligence, is doing that. Sentiens/Persona has no monopoly on information. It does have (thus far, apparently) a monopoly on intention: on sending a message.
Theologians one imagined the physical universe as an intentional artifact. They imagined it making "the music of the spheres." We're all familiar with that thinking. For Macroinformation, we must distinguish. In pk's mapping of information there is no Mozart in Pleroma; only in Persona.
There was an appealing hypothesis around when I was in graduate school that plants responded to Mozart. I don't believe that we know nearly enough to draw hard borders between categories. Where does Sentiens begin? Somewhere in Creatura (which of course is dependent on Pleroma).
Further note, monotheism, as we are all familiar, posits Persona, in the form of God, preceding Pleroma (and Time!). Macroinformation is conceived in the intellectual space of Darwin, followed by Bateson, followed by Prigogine.
Macroinformation does not reject the very appealing idea of intelligent design. It does recognize that we have no fossils of a designer. Therefore, for our purposes, Persona follows Sentiens, which follows Creatura, which follows Pleroma, which manifests in Time. Could there be a larger context in which Persona precedes Pleroma? precedes Time, or cohabits with Time? Sure. Why not? But not that we have any solid evidence for. Arguments, yes; solid evidence, no.
How Gaia complicates Pleroma I'll return to. Proceed to Sentiens.
Creatura Scrapbook
Likewise, the question of whether and how macroinformation applies to Creatura I'll return to. We'll study it in /Sentiens/Persona first.
Astronomer Fred Hoyle "found" multi-light-year-long strands of cellulose between stars. Is the cellulose alive? Is "real"? We don't know enough to draw firm boundaries. See the territories first: boundaries will be drawn: and redrawn.
Next, pk extends Bateson's two categories of existence to a third, a subset of Creatura: Sentiens, the world of self-awareness, the world of mortal intelligence.
Pleroma: The "Physical" Universe
2006 03 19
I take Time as the ur-set. Time doesn't exist within space; space exists within time.We don't and can't know how many universes exist in Time. I we know a bit about one: ours. Energy manifests in Pleroma. Some energy manifests there as matter.
Information, any difference that makes a difference, manifests in Pleroma. Light, spin, thermal activity ... everything counts. If it makes a difference, a physical difference, then it's information: Pleroma information. No one has to hear the star collide with the star or the comet hit the planet for the stars to collide or for there to be an impact crater.
But there is no abstract information in Pleroma, no information as symbol, as idea. Pleroma is pure territory. The word, these sentences, this file ... are all in Sentiens/Persona; NOT in Pleroma, except in the sense that abstractions can't emerge without territory, something under their feet: Pleroma. There is no letter "A" in Pleroma, no Shakespeare, no Mozart.
Pleroma, as actual territory, is unutterable.
2006 05 24
Pleroma seems to be the oldest, most widespread, most stable ... of the principal existential estates.
Astronomers are making strides toward figuring out its age and extent.
(See my corresponding statements for each of the others.)
My next comments apply to the universe of life. Thus, continue to Creatura.
Pleroma Scrapbook
Is there a species of macroinformation that applies to Pleroma? I don't know. I suspect so: but have no time or attention to devote to the question now.
Note: I'm writing around among these categories. Something about Persona just appeared in the file on Sentiens. These are all first drafts: and scrapbook style, may continue to accumulate inconsistencies. I edit as I can.
Monday, March 02, 2009
XCats: getting revised
Here are some terms essential for my conception of macroinformation.
Existential Category
The ground, the apple, and Newton may all exist (or have existed) but there are important differences among them not habitually appreciated by authorities of the past (and present).
Bateson's original two are still the essential categories: but see the utility of distinguishing Sentiens within Creatura: a significant subset.
I am now proposing to present Sentiens as composed of sanity and pathology in a mix impossible to separate, objectivity eluding us, the more so as factions set up authorities, and the authorities authorize inquisitions.
Within my proposed subset Persona, I now further propose an ineradicable ambiguity: between individuals nominated as persons, and individuals excluded, individuals whose personhood is denied: Persona/Geekoma.
proposed improvements temporarily render the post as draft status:
I also nominate a subset within the subset of Sentiens: Persona: the world of persons, of humans ... entities with entities those entities call rights.
My theory of Macroinformation also necessitates an additional subset of Sentiens: Pathologica: the world of unsane semantic entities. The rock exists in Pleroma but not in Creatura; the Blarney Stone exists in Pleroma and in Sentiens: some claims made for the Blarney Stone exist only in Pathologica. The moon exists in Pleroma and in Sentiens and in Persona, but a moon made of green cheese exists not in human experience but in Pathologica: human imagination divorced from survival-intelligence.
My hope of a future for our over-grown un-self-critical species necessitates a complementary subset to Pathologica, which, in honor of Korzybski, I name Santiens: the world of honest, intelligent, self-aware, scientific theory-honing, model-making, in short, the world of semiotic and semantic sanity: the world Korzybski, Bateson ... pk try, and largely fail, to give us.
Pathologica and Santiens are natural enemies, are at war. Civilization postures as though sanity rules; but its behavior proves, to me, that pathology rules, that earth will fail to birth an enduring Sentiens, and that if there's Sentiens in the universe apart from earth, then it should worry about us humans spreading.
(Redrafting here necessitates additional editing.)
Please be careful with my diction: as I am. Note and apply my definitions, my caveats.
Coined terms shouldn't mislead. Pleroma and Creatura are Gregory Bateson's coinages; Sentiens and Persona are my coinages as the concepts are my extensions of Bateson's concepts. Guard though against assuming common meanings for my uncommon usages: "existential category" has no important connection with Jean Paul Sartre or his "Existentialism." I simply refer to distinct types of existence: and emphasize that common parlance, like common thinking, shows no awareness of the distinctions being made.
For example, the stone I pick up on the beach manifests its existence in the physical universe: what Bateson calls Pleroma. The sand crab I pick up a moment latter manifests the universe of life: what Bateson calls Creatura.
The stone I picked up is existentially distinct from Ireland's famous Blarney Stone. That latter stone exists in Pleroma, but also exists, exists more importantly, in the human semantic universe. That universe I classify as a subset within Creatura: Sentiens, the universe of awareness. I, pk, also known as Paul Knatz, have an existence in Pleroma: I have physical extension, I stand 5'8", weight 159 LBs ... What you're reading here though has little to do with whether I still have in me some molecule I ate from an egg last week. No: here we are engaged with ideas: things that come from my being a feeling, thinking, writing, inventing creature. The sand crab we presume cares little about my macroinformation, has no awareness of any of it, has no interest in any of it.
So: first there's time: and information (any difference that makes a difference) (energy which is matter is different from energy which is not matter. Thus: Pleroma came to be, never mind how (or why). That's the physical universe. Things replicated, but it wasn't procreating in our sense, we of generations through time. Thus: Creatura is distinct from Pleroma. Gregory Bateson was forever emphasizing that we mislead ourselves by failing to make this distinction: if you hit the cue ball so that it hits the billiard red ball ... the red ball may drop into a pocket, may hit the yellow ball ...; but if you hit the dog the way your hit the cue ball the dog may bite you. The living dog is qualitatively different than the dead dog.
I further divide Bateson's Creatura, distinguishing you and me from the sand crab with my coined category Sentiens: the universe of awareness. Further I reserve the category Persona. The sand crab is alive, but we don't attribute awareness to it: I do not classify the sand crab in Sentiens. (Another thinker, in honesty and intelligence, might.) I do classify myself, and you, in the category Sentiens. (Another thinker, in honesty and intelligence, might not.) I further classify myself and you in the category Persona. That is, I grant us additionally a special status within Sentiens: that of personhood.
Work, thinking since the other day, necessitates revisions here. Beyond Persona, I've added Pathologica, bring the blog up to date on this subject with Macroinformation.org as of several years ago.
And just now, posting comments on informational dimensions as a numbered series, it occurs to me to specify these existential sets also into a numbered series. As hinted above, I start with Existence0, and identify it, not as the universe, not Pleroma, but as Time. Scan this month of March for posts on the subjects.
Existential Estates
One of my favorite jokes — ever — is my own: a joke I have no idea if anybody has ever gotten: in the first (and original) story of my series, The Model, the (student) creator of a universe tells the design critic that his theme is Existence. Later the critic commends the student's project for limiting itself, "unlike last week's," to the theme.
Huh? What's the joke? What could there "be" besides existence? I don't know. That's the joke.
Yesterday I wrote:Existence: Zero! in a sixty-nine with itself! All jokes. I don't know: you don't either.
Did anything precede the universe? Time, I presume. But We Don't Know!
Was intelligent design involved? I/We don't know.
Not seeing any other way it could have happened proves nothing.
In the midst of our uncertainty some things seem to be true:0ExistenceOur zero state. We know of nothing before it. We can imagine nothing beyond it.
| Pleroma Creatura Sentiens | the physical universe the universe of life the world of awareness, of intelligence |
The ground, the apple, and Newton may all exist (or have existed) but there are important differences among them not habitually appreciated by authorities of the past (and present).
Bateson's original two are still the essential categories: but see the utility of distinguishing Sentiens within Creatura: a significant subset.
2009 03 10
I'm revising my taxons of existence while posting these sections, all must be revised. Be aware, as you read, that the changes all concern ambiguity in Sentiens: the world of intelligent self-awareness. Sentience can lead to science, that is, to responsible, truthful, honest understandings of experience; sentience can also lead to pathologcy, to superstition. There is no correlative available to the living to tell objectively which is which. Today's superstitious blather is yesterday's religious certainty. Today's scientific bedrock may be tomorrow's superstitious blather. Majorities being on the side of the blather seems perpetual, the faithful count themselves among the blessed while their inquisiton tortures new victims.I am now proposing to present Sentiens as composed of sanity and pathology in a mix impossible to separate, objectivity eluding us, the more so as factions set up authorities, and the authorities authorize inquisitions.
Within my proposed subset Persona, I now further propose an ineradicable ambiguity: between individuals nominated as persons, and individuals excluded, individuals whose personhood is denied: Persona/Geekoma.
proposed improvements temporarily render the post as draft status:
I also nominate a subset within the subset of Sentiens: Persona: the world of persons, of humans ... entities with entities those entities call rights.
My theory of Macroinformation also necessitates an additional subset of Sentiens: Pathologica: the world of unsane semantic entities. The rock exists in Pleroma but not in Creatura; the Blarney Stone exists in Pleroma and in Sentiens: some claims made for the Blarney Stone exist only in Pathologica. The moon exists in Pleroma and in Sentiens and in Persona, but a moon made of green cheese exists not in human experience but in Pathologica: human imagination divorced from survival-intelligence.
My hope of a future for our over-grown un-self-critical species necessitates a complementary subset to Pathologica, which, in honor of Korzybski, I name Santiens: the world of honest, intelligent, self-aware, scientific theory-honing, model-making, in short, the world of semiotic and semantic sanity: the world Korzybski, Bateson ... pk try, and largely fail, to give us.
Pathologica and Santiens are natural enemies, are at war. Civilization postures as though sanity rules; but its behavior proves, to me, that pathology rules, that earth will fail to birth an enduring Sentiens, and that if there's Sentiens in the universe apart from earth, then it should worry about us humans spreading.
(Redrafting here necessitates additional editing.)
Please be careful with my diction: as I am. Note and apply my definitions, my caveats.
Coined terms shouldn't mislead. Pleroma and Creatura are Gregory Bateson's coinages; Sentiens and Persona are my coinages as the concepts are my extensions of Bateson's concepts. Guard though against assuming common meanings for my uncommon usages: "existential category" has no important connection with Jean Paul Sartre or his "Existentialism." I simply refer to distinct types of existence: and emphasize that common parlance, like common thinking, shows no awareness of the distinctions being made.
For example, the stone I pick up on the beach manifests its existence in the physical universe: what Bateson calls Pleroma. The sand crab I pick up a moment latter manifests the universe of life: what Bateson calls Creatura.
The stone I picked up is existentially distinct from Ireland's famous Blarney Stone. That latter stone exists in Pleroma, but also exists, exists more importantly, in the human semantic universe. That universe I classify as a subset within Creatura: Sentiens, the universe of awareness. I, pk, also known as Paul Knatz, have an existence in Pleroma: I have physical extension, I stand 5'8", weight 159 LBs ... What you're reading here though has little to do with whether I still have in me some molecule I ate from an egg last week. No: here we are engaged with ideas: things that come from my being a feeling, thinking, writing, inventing creature. The sand crab we presume cares little about my macroinformation, has no awareness of any of it, has no interest in any of it.
So: first there's time: and information (any difference that makes a difference) (energy which is matter is different from energy which is not matter. Thus: Pleroma came to be, never mind how (or why). That's the physical universe. Things replicated, but it wasn't procreating in our sense, we of generations through time. Thus: Creatura is distinct from Pleroma. Gregory Bateson was forever emphasizing that we mislead ourselves by failing to make this distinction: if you hit the cue ball so that it hits the billiard red ball ... the red ball may drop into a pocket, may hit the yellow ball ...; but if you hit the dog the way your hit the cue ball the dog may bite you. The living dog is qualitatively different than the dead dog.
I further divide Bateson's Creatura, distinguishing you and me from the sand crab with my coined category Sentiens: the universe of awareness. Further I reserve the category Persona. The sand crab is alive, but we don't attribute awareness to it: I do not classify the sand crab in Sentiens. (Another thinker, in honesty and intelligence, might.) I do classify myself, and you, in the category Sentiens. (Another thinker, in honesty and intelligence, might not.) I further classify myself and you in the category Persona. That is, I grant us additionally a special status within Sentiens: that of personhood.
Work, thinking since the other day, necessitates revisions here. Beyond Persona, I've added Pathologica, bring the blog up to date on this subject with Macroinformation.org as of several years ago.
And just now, posting comments on informational dimensions as a numbered series, it occurs to me to specify these existential sets also into a numbered series. As hinted above, I start with Existence0, and identify it, not as the universe, not Pleroma, but as Time. Scan this month of March for posts on the subjects.
Existential Estates
2006 05 24
Existence. What do we know about it? Only what we know: and we have little idea how much of what we "know" is wrong.One of my favorite jokes — ever — is my own: a joke I have no idea if anybody has ever gotten: in the first (and original) story of my series, The Model, the (student) creator of a universe tells the design critic that his theme is Existence. Later the critic commends the student's project for limiting itself, "unlike last week's," to the theme.
Huh? What's the joke? What could there "be" besides existence? I don't know. That's the joke.
Yesterday I wrote:
Did anything precede the universe? Time, I presume. But We Don't Know!
Was intelligent design involved? I/We don't know.
Not seeing any other way it could have happened proves nothing.
In the midst of our uncertainty some things seem to be true:
Paradox
Macroinformation and Paradox
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:Taking as an example the paradox presented by the man who says, "I am lying," we are caught in paradox because he makes a statement, and he makes a statement about this statement, the second being of a different order of abstraction from the first. The paradox arises from the interplay of these two levels of abstraction.
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.Gregory Bateson & Jurgen Ruesch, Communication: The Social Matrix of Psychiatry, NY, 1968, Chap. 8, Information and Codification: A Philosophical Approach, (Bateson alone), pp. 222, 223. From 2002 09 23 Please notice as soon as you can: in the second sentence above Bateson is talking about macroinformation!
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?
This file is prerequisite to all of Macroinformation.
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.
Sunday, March 01, 2009
Macroinformation Brief
This post will be reposted each month. Editing will take place in the latest version as this original gets further out of date. But then this "original" is an Nth generation offspring recreating an original of 1999 which itself is based on a conception from the mid-1960s.
Information issues from difference:
Powerful information issues from differences among metadifferences:
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.
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 tatooed 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.
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.
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 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.
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 macroinformation: the synformation, the synergy of the information. The more overtones, the more that is implicit, suggestable, 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.
To hunt for macroinformation on your own, focus on nature versus culture, and its informational scree.
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.
the more complexity among them,
the greater the potential of the information.
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 | synergisitc | information |
The wife gets "B"s tatooed 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?
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.
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
Difference is 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.
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 macroinformation: the synformation, the synergy of the information. The more overtones, the more that is implicit, suggestable, 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.
To hunt for macroinformation on your own, focus on nature versus culture, and its informational scree.
Thursday, February 26, 2009
Macroinformation Keywords
Keywords
abstract (/ concrete); aggregate; algorithm; ambiguity; analogic; anomaly (metadifference); art (epistemology ...); artifact; artifical
behavior
capacity (informational potential); category (type, kind, class); chaos; class (order, category, type); classification; cognition; communications; complexity; composite; compression (/ tension); concrete (/ abstract); construct; content; context; correspondence (pattern); cosmology; Creatura
data; deep structure (/ surface structure (linguistic)); definition (information); difference (different differences: metadifference, macrodifference); digital; dimension (informational dimension); discrepancy (informational metadifference); distinction (noting difference); dynamic (/ static)
eidetic; emergence; environment; epistemology (cosmology, philosophy, science, theology ... art); equilibrium; esthetic; existence; existential type (Pleroma, Creatura, Sentiens, Persona); explanation; explicit; extension; extension (/ intension)
finite (/ infinite); fovent; friction (informational: type, class ...); function
gestalt
heuristic; hypothesis (... theory)
implicit; improbability (/ probability); infinite (/ finite); infocule (information-molecule); information (difference / probability, data, metadata, metainformation, synformation); informational construct; intension (/ extension); interaction; interdisciplinary; interpretation; irony (metadifference)
[Note that I mean the spelling of "intension": do not confuse intension with intention.]
kind
language (semiotics, metainformation, synformation); law; levels (logic, type ...); linguistic structure; literature; logical type; logical type (category, class, type, taxon ...)
macro-; synformation; Synformation (theory of); macrouniverse (/ microuniverse); macrodecimal; map; matter (Pleroma); meaning (impossible without synformation); mental construct; metacontent; metadata; metadifference; metainformation; metaphor; microuniverse (/ macrouniverse); mind, mental; model (theory, explanation, tautology)
name; natural
obfuscation; objective (/ subjective); order; orthogonal; oscillation (cybernetic, informational)
paradym (paradym discrepancy); paradox (complex information); pathology; pattern; Persona; perspective (metadifference); phatic (informational atmosphere); philosophy; physical (/ abstract, intensional); physiology (biological information); Pleroma; politics (complex information); potential (potential difference, informational potential, informational voltage); probability (/ improbability); process (mental)
quality (/ quantity); quantity (/ quality)
random; real; relativity (/ absolutes); rhetoric
sanity (Korzybskian); science (epistemology ...); semantics; semiotics (signs, symbols); Sentiens; sets; sign (semiotics, symbol); spectrum (complexity, information ...); stasis; static (/ dynamic); structure; subjective (/ objective); surface structure (/ deep structure (linguistic)); symbol (semiotics, sign); symmetry; synecdoche; synergy (Gestalt, system, whole); synfo; synonymy; system (Gestalt, synergy, whole)
tautology; taxon; tension (/ compression); term; territory; theology (epistemology ...); theorem; theory (hypothesis ...); thing; theshhold (where difference is about to differ); time (dimension zero, the dimension before space, before information); type (order, category, class, kind)
universals; use
value; vectors
xml
Key Names
Shakespeare (and all great sources of complex information), Gregory Bateson, pk (Paul Knatz), Claude S. Shannon, Norbert Wiener, Alfred Korzybski, Calabi-Yau (team), Kaluza-Klein (team), bkMarcus, Robert Anton Wilson, R. Buckminster Fuller, Marshal McLuhan, Ogden & Richards, Gordon Pask (and all the cyberneticists I've encountered), Humberto Maturana, Fritjof Capra, Mitchel Resnick, Denis Wood
pk Coinages
Macroinformation, synformation (as a synonym for macroinformation, Sentiens (the universe of sentience), Persona (the universe of the "person": the respected individual), Dementia (the universe of sentience making mistakes, telling lies), Geekoma (the universe of the denial of personhood), fovent (informational event), infocule (informational structure on analogy with molecules, atoms, particles, quarks, strings ...), metainformation (a specific level of meta-information), meta-difference, Sentiens (the class of sentience), Persona (on analogy with Pleroma, Creatura), cartamania, macrodecimal), synfo
Note: I coined the term "macroinformation" in 1999 and coined the synonym synformation in 2008. Pleroma and Creatura are Gregory Bateson's terms. I first called Persona "Humana." I first called Dementia "Pathologica."
I recently coined "Scientia" for the sunny side of Sentiens and needed a name for the sunny side of Persona, when I decided that I only needed names for the dark side of either: Dementia and Geekoma.
Geekoma, my most recent coinage, is a little flippant, but it will do for the moment. Feedback is of course welcome on all.
abstract (/ concrete); aggregate; algorithm; ambiguity; analogic; anomaly (metadifference); art (epistemology ...); artifact; artifical
behavior
capacity (informational potential); category (type, kind, class); chaos; class (order, category, type); classification; cognition; communications; complexity; composite; compression (/ tension); concrete (/ abstract); construct; content; context; correspondence (pattern); cosmology; Creatura
data; deep structure (/ surface structure (linguistic)); definition (information); difference (different differences: metadifference, macrodifference); digital; dimension (informational dimension); discrepancy (informational metadifference); distinction (noting difference); dynamic (/ static)
eidetic; emergence; environment; epistemology (cosmology, philosophy, science, theology ... art); equilibrium; esthetic; existence; existential type (Pleroma, Creatura, Sentiens, Persona); explanation; explicit; extension; extension (/ intension)
finite (/ infinite); fovent; friction (informational: type, class ...); function
gestalt
heuristic; hypothesis (... theory)
implicit; improbability (/ probability); infinite (/ finite); infocule (information-molecule); information (difference / probability, data, metadata, metainformation, synformation); informational construct; intension (/ extension); interaction; interdisciplinary; interpretation; irony (metadifference)
[Note that I mean the spelling of "intension": do not confuse intension with intention.]
kind
language (semiotics, metainformation, synformation); law; levels (logic, type ...); linguistic structure; literature; logical type; logical type (category, class, type, taxon ...)
macro-; synformation; Synformation (theory of); macrouniverse (/ microuniverse); macrodecimal; map; matter (Pleroma); meaning (impossible without synformation); mental construct; metacontent; metadata; metadifference; metainformation; metaphor; microuniverse (/ macrouniverse); mind, mental; model (theory, explanation, tautology)
name; natural
obfuscation; objective (/ subjective); order; orthogonal; oscillation (cybernetic, informational)
paradym (paradym discrepancy); paradox (complex information); pathology; pattern; Persona; perspective (metadifference); phatic (informational atmosphere); philosophy; physical (/ abstract, intensional); physiology (biological information); Pleroma; politics (complex information); potential (potential difference, informational potential, informational voltage); probability (/ improbability); process (mental)
quality (/ quantity); quantity (/ quality)
random; real; relativity (/ absolutes); rhetoric
sanity (Korzybskian); science (epistemology ...); semantics; semiotics (signs, symbols); Sentiens; sets; sign (semiotics, symbol); spectrum (complexity, information ...); stasis; static (/ dynamic); structure; subjective (/ objective); surface structure (/ deep structure (linguistic)); symbol (semiotics, sign); symmetry; synecdoche; synergy (Gestalt, system, whole); synfo; synonymy; system (Gestalt, synergy, whole)
tautology; taxon; tension (/ compression); term; territory; theology (epistemology ...); theorem; theory (hypothesis ...); thing; theshhold (where difference is about to differ); time (dimension zero, the dimension before space, before information); type (order, category, class, kind)
universals; use
value; vectors
xml
Key Names
Shakespeare (and all great sources of complex information), Gregory Bateson, pk (Paul Knatz), Claude S. Shannon, Norbert Wiener, Alfred Korzybski, Calabi-Yau (team), Kaluza-Klein (team), bkMarcus, Robert Anton Wilson, R. Buckminster Fuller, Marshal McLuhan, Ogden & Richards, Gordon Pask (and all the cyberneticists I've encountered), Humberto Maturana, Fritjof Capra, Mitchel Resnick, Denis Wood
pk Coinages
Macroinformation, synformation (as a synonym for macroinformation, Sentiens (the universe of sentience), Persona (the universe of the "person": the respected individual), Dementia (the universe of sentience making mistakes, telling lies), Geekoma (the universe of the denial of personhood), fovent (informational event), infocule (informational structure on analogy with molecules, atoms, particles, quarks, strings ...), metainformation (a specific level of meta-information), meta-difference, Sentiens (the class of sentience), Persona (on analogy with Pleroma, Creatura), cartamania, macrodecimal), synfo
Note: I coined the term "macroinformation" in 1999 and coined the synonym synformation in 2008. Pleroma and Creatura are Gregory Bateson's terms. I first called Persona "Humana." I first called Dementia "Pathologica."
I recently coined "Scientia" for the sunny side of Sentiens and needed a name for the sunny side of Persona, when I decided that I only needed names for the dark side of either: Dementia and Geekoma.
Geekoma, my most recent coinage, is a little flippant, but it will do for the moment. Feedback is of course welcome on all.
Monday, January 12, 2009
Mi Origins: pk's Prigogine
Prigogine on Certainty: and the Origins of pk's Theory of Macroinformation
Entropy Magazine in 1999 wanted me to submit for publication the note on Ilya Prigogine — on Certainty, on Time — I'd posted at Knatz.com in the spring of 1998 as a footnote to my indictment of public school math. I thought, Oh, but that's not complete, I don't think I could complete it overnight; but I ought to be able to knock together a theory of complex information over the weekend: that"s been simmering on my back burners for decades. I still haven't finished "knocking" Macroinformation together, and I certainly never finished the note on Prigogine, but here's what Entropy had responded to:
Prigogine is Right:
Scientific Progress
From 1979 to 1989 I was occupied principally in trying to communicate Korzybskian semantics to my fellow man. Does your mental model match reality? Does anyone else’s? How can you tell? don’t you see that our survival depends (in the long if not in the short run) on some degree of accuracy?
The mental models we inherit too often are compromised by lazy, not to mention shoddy, thinking. Political and economic motives are so interwoven there’s no untangling them. But the latter isn’t necessary. Amnesty for all. Just improve your mental models. Meet the truth. Not as "land" or "power" as in the view of Norman Mailer’s Pontius Pilate. Not as ’whatever my version of my sect of Essene Jews is obsessed with’, as in the view of Norman’s Mailer’s Jesus. No: improve your mental models as in the scientific method.
Do the details of my model correspond with verifiable events in space/time? Does the picture they make jib with responsible theory? Am I careful to weed out as "dead" theories that don’t jib?
I’d been meaning to write a little piece on semantics to go with my map/territory piece (link above). The related material here nudged me to add a bit more as Semiotics/Semantics. (Actually, this is also a start on the fragmentary discovery section of my Knatz.com bio!.)
Should we trust science because someone calls it that
word? Should we have trusted the actor costumed in a white coat who used to tell us to smoke Camels? Science is only science when you, anyone, can review the reasoning, check the math, examine or challenge the data. (That becomes problematic when the data is Lucy’s bones and even having a Ph.D. in the field won’t necessarily get you near them.)
I’ve reviewed Prigogine’s reasoning: it’s awesome. I’m familiar with much of his data: it’s not just right; it’s right on the pinnacle. Others that can have already checked the math: I have to let that part pass.
The book is published. It’s in print. Maybe it will come out in paperback. Nevertheless, as I find time, I plan to summarize part of his argument. Here’s a start:
Many problems in science and philosophy (including religion) may be constructively subsumed under the problem of time. What is time? Does it have a beginning or end? Is it meaningful to think of anything as possibly being outside of time? Did time begin with the Big Bang? or any other Creation? Is time reversible? or unidirectional? ...
Other questions are intertangled. Are things determined? (All things? Some things? Which things?) Is our own behavior determined? Can we ever choose behavior? Or is free will an illusion?
Prigogine traces decisions made or assumed with regard to these questions through the recorded history of human thought. The record is clearest in science from the Greeks to the present, it being science which makes a virtue of examining assumptions.
Science up to and including quantum physics has typically assumed that time is reversible. Einstein believed that time was an illusion.
Einstein also believed that free will was an illusion. (Stephen Hawking’s recent popular books continue that vein of the argument: ’yes, it’s all determined but the etiology is too complicated to trace or predict’.)
Prigogine argues that time has no beginning and no end. The universe began within time and may end within it (as could other universes). Time is real. Time is unidirectional. Entropy assures that processes begun cannot be reversed.
The universe is one of evolutionary Becoming, not one of eternal Being. Choices are possible. Choices matter. more coming
My History of Magic and my short piece on revolution distill what I see as most important to digest from Sir James Frazer’s monumental The Golden Bough. That seminal anthropological book is towering and encyclopedic, staggeringly researched, incisively argued. I’ve spent decades with that work and feel confident in my simplification, however sweeping.
I hope you’ll notice that Prigogine’s points are directly relevant to points I’ve ridden on Frazer’s back to make: human confidence in its ability to determine cause and effect has been misguided. When we want to become the cause and to be certain of the outcome, our confidence is pathological.
Prigogine’s book is new. But I see it as even more important than The Golden Bough. The mental models of reality we learn from science and philosophy are themselves due for a spring cleaning. Prigogine gives it to them.
My first awareness of my preference for Becoming over Being came to me in my twenties, due in large part I am sure to my voracious reading of George Bernard Shaw. Shaw cites Butler as his source. I’ve since studied Butler and Butler’s sources. Hooray (Wallace/) Darwin. I’m helping Epicurus-Darwin-Prigogine the best I can despite my disabilities. Some of what’s here is already implicit elsewhere on this site. Most of the rest will be siphoned off to more appropriate locations.
Notes for more:
Scientists too have shared Descartes’ longing for certainty, for simple logical connections, for simple cause and effect relationships ... Descartes lauched his campaign for certainty with the "syllogism" Cogito: ergo sum. Cogito? No argument. Sum? No argument. Ergo? Balderdash.
A view of time common in many religions is that it has an inside and an outside. Men and other creatures are inside it; God is outside it. With the right magic we can get outside with Him. Beyond mortality and mutability.
Science is in part descended from our age old pursuit of control, our assumptions about simple cause and effect. Prigogine traces man’s pursuit of simple cause and effect. If I do A, then B must happen. I want also to be certain about C through Z. If magic doesn’t work, we’ll try technology ... as another form of magic.)
Footnotes:
The word "science":
My son heard the word "scientician" on The Simpsons and has proposed that there be three words to describe the range of "scientists": scientist (for those who actually know and follow the method; scientician (for those who have learned and can perform by rote a set of procedures); and sciencist (for a member of a priesthoold of some particular set of paradigms). The same suffixes could be useful in other fields: I am religious; the cardinals who persecuted Galileo were religiousists, the dunce trained to say mass correctly is a religiousician (or a religician).
2001 05 19
It’s been my intention since the inception of my home page to have the individual modules load quickly and read in a couple of bites. Notes were typically put in an accompanying file. Today more and more people have faster CPU’s, more memory, faster modems ... and I merge some files (& separate others).
This particular file however is as hairy a bear as any of my problem sections. Entropy Magazine asked to publish the section on Prigogine. Great, but that section is a part of this file, which in turn is part of my indoctrination folder, which interweaves with the entire home page (as it does with my entire life).
Entropy agreed to let me develop the theory of Macroinformation first. Years are slipping by and still none of it is published: except here (where it most belongs).
Context is important. Once again, the above "paper" had started as a footnote to my indictment of public school math; that module had been a footnote to my indictment of public school; and all of my school indictments had been illustrations for my modules on my own personal school indoctrination. Remember at all times that I, pk, am the deschooler. In 1970, with Ivan Illich, I founded The Free Learning Exchange, Inc., and offer of a cheap low-tech internet, voluntary public data-basing being offered as an alternative to schooling, to commercially controlled media, and so forth. So, my autobiographical pieces were intended as public prototypes: it was "personal" only by unavoidable coincidence.
I'll add the piece on math next, but at my InfoAll blog. The rest of the Knatz.com web I'll try to remount via other blogs, not this one.
Entropy Magazine in 1999 wanted me to submit for publication the note on Ilya Prigogine — on Certainty, on Time — I'd posted at Knatz.com in the spring of 1998 as a footnote to my indictment of public school math. I thought, Oh, but that's not complete, I don't think I could complete it overnight; but I ought to be able to knock together a theory of complex information over the weekend: that"s been simmering on my back burners for decades. I still haven't finished "knocking" Macroinformation together, and I certainly never finished the note on Prigogine, but here's what Entropy had responded to:
Prigogine is Right:
Scientific Progress
1998 05 05
Do not imagine that my couple of quick references are an adequate substitute for knowing the Prigogine work referred to directly. If you too are traumatized by mathematical notation or are less than literate in it, read the opening sections and final chapter of The End of Certainty. If you are already conversant with the history of science as well as of the history of philosophy you will find it not only accurate but illuminating.The things one feels absolutely certain about are never true.
Oscar Wilde
Oscar Wilde
From 1979 to 1989 I was occupied principally in trying to communicate Korzybskian semantics to my fellow man. Does your mental model match reality? Does anyone else’s? How can you tell? don’t you see that our survival depends (in the long if not in the short run) on some degree of accuracy?
The mental models we inherit too often are compromised by lazy, not to mention shoddy, thinking. Political and economic motives are so interwoven there’s no untangling them. But the latter isn’t necessary. Amnesty for all. Just improve your mental models. Meet the truth. Not as "land" or "power" as in the view of Norman Mailer’s Pontius Pilate. Not as ’whatever my version of my sect of Essene Jews is obsessed with’, as in the view of Norman’s Mailer’s Jesus. No: improve your mental models as in the scientific method.
Do the details of my model correspond with verifiable events in space/time? Does the picture they make jib with responsible theory? Am I careful to weed out as "dead" theories that don’t jib?
I’d been meaning to write a little piece on semantics to go with my map/territory piece (link above). The related material here nudged me to add a bit more as Semiotics/Semantics. (Actually, this is also a start on the fragmentary discovery section of my Knatz.com bio!.)
Should we trust science because someone calls it that
word? Should we have trusted the actor costumed in a white coat who used to tell us to smoke Camels? Science is only science when you, anyone, can review the reasoning, check the math, examine or challenge the data. (That becomes problematic when the data is Lucy’s bones and even having a Ph.D. in the field won’t necessarily get you near them.)
I’ve reviewed Prigogine’s reasoning: it’s awesome. I’m familiar with much of his data: it’s not just right; it’s right on the pinnacle. Others that can have already checked the math: I have to let that part pass.
The book is published. It’s in print. Maybe it will come out in paperback. Nevertheless, as I find time, I plan to summarize part of his argument. Here’s a start:
Other questions are intertangled. Are things determined? (All things? Some things? Which things?) Is our own behavior determined? Can we ever choose behavior? Or is free will an illusion?
Prigogine traces decisions made or assumed with regard to these questions through the recorded history of human thought. The record is clearest in science from the Greeks to the present, it being science which makes a virtue of examining assumptions.
Science up to and including quantum physics has typically assumed that time is reversible. Einstein believed that time was an illusion.
Einstein also believed that free will was an illusion. (Stephen Hawking’s recent popular books continue that vein of the argument: ’yes, it’s all determined but the etiology is too complicated to trace or predict’.)
Prigogine argues that time has no beginning and no end. The universe began within time and may end within it (as could other universes). Time is real. Time is unidirectional. Entropy assures that processes begun cannot be reversed.
The universe is one of evolutionary Becoming, not one of eternal Being. Choices are possible. Choices matter.
My History of Magic and my short piece on revolution distill what I see as most important to digest from Sir James Frazer’s monumental The Golden Bough. That seminal anthropological book is towering and encyclopedic, staggeringly researched, incisively argued. I’ve spent decades with that work and feel confident in my simplification, however sweeping.
I hope you’ll notice that Prigogine’s points are directly relevant to points I’ve ridden on Frazer’s back to make: human confidence in its ability to determine cause and effect has been misguided. When we want to become the cause and to be certain of the outcome, our confidence is pathological.
Prigogine’s book is new. But I see it as even more important than The Golden Bough. The mental models of reality we learn from science and philosophy are themselves due for a spring cleaning. Prigogine gives it to them.
My first awareness of my preference for Becoming over Being came to me in my twenties, due in large part I am sure to my voracious reading of George Bernard Shaw. Shaw cites Butler as his source. I’ve since studied Butler and Butler’s sources. Hooray (Wallace/) Darwin. I’m helping Epicurus-Darwin-Prigogine the best I can despite my disabilities. Some of what’s here is already implicit elsewhere on this site. Most of the rest will be siphoned off to more appropriate locations.
Notes for more:
Scientists too have shared Descartes’ longing for certainty, for simple logical connections, for simple cause and effect relationships ... Descartes lauched his campaign for certainty with the "syllogism" Cogito: ergo sum. Cogito? No argument. Sum? No argument. Ergo? Balderdash.
A view of time common in many religions is that it has an inside and an outside. Men and other creatures are inside it; God is outside it. With the right magic we can get outside with Him. Beyond mortality and mutability.
Science is in part descended from our age old pursuit of control, our assumptions about simple cause and effect. Prigogine traces man’s pursuit of simple cause and effect. If I do A, then B must happen. I want also to be certain about C through Z. If magic doesn’t work, we’ll try technology ... as another form of magic.)
Footnotes:
The word "science":
2000 08 25
My son heard the word "scientician" on The Simpsons and has proposed that there be three words to describe the range of "scientists": scientist (for those who actually know and follow the method; scientician (for those who have learned and can perform by rote a set of procedures); and sciencist (for a member of a priesthoold of some particular set of paradigms). The same suffixes could be useful in other fields: I am religious; the cardinals who persecuted Galileo were religiousists, the dunce trained to say mass correctly is a religiousician (or a religician).
2001 05 19
It’s been my intention since the inception of my home page to have the individual modules load quickly and read in a couple of bites. Notes were typically put in an accompanying file. Today more and more people have faster CPU’s, more memory, faster modems ... and I merge some files (& separate others).
This particular file however is as hairy a bear as any of my problem sections. Entropy Magazine asked to publish the section on Prigogine. Great, but that section is a part of this file, which in turn is part of my indoctrination folder, which interweaves with the entire home page (as it does with my entire life).
Entropy agreed to let me develop the theory of Macroinformation first. Years are slipping by and still none of it is published: except here (where it most belongs).
Context is important. Once again, the above "paper" had started as a footnote to my indictment of public school math; that module had been a footnote to my indictment of public school; and all of my school indictments had been illustrations for my modules on my own personal school indoctrination. Remember at all times that I, pk, am the deschooler. In 1970, with Ivan Illich, I founded The Free Learning Exchange, Inc., and offer of a cheap low-tech internet, voluntary public data-basing being offered as an alternative to schooling, to commercially controlled media, and so forth. So, my autobiographical pieces were intended as public prototypes: it was "personal" only by unavoidable coincidence.
I'll add the piece on math next, but at my InfoAll blog. The rest of the Knatz.com web I'll try to remount via other blogs, not this one.
Sunday, January 11, 2009
Information, Macroinformation Quotes
| Information issues from difference: the more improbable, the more information. |
Note, 2010. All pk and Knatz.com quote files are currently edited at pKnatzQuotes.
Saturday, January 10, 2009
Macroinformation Definitions
Information begets information.
First, before I define macroinformation (complex information, interpreted information, information as understood by social humans), I review the great definitions of information that followed from information theory of the 1940s:
Information:
Gregory Bateson
H = -∑pi logepi
(the inverse of the probability of the signal)
Claude E. Shannon
pk rephrases Wiener, Shannon, Bateson: Information "is"
Also essential to pk's macroinformation (also from Bateson):
Gregory Bateson
Now: Macroinformation:
Macroinformation, the cream of the information — multi-complex, multi-dimensional information — is silent — and emerges from conflict: logical frictions among logical categories.
The potential of the information is directly proportional to the complexity of the informational geometry.
("Category" and "geometry" are explored above and below this post.)
Tuesday, January 06, 2009
Macroinformation Synonym
In the 1960s my word for complex information was alternately "information" and "art." I invented the term "macroinformation" to represent meta-information beyond the complexity of either metadata or mere language with its grammar. I intended the macro- prefix to echo science's concept of the "macrouniverse." That is, I intended the word to suggest something whose principal existence was mental with overtones of "constructed": in particular, socially-constructed .
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:
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.
Macroinformation Update
Review: My thinking on complex information (art, politics, religion ...) commenced in the early 1960s while in graduate school. I left it on a back burner while I tried (and failed) to communicate my reading of Shakespeare's sonnets as complex meta-information to my graduate faculty. I kept it on that back burner through the 1970s as I tried, with Ivan Illich, to recommend cybernetic data basing to replace authoritarian information structures: no (dictatorial) school, no (dictatorial) government (no (dictatorial) Church); just public-volunteered information (while we all learn to mind our own business).
My thinking on complex information moved forward on my stove in the late 1990s when Entropy Magazine asked me to submit my notes on Ilya Prigogine, science, and "certainty" for peer-reviewed publication. I responded that Certainty would take me a while to prepare, but that I could knock out a theory of complex information over the weekend: would he consider that in the meantime? (Since then, now, see: Macroinformation in Brief.)
(I'll post those Prigogine notes here: they had been at Knatz.com, but Knatz.com got scuttled by the fed.)
In the late 1990s the first materials I assembled on the subject got posted in the "Teaching/Scholarship section of my home page. That section became a separate folder when my home page moved from my local ISP to a "Knatz.com" folder at my online art gallery (PKImaging.com, all pk domains destroyed in 2007). Later that section inherited its own domain: Macroinformation.org. All that was trashed by the US in the United States versus Paul Knatz, February 2007. Ah, but I'd also started this Macroinformation blog: and the federal proscription didn't reach my several blogspot.com blogs!
Now, if the parole office will leave me in peace, I'll try to recreated all "Knatz.com materials at these several blogs. An similar attempt to restore my Thinking Tools recently failed. I'll try that again: and I'll try to put all information theory materials here.
(Anyone who bought online storage and invited me to recreate Knatz.com would get points in heaven (anyone who doesn't will have to remain here in hell).)
My thinking on complex information moved forward on my stove in the late 1990s when Entropy Magazine asked me to submit my notes on Ilya Prigogine, science, and "certainty" for peer-reviewed publication. I responded that Certainty would take me a while to prepare, but that I could knock out a theory of complex information over the weekend: would he consider that in the meantime? (Since then, now, see: Macroinformation in Brief.)
(I'll post those Prigogine notes here: they had been at Knatz.com, but Knatz.com got scuttled by the fed.)
In the late 1990s the first materials I assembled on the subject got posted in the "Teaching/Scholarship section of my home page. That section became a separate folder when my home page moved from my local ISP to a "Knatz.com" folder at my online art gallery (PKImaging.com, all pk domains destroyed in 2007). Later that section inherited its own domain: Macroinformation.org. All that was trashed by the US in the United States versus Paul Knatz, February 2007. Ah, but I'd also started this Macroinformation blog: and the federal proscription didn't reach my several blogspot.com blogs!
Now, if the parole office will leave me in peace, I'll try to recreated all "Knatz.com materials at these several blogs. An similar attempt to restore my Thinking Tools recently failed. I'll try that again: and I'll try to put all information theory materials here.
(Anyone who bought online storage and invited me to recreate Knatz.com would get points in heaven (anyone who doesn't will have to remain here in hell).)
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