Ed Weick wrote:
A recent Scientific American (Special Addition, Feb 20, 2006) contains
an article by physicist by Jacob Bekenstein entitled "Information in
the Holographic Universe". The article begins with:
Ask anybody what the physical world is made of, and you are likely
to be told "matter and energy." Yet if we have learned anything
from engineering, biology and physics, information is just as
crucial an ingredient. The robot at the automobile factory is
supplied with metal and plastic but can make nothing useful
without copious instructions telling it which part to weld to what
and so on. A ribosome in a cell in your body is supplied with
amino acid building blocks and is powered by energy released by
the conversion of ATP to ADP, but it can synthesize no proteins
without the information brought to it from the DNA in the cell’s
nucleus. Likewise, a century of developments in physics has taught
us that information is a crucial player in physical systems and
processes. Indeed, a current trend, initiated by John A. Wheeler
of Princeton University, is to regard the physical world as made
of information, with energy and matter as incidentals.
I find this line of argument compelling. But it does raise the
question of where the information that has shaped the universe and
ourselves came from. It was there in the big bang, I suppose. I'm not
arguing intelligent design, but I do wonder how it got there.
Information, so far, is only a part-aspect of the living event of a
person entertaining (or at least
being beset by...) that information. As Husserl stressed, Descartes'
"cogito ergo sum" was
a kind of distraction: it is always the cast that: Cogito cogitationes,
i.e., I think *something*, and
directly relevant here, what is that something? *information*. Show me
information without
its being part of some person being [mis]informed.
The universe as a whole is only one side of the living event of human
experience. I [you, he,
she, other...] experience the universe. Go try to find an unexperienced
universe, i.e.,
try to experience not experiencing.
This bears repeating, because people almost never seem to "get it", even
people with PhDs.
And it has something to do with work: Work is always the living
experience of an experiencing
person, even though it can *also* be the object of F.W. Taylor's, Dennis
Kosloswki's or anybody
else's living experience. Machines do not work, although they obviously
can accomplish
transformations of energy and material that persons fined useful [or
find oppressive].
There is no such thing as information, except as an
abstraction (like there are stock market trends, etc.).
There are informed persons [an informed person is the living whole
of information contents and their attitudes toward/deployments of... said
contents]. There are misinformed
persons. And, of course, there are also informers and those informed on.
\brad mccormick
Ed
----- Original Message -----
*From:* Karen Watters Cole <mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
*To:* [email protected]
<mailto:[email protected]>
*Sent:* Thursday, April 27, 2006 2:17 PM
*Subject:* [Futurework] JKG: Smith vs Darwin and The Predator State
Two by James K. Galbraith, first from Winter 2005, the second from
the current issue of Mother Jones.
*Smith vs Darwin: *Like Intelligent Design, the idea of the
Invisible Hand stubbornly persists in the face of overwhelming
evidence.
In each generation since Veblen, some economists have fought for
evolutionary ideas, but the ID types keep coming back. Today their
most lethal champions call themselves the "School of Law and
Economics." This group holds that markets are self-policing, that
fraud is really impossible except where publicly provided
insurance creates "moral hazard." Get rid of regulations, they
believe, and we won't much need the SEC, the FTC, and the Justice
Department to protect us from Enron, Tyco, and WorldCom. Now that
John Roberts has taken over at the Supreme Court, we'll see how
this touching faith works out.
Modern economics resembles religion in other, more prosaic ways.
The American Economic Association (AEA) runs like a priesthood;
its flagship /Review/ is as unreadable as a Dead Sea Scroll. And
when heretics gather in the Association for Evolutionary Economics
and elsewhere, Inquisitors keep after them. (At the annual
academic meetings, the AEA sends seat counters to the heretical
sessions, looking for groups small enough to cut from its rolls.)
To borrow an old line from Robert Kuttner, the evolutionists are
"a tiny and despised sect that stubbornly refuses to disappear."
Yet we're a threat. For Darwin cannot be erased; his material,
randomized, godless view of change informs every aspect of the way
real scientists investigate physical, biological, and social
problems, from cosmology to the study of political or
technological change. The new mathematics of chaos and complexity
are evolutionary, for they study how simple determinate processes
can give rise to lifelike diversity. These techniques yield many
new insights into the origins of pattern and structure. (For a fun
example, download John Conway's "Game of Life" and have a look at
what it can do.) One day, they may break through even in
economics, and Veblen's long-delayed evolutionary revolution will
be complete.
http://www.motherjones.com/commentary/columns/2005/12/smith_darwin.html
*The Predator State: *Enron, Tyco, WorldCom... and the U.S.
government?
http://www.motherjones.com/commentary/columns/2006/05/predator_state.html
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--
Let your light so shine before men,
that they may see your good works.... (Matt 5:16)
Prove all things; hold fast that which is good. (1 Thes 5:21)
<![%THINK;[SGML+APL]]> Brad McCormick, Ed.D. / [EMAIL PROTECTED]
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