An addendum to James Surowiecki’s “Soft in the Middle”

In the New Yorker, James Surowiecki (of the “The Wisdom of Crowds” fame) makes the assertion that life is getting hard for corporations “in the mushy middle”—high, middle and low being demand markets. The high-end market is one where consumers are concerned with and will pay a premium for quality. Conversely, the low-end markets are made up of consumers that are purely cost-conscious. His two principle points are that reaching consumers with a message of quality is getting harder because of the ready availability of information that critiques products, and also that same ubiquity of information is making it easier to be a niche player. Well, he doesn’t make this second point precisely, but it’s floating around in the article. I think that there is an additional reason why this trend is occurring—one that is on the demand side. The middle class is (and has been) getting squeezed.

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Rupert Murdoch is going to take his ball and go home. In a recent interview, he informed all that he intends to eventually block Google and some other search engines from indexing his News Corp. sites and then start charging for content. Apparently, Murdoch has been taking a nap for the last some odd ten years. More ridiculous still, Murdoch seems to have a problem with fair use itself, making claims towards dismantling it. I think it would be a good psychology study to look at what number of billions of dollars actually makes a person completely lose their grasp on reality—it can’t just be one billion. Cory Doctorow’s analysis of the situation is dead on over at BoingBoing along with the best quote I’ve read in weeks:

“So good luck with that, Rupert. have a delightful, Howard-Hughesian dotage, acting out a crazed, Moby-Dick dumbshow against the Internet…”

“World Builder” is a very nicely produced (and touching) short film by Bruce Banit. From the Vimeo page: “A strange man builds a world using holographic tools for the woman he loves.” This is the kind of virtual reality I long for, even if it were just on the Xbox. All the first-person shooter games are great fun, but I wish developers would invest more time in games/open-ended environments like this. I know, of course, that some will point out that Second Life is close, but their rendering engine still doesn’t match what the shooter games manage.¹

Considering the other day’s post, I thought I would post something a little less flame-y and defensive.  My interest in information does actually go further than only making debate against those who have a differing opinion.  I’ve been working on a work to be entitled “This is Information” that I imagine to be a kind of unification of the concepts of information between physics, communication theory, artificial intelligence, psychology, design, and various other disciplines.  There are a lot of varying concepts on the subject of information, which should come as a surprise to no one given we are only still in the dawn of this “third wave” of civilization.  A project that pulls it all together has seemed to me like a good use of time for a while now, so without further ado, I present the introductory section to the chapter on entropy and anentropy:

Consider a simple glass. It is not a complex object in shape. And it is not relatively complex into terms of its materials. To simplify it, we can just say that a glass is made out of sand. But that’s not all that makes a glass. To construct a glass requires energy. It also requires information. The glassmaker must know the temperature to heat the glass to, how to cool it, and numerous other things. The more complex the structure of the glass, the more the glassmaker must know. But the information is not transferred to the glass. The energy it takes to sustain the glassmaker, the energy his motions require, that energy is transferred to the glass. Gradually, if that glass were left on a sandy beach somewhere, natural forces would tear it apart. We call this increase in disorder in the universe entropy. Glasses tend to shatter and not form themselves from nothing. It is as if the natural resting state of the universe is total disorder and randomness and everything is moving in that direction. Everything except the glassmaker, that is.

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I ran into a site the other day, Cosmicfingerprint.com, and as you might guess from the URL itself, it appears to be a defense of the “theory” of intelligent design.¹ At any rate, a gentleman named Perry Marshall on that site makes some interesting arguments on behalf of the idea of intelligent design that he claims prove God’s existence. I was interested in what he had to say, since it appeared to be a novel argument, but unfortunately, it suffers from one very critical flaw: information is not real.

Codes, however, do not occur without a designer. Examples of symbolic codes include music, blueprints, languages like English and Chinese, computer programs, and yes, DNA. The essential distinction is the difference between a pattern and a code. Chaos can produce patterns, but it has never been shown to produce codes or symbols. Codes and symbols store information, which is not a property of matter and energy alone. Information itself is a separate entity on par with matter and energy.
—Perry Marshall

I see where Mr. Marshall is coming from and I think it is an enormous misconception that largely stems from Claude Shannon‘s Information Theory. This semantic problem is so embedded in current scientific language that wikipedia even has it wrong in the very first sentence: “Information theory is a branch of applied mathematics and electrical engineering involving the quantification of information.” I’m working on a much more deep analysis of this, but suffice it to say, in brief here, that information does not exist without cognition. There is data “out there” in the universe, but that statement is vastly different from saying that information is “out there.” Information is the transform of some physical entity like a photon into a perception like color. Data, when contextualized, becomes information. There is no information “out there.” It is simply not a standalone entity on par with matter and energy the way that Mr. Marshall would have us believe. It is a relationship between matter and energy. It is a construct, a configuration, dependent on energy. Mr. Marshall, for all his intelligence, doesn’t seem to recognize that the universe is rapidly moving towards disorder, not order. Hm. Maybe he thinks God is dying.

He goes on (in the mp3 you can download from the page) to say that DNA is information not unlike the code that’s sent around the internet, but this, too, is a mistake. If it were truly information like that on the Internet then we would have a very clear understanding of what DNA does and how it does it. As it stands now, we are only just beginning to explore that realm after having completed the Human Genome project. In fact, the DNA is data, it is a thing that can be perceived, counted and measured, and we are extracting entirely new information from it. Once again, information does not exist outside of cognition. There was no information in DNA before humans worked out what it did. In fact, there’s no information in DNA now; the information is in all our heads. We’re not sure what that structure is, but it is probably some kind of network of potential electrical charges.

Cellular automata can be used to easily show that some patterns are chaotic while some repeat quite reliably. Even numbers repeat, prime numbers seem to pop up without pattern. This does not in any way indicate that one pattern is information while the other one is not. None of these patterns, repeating or otherwise, contain information without context. Until I tell you that 0 means false and 1 means true, then the string 00101010 has no meaning for you, no information. And even if I told you they meant true or false, true of what? A quote from the web site, says, “Information theory shows us why this is so: In communication systems, Random Mutation is exactly the same as noise, and noise always destroys the signal, never enhances it.” As well, in his lecture, he uses music as an example of something that is designed. But listen to generated music and you’ll find that it is music, but it’s not designed at all.

I think this clarification will seem picky at times, but I’ve come to see that it has extraordinary consequences in my own field, cognitive psychology. We humans, have still really not come around to the idea that we exist on a spectrum of cognition. We are really only the latest in a long line of animals (alive and extinct) that have had and do have the ability to perceive, process and predict. There’s nothing magical about that, no need for a deity to explain it. Once a creature has some mode of perception and a few neurons, that creature has developed a powerful adaptation that literally sets it (it’s brain) apart from its environment; things become thinking-things. And that shift doesn’t require a distinction between patterns and design or noise and information. The universe is data. Sometimes we get it, sometimes we don’t. But that never indicates the existence of information “out there” because information is all in your head.