Good lord! I’m being so sarcastic at this point, I can’t even sense what my position on this is from what I just wrote. So, okay, this all really does have the taste of an alternate dimension, whether it’s happening or not. Making sense of it would be essentially impossible for me, so I’m just going to ask one basic questions, after a brief disclaimer.

Disclaimer

I really see nothing wrong with the behavior of former Senator David Vitter or “Stormy” Daniels, the adult entertainer being courted to run for the open senate position. That is to say, I have no problem with women making pornographic movies and men hiring prostitutes. It’s sex and it is ridiculous that we have decided that it’s only proper usage (usage?) is for the purpose of breeding. So, I’m not here to judge anybody’s “moral” positions vis-á-vis sex. It’s the same reason why I keep putting all these words (family values, questionable and moral) in quotes; you really do misunderstand the human psyche when you are assured that you understand a “completely correct” position on matters of morality.²

“Stormy” Daniels, as near as I can tell, is doing what she is doing because it has brought her success, notoriety and probably wealth. Do I think that she’s been kidded into believing that this is a life that will make her happy and bring meaning to her existence? Absolutely. Do I think that she has the right to peruse her own happiness in her own right? You bet. As for former Senator Vitter, the only thing that I can figure he did wrong was that he had to have lied to his wife somewhere along the way. If he didn’t, props to him for having an honest relationship. That he is a hypocrite is just not a problem for me. Our society will do better by itself when we realize that hypocrite and politician are synonymous by necessity. You will do better by a politician who is fighting for you when he or she believes in what they are fighting for, but there just aren’t that many people with integrity in our government. Many of them engage in what is convienient. Get over it. Lying is not great either, but it’s forgivable. She did see fit to forgive him, after all.

No, the irony here is that both of these individuals, on the outs with different segments of society, are on essentially the same side of an issue—that appearances are really all that matters in our culture. Fame is more important than power or wealth. Selling millions of copies of superfluous work is more important than works of care and patience. (Now a world different from what I just described actually was a Sliders episode.) The story of the porn star running for Senate and the story of the Senator’s fall from grace continue represent the blatant illusion (or mass delusion) of conformity and opinion that our media pushes on us as relevant information.³ Meanwhile, the truth, that these stories are both wildly irrelevant, goes unnoticed. There is, of course, the even greater illusion that we are not animals. If we, for a second, insisted on applying our embarrassment about our physical form to the other creatures of nature, the results would be absurd. Not really the point here, although we should try to get over it. Nakedness ain’t that big of a deal.

The Question

My question is how much has this very common presentation of outlier-as-mainstream had an effect on what we believe about the world? During one portion of the multiple interviews with Stormy Daniels, her own director, in a complaint about the difficulty of working with high definition video was that “not everything is as pretty as it should be [emphasis added].” I don’t think I could stress enough what a disturbing comment that should be to you. Put another way, what that comment reveals is that not only is the natural design of our world something to be cherished, it isn’t good enough for commercialism. And what’s really funny is that one of the unsightly problems that the director notes shows up in his high definition pornos is “razor burn” which is itself an attempt to manipulate the human body into something that it is not—namely hairless.

“It’s not as pretty as it’s supposed to be.” I’m sure the maker of this remark did not realize the insidious nature of what he was saying; however, I can’t think of a more insidious comment when you apply to the world of media at large. We have arrogantly termed our age on this Earth as the Information Age and failed, utterly, to notice that it is the Noise Age. It is the age of Bullshit and Noise and most of it is very, very pretty—of course, only because the very definition of pretty went down the drain some time ago. So, just for fun, let’s edit the Wikipedia entry on the Information Age:

“The Information Noise Age, also known commonly as the Computer Bullshit Age or Information Irrelevant Era, is an idea that the current age will be characterised by the ability of individuals to transfer information freely, and limited by the bandwidth of their brains, to have instant access to knowledge have limited access to irrelevant garbage that would have previously have been difficult or impossible to find will not assist them with life at all.”

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.

Archaeologists are quite able to find human tools that are tens of thousands of years old. They are able to identify the tools because of the telltale signs of work that were performed on the stones. But the stones don’t possess information. They retain the structure leftover after forces had done their work. And you can further illustrate this fact by not asking an archaeologist if the stone was made by a human but how the human made the tool. A good scientist will tell you that she can only speculate on that, however. And given the simplicity of the task, she might even likely be right. But the reality is, the information on how any particular stone tool was made, is lost forever when the cybernetic organism that built it finally succumbed to entropy—just like the glass or the tool that it made. And its not just us; spider webs follow the same path along with the spiders that made them.

What is this force, then? Or rather, what is this particular locality of a lack of entropy? In fact, one would have to go so far and say anentropy. It’s not really a word, don’t look it up in the dictionary, but I’ve seen it tossed around and I think its fair to refer to life as an anentropic arrangement of the universe. Life seems to do little else in common other than replicate itself in a defense against entropy. If the individual organism cannot be sustained, then parts of it can be used to make new life. And so far as we know, it is an extraordinarily fleeting arrangement of matter and energy. Consider the vast stretches of nothing between galaxies and between stars. Consider the relative densities of stars versus galaxies (stars are much more dense). Consider the acres and acres and acres of barren rock and gas on all the other planets accept for our own. And even on our own, the biosphere, is nothing but a fragile and thin skin on the surface of a massive iron and dirt orb filled with magma. Places in the universe where entropy is decreasing are very hard to come by—even if there are more worlds out there like our own—we are vastly outweighed by a Universe that would prefer to scatter our atoms evenly across the Cosmos.”

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.