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Evolution itself embodies an ongoing exchange of information between organism and environment.
When photons and electrons and other particles interact, what are they really doing? Exchanging bits, transmitting quantum states, processing information. 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.
Redundancy—inefficient by definition—serves as the antidote to confusion. It provides second chances. Every natural language has redundancy built in; this is why people can understand text riddled with errors and why they can understand conversation in a noisy room.
the expression “to look up something” is an empty phrase: it would have no conceivable meaning. Without writing, words as such have no visual presence, even when the objects they represent are visual. They are sounds. You might “call” them back—“recall” them. But there is nowhere to “look” for them. They have no focus and no trace.
For this invention will produce forgetfulness in the minds of those who learn to use it, because they will not practice their memory. Their trust in writing, produced by external characters which are no part of themselves, will discourage the use of their own memory within them. You have invented an elixir not of memory, but of reminding; and you offer your pupils the appearance of wisdom, not true wisdom.
The written word—the persistent word—was a prerequisite for conscious thought as we understand it.
as India and China, where it developed independently. Logic turns the act of abstraction into a tool for determining what is true and what is false: truth can be discovered in words alone, apart from concrete experience.
Logic takes its form in chains: sequences whose members connect one to another. Conclusions follow from premises. These require a degree of constancy. They have no power unless people can examine and evaluate them.
“The larger the number of senses involved, the better the chance of transmitting a reliable copy of the sender’s mental state.”
“I will yet venture to predict, that a time will arrive, when the accumulating labour which arises from the arithmetical application of mathematical formulae, acting as a constantly retarding force, shall ultimately impede the useful progress of the science, unless this or some equivalent method is devised for relieving it from the overwhelming incumbrance of numerical detail.”
“If you speak to him of a machine for peeling a potato, he will pronounce it impossible: if you peel a potato with it before his eyes, he will declare it useless, because it will not slice a pineapple.” They no longer saw the point.
It is the science of calculation—which becomes continually more necessary at each step of our progress, and which must ultimately govern the whole of the applications of science to the arts of life.
He saw dangers, though: “Intelligence, thus hastily gathered and transmitted, has also its drawbacks, and is not so trustworthy as the news which starts later and travels slower.” The relationship between the telegraph and the newspaper was symbiotic. Positive feedback loops amplified the effect. Because the telegraph was an information technology, it served as an agent of its own ascendency.
by which a message may pass between two correspondents, through the medium of the telegraph, and yet the contents of that message remain a profound secret to all others, not excepting the operators of the telegraphic stations, through whose hands it must pass.
That Language is an instrument of human reason, and not merely a medium for the expression of thought. The elements of which all language consists are signs or symbols. Words are signs. Sometimes they are said to represent things; sometimes the operations by which the mind combines together the simple notions of things into complex conceptions. Words … are not the only signs which we are capable of employing. Arbitrary marks, which speak only to the eye, and arbitrary sounds or actions … are equally of the nature of signs.
“Information can be considered as order wrenched from disorder.”
It sometimes seems as if curbing entropy is our quixotic purpose in this universe.
Once “information” has passed into protein it cannot get out again. In more detail, the transfer of information from nucleic acid to nucleic acid, or from nucleic acid to protein may be possible, but transfer from protein to protein, or from protein to nucleic acid is impossible. Information means here the precise determination of sequence. The genetic message is independent and impenetrable: no information from events outside can change it.
“The gene is, in fact, a linear array of DNA nucleotides which determines a linear array of protein amino acids.”
However complex a given state of the world may be, the difference between that state of the world and some alternative state of the world may be caused by something extremely simple.
Ideas. Whether an idea arises uniquely or reappears many times, it may thrive in the meme pool or it may dwindle and vanish. The belief in God is an example Dawkins offers—an ancient idea, replicating itself not just in words but in music and art. The belief that the earth orbits the sun is no less a meme, competing with others for survival. (Truth may be a helpful quality for a meme, but it is only one among many.)
Ignorance is subjective. It is a quality of the observer. Presumably randomness—if it exists at all—should be a quality of the thing itself. Leaving humans out of the picture, one would like to say that an event, a choice, a distribution, a game, or, most simply, a number is random.
Researchers have established that human intuition is useless both in predicting randomness and in recognizing it.
Asking whether a number is interesting is the inverse of asking whether it is random. If the number n can be computed by an algorithm that is relatively short, then n is interesting. If not, it is random. The algorithm PRINT 1 AND THEN PRINT 100 ZEROES generates an interesting number (a googol). Similarly, FIND THE FIRST PRIME NUMBER, ADD THE NEXT PRIME NUMBER, AND REPEAT A MILLION TIMES generates a number that is interesting: the sum of the first million primes. It would take a Turing machine a long time to compute that particular number, but a finite time nonetheless. The number is
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Why does nature appear quantized? Because information is quantized. The bit is the ultimate unsplittable particle.
This is a misreading of the predicament confronting historians today. It is not the onset of amnesia that accounts for present difficulties but a more complete recall than any prior generation has ever experienced. Steady recovery, not obliteration, accumulation, rather than loss, have led to the present impasse.
that words are not themselves ideas, but merely strings of ink marks; we see that sounds are nothing more than waves. In a modern age without an Author looking down on us from heaven, language is not a thing of definite certainty, but infinite possibility; without the comforting illusion of meaningful order we have no choice but to stare into the face of meaningless disorder; without the feeling that meaning can be certain, we find ourselves overwhelmed by all the things that words might mean.
