paradigm shifts

Can you imagine...

• ...living with a ton of air sitting on you,
• ...in spacetime so curvy it's tough to jump higher than a meter,
• ...among objects whose spin-rate must increase in steps,
• ...which attract/repel enough to levitate from length-contraction,
• ...while you move timeward at the speed of light
• ...relying on a hierarchy of hedges against uncertainty?

Do you perhaps know someone who's actually been in this situation?

information upgrade

Everyday uses for information prompt one to think of it as something like a string of characters which takes up space e.g. in a book or in a computer's memory. However these uses depend on context, since one person's information is another's meaningless gibberish. In fact the idea of information as a collection of isolated objects misses out on important physical aspects of the concept. As a result it has for instance distracted discussions of idea-evolution with questions about "particulate storage" in the brain, when the conversion of idea codes to digital storage is clearly taking place outside of our brains.

Even in its earliest communications-theory apps, information was an element of structure (like a string of characters delivered to the far end of a communications line) that was correlated with another element of structure (like the string of characters typed in to be sent at the near end of a communications line). This correlation value is delocalized i.e. dependent on the existence of structures at both ends of the comparison. Thus the information value of a map of the sky can be taken away by either destroying the map, or by randomizing the positions of stars in the heavens.

All quantitative applications of the information concept, like the "mutual information" described above, may be seen as special cases of a correlation measure known as KL-divergence. This is a kind of net surprisal, whose units are proportional to the logarithm of a multiplicity as for example in: #choices = 2^#bits.

A particular advantage of this definition (with roots in Bayesian inference) is that it works regardless of whether or not the elements of structure take the form of replicable code strings. In the language of the introductory note to Shannon and Weaver's 1948 book, this broadened definition can deal with more complex questions of correlation, meaning, truthfulness, and fidelity than the "Level A" problems associated with the communication of replicable codes.

Thus for example it applies to the evolution of complexity (like the accretion of planets in the solar nebula) before elements of correlation-storage associated with it "go digital" e.g. in the form of nucleic acid or ASCII strings. Moreover this definition works for quantum systems e.g. qubits, and "it has second law teeth". As a result for example acquired knowledge in general, and even a blank storage device on which to write, extracts a minimum price in thermodynamic availability.

digital sand tracks

What fraction of us are still analog jellyfish of the idea world, and unlikely to leave fossilized tracks let alone bones in the digital sand?

Here "bones in the digital sand" might be entries which start out with your by-line, while "tracks in the digital sand" might be edits to something with a separate digital life even if these too are traceable to you through document histories, etc. Although literature publications are being converted from analog to digital, the universe of abiding fossils in the digital sand may downstream be found in many other places as well (at least until net neutrality disappears).

In a larger context, one might consider six types of legacy (analog or digital) for an individual metazoan. These include actual bones & footprints in the sense of (i) its physical self & (ii) objects that it shaped, bones & footprints in the gene-pool sand which correspond to (iii) its offspring & (iv) its impact on the success of other families in its community, and bones & footprints in the idea-pool sand which correspond to (v) its by-line contributions to culture & (vi) its spiritual and intellectual impact on those around.

nnlm tweet

Community health (like information, complexity & dollar value) is conserved not like energy but like available work: Only with care...