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Hermann Weyl,
“Theories permit consciousness to ‘jump over its own shadow,’ to leave behind the given, to represent the transcendent, yet, as is self-evident, only in symbols.”
We can see now that information is what our world runs on: the blood and the fuel, the vital principle.
intercellular communication. He reminds us that information means something deeper now: “It connotes a cosmic principle of organization and order, and it provides an exact measure of that.”
The gene has its cultural analog, too: the meme. In cultural evolution, a meme is a replicator and propagator—an idea, a fashion, a chain letter, or a conspiracy theory. On a bad day, a meme is a virus.
The bit is a fundamental particle
this sentence should end here, the bit is democratis' indivisible particle
as scientists finally come to understand information, they wonder whether it may be primary: more fundamental than matter itself.
“All things physical are information-theoretic in origin, and this is a participatory universe.” The whole universe is thus seen as a computer—a cosmic information-processing machine.
We are the species that named itself Homo sapiens, the one who knows—
The greatest gift of Prometheus to humanity was not fire after all: “Numbers, too, chiefest of sciences, I invented for them, and the combining of letters, creative mother of the Muses’ arts, with which to hold all things in memory.”
there were people for whom the path of communications technology had leapt directly from the talking drum to the mobile phone, skipping over the intermediate stages.
“The written symbol extends infinitely, as regards time and space, the range within which one mind can communicate with another; it gives the writer’s mind a life limited by the duration of ink, paper, and readers, as against that of his flesh and blood body.”
She was programming the machine. She programmed it in her mind, because the machine did not exist.
“I do not think you possess half my forethought, & power of foreseeing all possible contingencies (probable & improbable, just alike).—… I do not believe that my father was (or ever could have been) such a Poet as I shall be an Analyst; (& Metaphysician); for with me the two go together indissolubly.”
In tree rings he saw nature encoding messages about the past.
A profound lesson: that a tree records a whole complex of information in its solid substance. “Every shower that falls, every change of temperature that occurs, and every wind that blows, leaves on the vegetable world the traces of its passage; slight, indeed, and imperceptible, perhaps, to us, but not the less permanently recorded in the depths of those woody fabrics.”
the world of matter has become a great nerve, vibrating thousands of miles in a breathless point of time? Rather, the round globe is a vast head, a brain, instinct with intelligence! Or, shall we say, it is itself a thought, nothing but thought, and no longer the substance which we deemed it!
electricity is by far the subtlest energy of the two. It is an original natural element, while steam is an artificial production.… Electricity combined with magnetism, is a more subjective agent, and when evolved for transmission is ready to go forth, a safe and expeditious messenger to the ends of the habitable globe.
