Quotes About Information

Entropy is a measure of the deadness of a system. Negentropy or information is a measure of the liveliness of a system.

The human increment accelerates faster than pre-human evolution because through the third, semantic circuit and its symbols (words, maps, equations etc.) we are able to pass information (negative entropy: coherence) from generation to generation.

INFORMATION: as used in mathematical information theory, this denotes the amount of unpredictability in a message; information is, roughly, what you do not expect to hear. In this sense, information may be true or false, but is always a small surprise. Resistance to new information measures the degree of Fundamentalism in a culture, a sub-culture, or an individual.

Always reward the bringers of information, whether the news is good or bad: that was one of his basic rules.

Since the mechanical bio-chemical reflexes on this level remain invisible (and cannot even reach translation onto the verbal level except in an altered state of consciousness, such as hypnosis, or under certain drugs), this hard-wired infantile information system controls all later information systems (or selves) without the knowledge of the conscious ego.

The resistance to hearing the women at Greenham Common is not unrelated to the resistance to bizarre information we have been examining. There are economic as well as neurological reasons why Dr. Reich and Dr. Leary went to prison, while Dr. Teller, Father of the Hydrogen Bomb, is a recognized Authority on The Real Universe, rich, honored and praised throughout the Citadel.

UMMO differs from Meier and the other cults in one very significant way. All of the other outer space messages peddled by "contactees" have low-to-zero information content.* They say nothing new. They have all the philosophic, scientific and literary value of Hallmark cards.

In modern mathematics, information content has a precise numerical value, based on the reverse of the probability that you can predict it in advance. Thus, an astrology column has virtually no information, a great poem has high information, and the ravings of an acute schizophrenic have such enormous information that nobody can predict them or make use of them.

The major operative principle seems to be that the human computer operates in such a way as to make signals out of noise and thus to create information out of random energies where there was no signal . . . The information "created" from the noise can be shown by careful analysis to have been in the storage system of the computer . . .

This is precisely the sort of thing that occurs on an LSD trip. The difference is that the noise and newly created information is coming in at the tripper, not just through words on a page, but through each of the senses, including the 17 senses that modern science has discovered in addition to the traditional sight, sound, touch, smell and taste.

The information in a message equals the negative of the probabilities that you can predict what will come next every step of the way. The easier you can predict a message, the less information the message contains.

Norbert Weiner once simplified the meaning of this equation by saying that great poetry contains more information than political speeches. You never know what will come next in a truly creative poem, but in a George Bush speech you not only know what will come next, you probably could predict the whole speech, in general, before he even opens his mouth.

Obviously, the faster we process information, the more rich and complex our models or glosses — our reality-tunnels — will become.

Take this as delightful whimsy or sinister nonsense, file it as you will according to your own reality-tunnel, but — our information bank has grown richer. Dozens of UFO/rabbit stories indicate something about UFOs or something about human psychology, something we never suspected before.

Dr. Jack Sarfatti offers a different interpretation. The medium of the Bell interconnectedness, he says, is not consciousness but information. Now, information is very abstract in communication theory: it is the negative reciprocal of entropy, which means roughly that it is the opposite of disorder. It is almost what we call system or organization in daily speech. Information, Sarfatti proposes, is not bound by the same laws as energy and not subject to Einsteinian limits.

If information processing and transmission is common to both psyche and soma, the mind-body problem might be reformulated as follows: How is information, received and processed at a semantic level, transduced into information that can be received and processed at a somatic level, and vice-versa? That sounds like a question that can be more sensibly addressed than the one it is meant to replace.2

In terms of Information Theory, this appears as a dramatic increase in the amount of information processed per second. The more new circuits opened in the brain, the more new information you notice in even the simplest and most familiar objects or events. To quote Blake, The fool sees not the same tree that the wise man sees.

Besides, I cannot imagine a first-rate artist or scientist who could possibly qualify as Politically Correct, since P.C., like all dogma, creates an information-impoverished environment and art and science always seek information enrichment.

Information, mathematician Norbert Wiener once said, consists of signals that you do not expect. Remember?

In a non-local implicate order, information cannot have a locality, but permeates and/or transcends all localities. And information that has no locality sounds a great deal like the Hindu divinity Brahma, the Chinese concept of Tao, Aldous Huxley's Mind At Large, and the Buddha-Mind of Mahayana Buddhism. Any one of those concepts must mean information without location (if we admit they mean anything at all).

The Buddha-Mind is not 'God'," Buddhists continually explain, and Occidentals blink, unable to understand a religion without God. But Brahma, in Vedic Hinduism, does not have any of the personality, locality, temperament (or gender) of Western gods and, like Buddha-Mind, seems to mean a kind of non-local implicate order, or information without location, if it means anything.

One knows that a god is in the temple when, after contemplating the coherence of the structure, one is seized, violently, by the power and beauty of it, as by a light or flame or an effulgence. This illumination is a discharge of compressed energy and information.

Indeed, Lao-Tse's famous paradox, The largest is within the smallest only begins to make sense to an Occidental after she or he has understood what non-local information means in modern physics.

Time is in-form-ation. Fuller simplifies Einstein into a one-sentence poem: Matter is knots in energy. Matter is interference patterns. All radiations travel in geodesics, due to gravity which curves their trajectories. Where these trajectories cross, interference results: knots in energy, perceived by us as matter. The world of matter is the tuned-in. The not-yet-tuned-in is not not, it is merely not knot. Dig?