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We can see now that information is what our world runs on: the blood and the fuel, the vital principle.
Information theory began as a bridge from mathematics to electrical engineering and from there to computing.
Now even biology has become an information science, a subject of messages, instructions, and code. Genes encapsulate information and enable procedures for reading it in and writing it out. Life spreads by networking. The body itself is an information processor. Memory resides not just in brains but in every cell. No wonder genetics bloomed along with information theory. DNA is the quintessential information molecule, the most advanced message processor at the cellular level—an alphabet and a code, 6 billion bits to form a human being.
The cells of an organism are nodes in a richly interwoven communications network, transmitting and receiving, coding and decoding. Evolution itself embodies an ongoing exchange of information between organism and environment.
Even when money seemed to be material treasure, heavy in pockets and ships’ holds and bank vaults, it always was information. Coins and notes, shekels and cowries were all just short-lived technologies for tokenizing information about who owns what.
Information gives rise to “every it—every particle, every field of force, even the spacetime continuum itself.” This is another way of fathoming the paradox of the observer: that the outcome of an experiment is affected, or even determined, when it is observed. Not only is the observer observing, she is asking questions and making statements that must ultimately be expressed in discrete bits.
The laws of physics are the algorithms. Every burning star, every silent nebula, every particle leaving its ghostly trace in a cloud chamber is an information processor. The universe computes its own destiny.
The hardest technology to erase from our minds is the first of all: writing.
the history begins with the writing. The pastness of the past depends on it.
The written word is the mechanism by which we know what we know. It organizes our thought. We may wish to understand the rise of literacy both historically and logically, but history and logic are themselves the products of literate thought.
Writing, as a technology, requires premeditation and special art. Language is not a technology, no matter how well developed and efficacious. It is not best seen as something separate from the mind; it is what the mind does.
whereas the total vocabulary of any oral language measures a few thousand words, the single language that has been written most widely, English, has a documented vocabulary of well over a million words, a corpus that grows by thousands of words a year. These words do not exist only in the present. Each word has a provenance and a history that melts into its present life.
With words we begin to leave traces behind us like breadcrumbs: memories in symbols for others to follow.
The ruling priestly classes were invested in their writing systems. Whoever owned the scripts owned the laws and the rites.
The alphabet spread by contagion. The new technology was both the virus and the vector of transmission. It could not be monopolized, and it could not be suppressed.
Writing also gave rise to discourse about discourse. Written texts became objects of a new sort of interest.
The written word—the persistent word—was a prerequisite for conscious thought as we understand it.
Only with writing does narrative structure come to embody sustained rational argument.
Mathematics, too, followed from the invention of writing.
If the ideal of communication is a meeting of souls, then writing is a sad shadow of the ideal.
“The larger the number of senses involved, the better the chance of transmitting a reliable copy of the sender’s mental state.”
Every time people dipped quill in ink to form a word on paper they made a fresh choice of whatever letters seemed to suit the task. But this was changing. The availability—the solidity—of the printed book inspired a sense that the written word should be a certain way, that one form was right and others wrong.
Like the printing press, the telegraph, and the telephone before it, the Internet is transforming the language simply by transmitting information differently.
Knowledge has a value and a discovery cost, each to be counted and weighed.
Secret writing was as old as writing. When writing began, it was in itself secret to all but the few. As the mystery dissolved, people found new ways to keep their words privileged and recondite. They rearranged words into anagrams. They reversed their script in the mirror. They invented ciphers.
“This statement is false” is meta-language: language about language.
“Information can be considered as order wrenched from disorder.”
Von Foerster
We all behave like Maxwell’s demon. Organisms organize. In everyday experience lies the reason sober physicists across two centuries kept this cartoon fantasy alive. We sort the mail, build sand castles, solve jigsaw puzzles, separate wheat from chaff, rearrange chess pieces, collect stamps, alphabetize books, create symmetry, compose sonnets and sonatas, and put our rooms in order, and to do all this requires no great energy, as long as we can apply intelligence. We propagate structure (not just we humans but we who are alive). We disturb the tendency toward equilibrium.
“When is a piece of matter said to be alive?” he asked. He skipped past the usual suggestions—growth, feeding, reproduction—and answered as simply as possible: “When it goes on ‘doing something,’ moving, exchanging material with its environment, and so forth, for a much longer period than we would expect an inanimate piece of matter to ‘keep going’ under similar circumstances.” Ordinarily, a piece of matter comes to a standstill; a box of gas reaches a uniform temperature; a chemical system “fades away into a dead, inert lump of matter”—one way or another, the second law is obeyed and maximum
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Life is that which does not give up, that stays in a constant state of growing, learning, thinking, moving, breathing
A gene might maximize its own numbers by giving an organism the instinctive impulse to sacrifice its life to save its offspring: the gene itself, the particular clump of DNA, dies with its creature, but copies of the gene live on.
The history of life begins with the accidental appearance of molecules complex enough to serve as building blocks—replicators. The replicator is an information carrier. It survives and spreads by copying itself.
In music, as in poetry, as in any art, perfect understanding is meant to remain elusive. If one could find the bottom it would be a bore.
Everything we care about lies somewhere in the middle, where pattern and randomness interlace.
Another way to speak of the anxiety is in terms of the gap between information and knowledge. A barrage of data so often fails to tell us what we need to know. Knowledge, in turn, does not guarantee enlightenment or wisdom.
When information is cheap, attention becomes expensive.
It is not the amount of knowledge that makes a brain. It is not even the distribution of knowledge. It is the interconnectedness.
The network has a structure, and that structure stands upon a paradox. Everything is close, and everything is far, at the same time. This is why cyberspace can feel not just crowded but lonely. You can drop a stone into a well and never hear a splash.
Selecting the genuine takes work; then forgetting takes even more work.
We are all patrons of the Library of Babel now, and we are the librarians, too.
The library will endure; it is the universe.
