Information is separate from meaning in the sense that, as you step back to gain a broader perspective, or look much closer, to isolate factors to a particular scale of consideration, you turn known things into new objects collections that have no new, desired linkages, with which to make new propositions of cause, and effect with. The information is what you can collect concerning these new black boxes, in whatever metrics that are available to you, as it all relates to each other in an unavoidably arbitrary frame of reference; typically an operating situation of some complex form, that you have been closely associated with over time . The meaning is then whatever new relationships you can discern, with as many of the new, meaningful connections, between your known objects, that you can describe, that would make this new relationship hold together.
Once meaning is described, however, does how its stored matter? And I hasten to add that I mean this question in a sense beyond just the practical considerations that guys like Harold Innis described in the "Bias of Communication" (you know, where whether its a clay tablet, or a scroll, might change whether your society was spread out over time better, or physical space better). And in this sense I am wondering if one form contains a spirit that the other cannot.
Uh Oh. I've done it now. Talking about the spirit of a thing.
Of course, on the one hand a would be philosopher ought to be able to have some slack cut if he were of a mind to at least broach the subject every now and again. On the other hand, though, if a philosopher who also claims to be Mr. Process guy, how does spirit fit in? And remember also that, if your cosmology also allows that meaning processors are fundamental in the expression of energy, why wouldn't their utilization of instrumentality not have lasting, entangling, effects.
In point of fact here I am trying to make clear in my mind whether a book can have a spiritual mysticism that an electrical switching system, simply rearranging numbers to represent descriptive content, does not. Which is not necessarily to say that the electronic machine itself, as a whole, would not have spirit; assuming people worked on it to make it come into being; with hands, and meaningful intent by an actual meaning processor.
I know, it's a thin margin of difference to say that a book's content has one bit of spirit, and that the book itself also has some, to the degree that people actually worked to make it happen. If other machines made it, though, what then?
Am I just talking about the number of angels that can dance on the head of a pin here, in any case?
Or is it simply a matter of the combination of both belief, and meaning, that makes things be whatever enough of us describe; with whatever degree of meaning we can muster, as well as the degree of belief?
Will AI ever be able to master both meaning and belief? Any more than intuition or imagination? Will AI ever be able to take a leap of faith? Will AI ever be able to understand balance as I have described it in my philosophy? Understand the metaphorical overlays of what I am talking about when I say we must live the tension, of working the negotiations and compromises, that must form the balance between Father Fortress, and Mother Earth? Or, expressed more basically, the compromises between the fundamentals of Mind, and the Elemental Embrace?
I am just asking questions here. I am always just asking questions. I can't help it. It's a necessary part of trying to create a philosophy that appeals to a questioning mind. It is also just a part of the curse of not only living in "Interesting Times," but also of having been so naive as to what the consequences of being so curious about everything would entail; so naive as to how it would leave me to deal with so much; at least as that curiosity has come up against commercialized life as we now know it.
I believe in spirit and magic because I have experienced them directly. Early on especially. I have had, for instance, books speak to me without words, from a bookshelf. Most usually from a used book store shelf. And in point of fact, back when I was selling blood for books in the mid seventies, I would get a feeling from a book, the title of which might, or might not, have anything in them to suggest their applicability, but for which the feeling would say: you must read this. And in almost every case it was precisely so. To an amazingly important degree, in fact, as to critical aspects of things that would help me understand the concepts that I have come to rely on to get me to this point; for both an analysis of Capitalism, and a suitable alternative; not to mention a philosophy to with which to provide a proper foundation for change.
So are we then confronted with effect without material causality? And to that I would answer that just because we are not aware of how a mechanism works doesn't mean it has to work by magic, or not at all. It is just that certain parts take place in contexts that have to be implied because the cosmos is just complicated that way. Way more so, in fact, than we will ever be able to fully comprehend. And we won't be able to do that because there will always be limits to what we can objectify in the first place, from our primary scale of existential consideration, let alone with any objective precision in scales outside our primary. Which is why, in the end, even scientists will have to take some things on faith eventually.
Bottom line? Do not ever think that old books are an anachronism because they simply are not. Just like a house, that people have lived, and died, in, is more than just a building. The entanglements just go on and on and on. And as long as small inputs can have large effects, in very complex systems, you just better believe that spirit, and magic, are real. You will live longer, and more rewardingly, if you do.
See Also:
[Post Note: I know I've posted this link before, but I just couldn't resist posting it again here. J.V.]
You thought quantum mechanics was weird: check out entangled time
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