On 9/6/2012 1:39 PM, Craig Weinberg wrote:
(reposting from my blog <http://s33light.org/post/31001294447>)
If I’m right, then the slogan “information wants to be free” is not
just an intuition about social policy, but rather an insight into the
ontological roots of information itself. To be more precise, it isn’t
that information wants to be free, it is that it can’t want to be
anything, and that ownership itself is predicated on want and
familiarity. Information, by contrast, is the exact opposite of want
and familiarity, it is the empty and generic syntax of strangers
talking to strangers about anything.
I propose that information or data is inherently public such that it
lacks the possibility of privacy. Information cannot be secret, it can
only be kept a secret through voluntary participation in
extra-informational social contracts. It is only the access to
information that we can control - the i/o, we cannot become
information or live /in/ information or as information.*
Information spreads only as controlled changes in matter, not
independently in space or non-space vacuum. Information is how stuff
seems to other stuff. Computation exploits the universality of how
many kinds of stuff make sense in the same basic ways. It is to make
modular or ‘digital’ collections of objectified changes which can be
inscribed on any sufficiently controllable substance. Not live
hamsters or fog. They make terrible computers.
To copyright information or to encrypt it is to discourage
unauthorized control of information access. This underscores the fact
that information control supervenes on (requires) capacities of
perception and intent rather than the capacities of information
itself. We have to be shamed or frightened or tempted into agreeing to
treat information as proprietary on behalf of the proprietor’s
interests.*We can’t train information not to talk to strangers*.
The data itself doesn’t care if you publish it to the world or take
credit for writing Shakespeare’s entire catalog. This is not merely a
strange property of information, this is the defining property of
information in direct contradistinction to both experience and matter.
I maintain however, that this doesn’t indicate that information is a
neutral monism (singular ground of being from which matter, energy,
and awareness emerge), but rather it is the neutral nihilism - the
shadow, if you will, of sensorimotive participation divisible by
spacetime. It’s a protocol that bridges the gaps between participants
(selves, monads, agents, experiences), but it is not itself a
participant. This is important because if we don’t understand this
(and we are nowhere near understanding this yet), then we will proceed
to exterminate our quality of life to a hybrid of Frankenstein
neuro-materialism and HAL cyberfunction-idealism.
To understand why information is really not consciousness but the
evacuated forms of consciousness, consider that matter is proprietary
relative to the body and experience is proprietary relative to the
self, but information is proprietary to nothing. Information, if it
did exist, would be nothing but the essence of a-proprietary
manifestation. It has no dimension of subjectivity (privacy,
ownership, selfhood) at all. It is qualitatively flat. Information as
a word is a mis-attribution of what is actually, ontologically,
“formations to be interpreted” as code, to be unpacked, reconstituted,
and reconstituted as a private experience.
*Who and what we are is sensorimotive matter (or materialized
participation if you prefer…there are a lot of fancy ways to describe
it: Meta-juxtaposing afferent-efferent phenomenal realism, or private
algebraic/public-geometric phenomenal realism, orthogonally involuted
experiential syzygy, etc.)
--
Dear Craig,
Could it be that what you are considering is a novel way of
thinking of the "principle of least action" for information exchange? If
we define information as "a difference between two that makes a
difference to a third" and add your considerations, what we are
considering is something like minimizing theCoaseCost
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transaction_cost> of exchanging
information or, in combinatorial topology terms: minimizing the length
of the path of transformation between a state of mind that can be
consistently represented as a false version of the information and a
true version of the information.
It is important to note that in the topological picture there will
be the equivalent of "some people ya just can't reach...". Only on
simply connected manifolds of genus zero (or isomorphs) does this not
occur. Anyone see why? Hint: some paths cannot be smoothly connected to
others.
--
Onward!
Stephen
http://webpages.charter.net/stephenk1/Outlaw/Outlaw.html
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