The Information - James Gleick [201]
He knew there would be resistance. He could hardly deny that messages can have meaning, “that is, they refer to or are correlated according to some system with certain physical or conceptual entities.” (Presumably a “system with certain physical or conceptual entities” would be the world and its inhabitants, the kingdom and the power and the glory, amen.) For some, this was just too cold. There was Heinz von Foerster at one of the early cybernetics conferences, complaining that information theory was merely about “beep beeps,” saying that only when understanding begins, in the human brain, “then information is born—it’s not in the beeps.”♦ Others dreamed of extending information theory with a semantic counterpart. Meaning, as ever, remained hard to pin down. “I know an uncouth region,” wrote Borges of the Library of Babel, “whose librarians repudiate the vain and superstitious custom of finding a meaning in books and equate it with that of finding a meaning in dreams or in the chaotic lines of one’s palm.”♦
Epistemologists cared about knowledge, not beeps and signals. No one would have bothered to make a philosophy of dots and dashes or puffs of smoke or electrical impulses. It takes a human—or, let’s say, a “cognitive agent”—to take a signal and turn it into information. “Beauty is in the eye of the beholder, and information is in the head of the receiver,”♦ says Fred Dretske. At any rate that is a common view, in epistemology—that “we invest stimuli with meaning, and apart from such investment, they are informationally barren.” But Dretske argues that distinguishing information and meaning can set a philosopher free. The engineers have provided an opportunity and a challenge: to understand how meaning can evolve; how life, handling and coding information, progresses to interpretation, belief, and knowledge.
Still, who could love a theory that gives false statements as much value as true statements (at least, in terms of quantity of information)? It was mechanistic. It was desiccated. A pessimist, looking backward, might call it a harbinger of a soulless Internet at its worst. “The more we ‘communicate’ the way we do, the more we create a hellish world,” wrote the Parisian philosopher—also a historian of cybernetics—Jean-Pierre Dupuy.
I take “hell” in its theological sense, i.e., a place which is void of grace—the undeserved, unnecessary, surprising, unforeseen. A paradox is at work here: ours is a world about which we pretend to have more and more information but which seems to us increasingly devoid of meaning.♦
That hellish world, devoid of grace—has it arrived? A world of information glut and gluttony; of bent mirrors and counterfeit texts; scurrilous blogs, anonymous bigotry, banal messaging. Incessant chatter. The false driving out the true.
That is not the world I see.
It was once thought that a perfect language should have an exact one-to-one correspondence between words and their meanings. There should be no ambiguity, no vagueness, no confusion. Our earthly Babel is a falling off from the lost speech of Eden: a catastrophe and a punishment. “I imagine,” writes the novelist Dexter Palmer, “that the entries of the dictionary that lies on the desk in God’s study must have one-to-one correspondences between the words and their definitions, so that when God sends directives to his angels, they are completely free from ambiguity. Each sentence that He speaks or writes must be perfect, and therefore a miracle.”♦ We know better now. With or without God, there is no perfect language.
Leibniz thought that if natural language could not be perfect, at least the calculus could: a language of symbols rigorously assigned. “All human thoughts might be entirely resolvable into a small number of thoughts considered as primitive.”♦ These could then be combined and dissected mechanically, as it were. “Once this had been done, whoever uses such characters would either never make an error, or, at least, would have the possibility of immediately recognizing his mistakes, by using the simplest of tests.” Gödel ended that