On 07 Sep 2012, at 13:49, Roger Clough wrote:
Hi Craig Weinberg
Although I don't follow Dawking's views on life and God,
I think his idea of "semes", which are like genes but ideas instead,
is a very good one. If the logic follows through, then
man is the semes' way of propagating itself through society.
semes? is it not the memes?
Bruno
Roger Clough, [email protected]
9/7/2012
Leibniz would say, "If there's no God, we'd have to invent him
so that everything could function."
----- Receiving the following content -----
From: Craig Weinberg
Receiver: everything-list
Time: 2012-09-06, 13:39:10
Subject: The Unprivacy of Information
(reposting from my blog)
If I抦 right, then the slogan 搃nformation 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抰 that information wants to be free, it is that it
can抰 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 慸igital� 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抯
interests.We can抰 train information not to talk to strangers.
The data itself doesn抰 care if you publish it to the world or take
credit for writing Shakespeare抯 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抰 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抯 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抰
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, 揻ormations 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卼here 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.)
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