Newness involves the transition from absence to presence: an absent belief to a present belief, an absent species to a present species, an absent object to a present object, an absent activity to a present activity, and so forth. But not everything that involves transition from absence to presence is new. Memory, for instance, is characterized by the sequence
[absence presence absence presence…] where the presence is a particular memory that may be called forth by an act of recollection, but is later absent as not all present memories persist as part of the attentional field.
Subsequent recollection may bring forth the memory as present once again. The memory is not new, at least not upon a typical understanding of memory, although each recollection, each transition from absence to presence is new like each photocopy is a new copy. The newness does not derive from the numerical repetition of transition but from the transition itself. Each transition from absence to presence, whether the first or the fifth, partakes of newness. Memory requires this newness but is not fully new in that the presence of a memory is always familiar.
Not everything that transitions from absent to present is immediately familiar. The newly discovered species makes this transition as immediately unfamiliar. The new style of painting and new sound in music arrive unfamiliar. Again, aspects of these unfamiliar new arrivals may be quite familiar, but when we attempt to recognize them as wholes, we find that we cannot do so. We may try to measure the degree of newness of an object through its familiar parts, but such objective measures of newness are always ad hoc. An object may be quite alien even when composed of mundane parts, and a part-wise decomposition into familiar objects may tell us little about the object as a whole. One may always attempt to do so, and at times there will be value in the effort, but taking decomposition as the one true methodology to discover truth will surely lead one to miss the truth of the object.
We are now seeing newness as the becoming of unfamiliar presence, or the transition from absence to unfamiliar presence. Newness is a transient—of all features of newness we should have noted this one from the onset. New information is not new for long. It is in fact new only so long as you can newly communicate it to someone else? Of course one could argue that newness lasts forever, or that each moment is new, although our purpose here is not to challenge those assertions. We are 79
concerned with the transitional aspect of newness relative to absence and presence.
To understand newness we require a more elaborate understanding of absence. There are multiple ways in which something may be absent, and we can approach these by reconsidering our celebrity engagement example. The belief about celebrity engagement must be absent at the time of being newly informed that celebrity X got engaged to celebrity Y. How do we know this belief was absent? We all know that it is impossible to empirically prove that something does not exist, although one can judge that something is not present or absent within a determinate space. We do not do this by directly recognizing an absent object, for it is impossible to recognize something that is not there; but rather, we recognize that an entire space is already filled with other objects. We reason that, since the space is completely occupied with objects, and the object we were ‘listening’ for is not among those recognized objects, then the listened for object is absent. We need not always investigate the entire space to determine absence; if the absent object can only be present in a particular place, then it is enough to look at that place and to see what is there. If we recognize some other object in that place, then we may claim that the looked-for object is absent.
It is of course possible to ask more restrictive questions about absence, and to restrict our search to a particular place at the onset even though the object may be present at other places. We might ask if object X is present at place P, and if we recognize some other object at place P, an object that is not X, then we can say that X is absent at P. We acknowledge that it will be difficult to accept this logic if one upholds the possibility of directly recognizing an ‘empty’ place. Pragmatically, empty implies a place that does not contain the thing I was seeking to find, where my method of seeking determines the sense in which the place may be empty. If I am seeking with my eyes, then a place may be visually empty. If I am seeking with my hands, then a place may be tactilely empty. If I am seeking with a voltmeter, then a place may be electrically empty. But visual emptiness does not imply I see nothing, tactile emptiness does not imply I feel nothing, and a voltmeter reading of zero does not imply I measure nothing. A measurement of zero is a just and true measurement of something, but a measurement of nothing is akin to not measuring at all. Direct recognition of absence only makes sense when we conflate recognition of an equilibrium or baseline situation—darkness, silence, … —with the direct apprehension of 80
nothingness, but the latter is beyond our grasp. The person born deaf does not hear silence; she does not hear at all.
While it is impossible to recognize emptiness as nothingness, since nothingness has no properties to be recognized, and that in general it is impossible to directly recognize an absent object, it remains that we can directly recognize an absence of change. We need not recognize something else as occupying the place of change in order to recognize that change is absent, that is, except for the continued presence of the same. But recognizing the continued presence of the same seems far more difficult than recognizing an absence of change, and I suspect I have missed something here.
Returning to our focus on the place of absence, it appears that the more we confine the possible place of an absent object, the less new that object may be when present. In the limit, when we determine a place so tightly that one and only one particular object may occupy that place—and here we are imagining confines that limit form as well as substance and dynamics—then the object that fits into that place must necessarily be present, or more weakly, we necessarily recognize that place as being occupied by the object. This follows from the impossibil-ity of directly recognizing an object as absent—if we look at this determinate place, we must recognize it as occupied with something. If we additionally claim that one and only one thing may occupy that place, then we must recognize it as filled with that object. In this limit, it is difficult for the object to be new since the place of the object is essentially the object itself. Let us call this extreme confined newness.
If we take the limit in the other direction, where the object has no particular place, or when aspects of the object are spread across place without clear barriers or rigid confines, then the object will be more new. The presences of objects that bring intense newness of this type are often destructive. These objects, lacking determinate places, displace other objects and erode barriers. Newness of this sort is opposed but also welcomed. It is often avoided, ridiculed, and worshipped. This newness corresponds roughly to what we previously called indescribable newness. In the extreme it cannot be recognized as such at all, even when present. Let us call this extreme invasive newness.
Our celebrity engagement example lies closer to confined newness, where the place of the new object is well-circumscribed. When we are newly informed that celebrity X got engaged to celebrity Y, the place of that new belief presumably lies close to the place of our desires and thoughts about the same. Even if we never considered these two 81
celebrities together before, there is likely a fairly-well characterized place where beliefs like these may form, a place associated with the idea of celebrity marriage in general. Informative propositions like these are not particular new, they are the most easily produced information, they are transiently fulfilling and do not tend to disrupt the individual in any important way, and people tend to be eager to receive these propositions.
Questions develop. Do the belief and the place of the belief form together, or did the place of the belief exist prior to the belief? And, if the place existed prior, then what occupied that place prior to the formation of the belief? If the place is formed in real-time with the belief, then does the place only fit the particular belief and nothing else, or can it contain other things? Most of these questions will be difficult to approach and will remain unanswered. We do notice that confined information is at least transiently fulfilling, which suggests that the place of this information exists prior to receiving the information, but that the place was not as ‘tightly’ filled prior to the information. A cavity may be filled with air, but that air is easily displaced by other objects, such as cement.
When the cavity is filled with cement and the cement hardens, it becomes difficult to displace that cement with something else. In this sense, the cavity is more tightly bound by cement than by air. Newly informative confined beliefs are similar to a cementing food, except that once beliefs are formed or consumed; a similar belief cannot serve as sustenance again, and the fulfilling effects of the new information quickly decay. Beliefs cannot be replicated within an individual because once the place of a belief is occupied there is no other place for a copy of the belief to be. This does not, however, explain anything about the place of a belief prior to the occupancy by that belief, although we assume that the place was occupied by something or that a specific place simply did not exist at all. Using the language of the previous chapter, the place of a new belief is comparable to the receptivity of the self-object for a particular source.
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2.2 Sources of information
People can be sources of information.
Communication between people is not about exchanging information or understanding the information arising from each person, but about mutually understanding each source of information.
Information is always information about its source, and may or may not be information about something else as well.
Today we focus attention upon the content of information, whatever that is, and pay less attention to the source of information. When we do focus upon the source of information, we often take this to mean the person who produced the words or texts or objects that constitute the information. But knowing the source of production is not the same as knowing the source itself. To know ‘the information arose from him’
says nothing about the source other than the fact that the words were produced by that person.
Most problems in epistemology today arise from confusing the location of the production of words or sensations with the knowledge of the source itself.
Sources do not produce information, even though I have suggested otherwise.
Knowledge of the source itself makes the information from the source less relevant.
The person who speaks information is not necessarily the source of this information, even if that person was the first to speak this information.
All information potentially explains its source independent of the truth of that information.
When information is directed at its source of production, we need not ask if the information is true or false. We ought to ask, ‘why does this source of production talk about itself and say such things?’
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We complain that we no longer know what to believe. For every position there is another that contradicts it. It helps to know that every position is information about a source, but not necessarily information about the supposed content of that information. The content of information is an act of recognition while the source of information is its source.
The source of information is not the location of the production of words.
It is not the person who speaks that information, although people can be sources. It is not the material object in geometric space that causes someone to write those words. It is not God.
We may trace the origin of words to a mechanical device, such as a loudspeaker. The words begin at the speaker, but this does not imply that the speaker is a source of information associated with those words. We may further trace the words from the loudspeaker to a person who speaks those words. The mouth, tongue, lungs, oral cavity, vocal cords, etc. are similarly a loudspeaker. Again, although the words begin at the mouth speaker, this does not imply that the mouth speaker is the source of information associated with those words. We may trace those words to other mouth speakers, to brains, to other objects and sensations in the world, to socio-cultural institutions, and to the origin of the universe; yet at no point have we definitively indentified the source of information.
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2.3 Bits of substance
Communication is often reduced to the idea of information transfer, where transfer is the movement of information (or materially encoded information) from one place to another. The originating place is called the source of information, although it is only a source in the sense that a material pattern is thought to emanate from a particular object or place.
An everyday understanding of information suggests that acquiring information is akin to forming a new belief, where newness plays the primary role in grounding this sense of information, and belief functions mostly to explain the place of this newness. We have glossed over an understanding of belief, and have only hinted at the formative and spatial aspects of belief.
In contrast, when communication is taken to be bi-directional directedness, it is not clear that the newness we analyzed in the previous chapter plays a substantial role. Our idea of communication relies more upon understanding, and although there is something new in gaining understanding, it does not appear that this newness is of the confined or invasive sort. Consider, for instance, the process of understanding the fundamental theorem of calculus, or any sort of mathematical object in general. At first blush the fundamental theorem of calculus, when presented in words, barely evokes any sense of meaning in those of us who do not already know it. The symbols of the theorem are foreign, and there is a sense that the theorem is unfamiliar. As we begin to explore functions, perhaps visually at first, and begin to manipulate symbols and practice taking limits, and then try to solve model problems, we begin to understand the theorem. This understanding does not hit us as a transient jolt of newness—like hearing who won a presidential election—nor does it disrupt our entire worldview or create a spiritual revelation. I do not deny that one may experience a moment when the theorem suddenly ‘makes sense,’ but that is not the same thing as acquiring new information. The making-sense typically comes long after we are presented with the definition of a mathematical theorem, and the understanding of the theorem continues to nourish long after we have heard the news. Confined newness is immediate and wears off quickly; invasive newness is disruptive. New understanding broadens, and although it may replace other understanding, it typically leaves one’s appreciation of old understanding intact.
People can consume an almost never-ending sequence of information with little effort. It is enough to passively watch the news on TV
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and to listen to the sequence of new stories. You do not necessarily memorize every piece of information for long, but in the moment, you recognize each piece of news as new and grasp the meaning of this information. Grasping meaning does not, however, imply that you understand what is being said. Understanding implies that you are acquainted with the source of information, and by source we do not mean the person who is speaking the words; we mean roughly an explanation for the presence of those words. But explanations abound. One explanation is that the newscaster read a teleprompter that contained those words. But why did he read them? Why were they present on the teleprompter at that time and not some other words? Because the news team commissioned stories that reflect those words? Why did they commission what they did? Because they thought the general population would be drawn to that topic or theme? Why did they think that? Did you the watcher show a preference for those types of stories in the past?
There is a comparison to material objects. We passively consume an unending sequence of perceptual information. Simply in turning my head I take in new visual information. It takes no effort to take in this information, although like the news, I do not necessarily remember it at a later time. Perceiving visual images does not, however, imply that I understand what I am seeing. In looking at my rug, I see abstract images of trees and plants, but a material understanding of the rug will appeal to the individual fibers, knotted together that make up the rug; and the chemical composition of the dyes that color the fibers, and the molecular structure of the synthetic fibers, and the atoms of those fibers. We may also enquire about the reason for this particular style of rug, why it was chosen among others, who made it, what permitted the artistry to create rugs and the machines to produce them in mass quantities. The questioning is unfortunately endless, and grows with our understanding of what we see.
The information that we receive on the news is similar to visual perceptions in the world. Both are acquired in large amounts and without effort. Both are meaningful. Both are thought to reflect the world. Both are informative so long as you recognize them as unfamiliar. Neither of them is understood until you take the effort to do so, although we attempt to understand informative news and visual perceptions differently.
Once we perceive a piece of fruit to be an apple, we may further examine the apple itself to understand it better. We may cut the apple apart and take note of its form. We may look at it under a magnifying 86
lens, dye it with ink, cook it, analyze its molecular structure, determine the genetic sequence of its cells, and so forth. We may also enquire about the tree it came from, study the tree and its habitat, trace the evolutionary history of this tree and its related ancestors, and compare it to other trees. We may want to know how the apple arrived in front of us—what was its path from flower bud to our table. All of these questions may be relevant with regard to understanding the apple that we see.
When presented with information on the news, how do we attempt to understand this news further? Our questioning, if we question at all, usually begins and ends with questions of truth. Is this news true? We could of course ask a similar question about the perceived apple—is the apple we see ‘really’ there; is it a true apple or is it an illusion or dream.
Often we do not ask this question about perceptions, and it was considered a philosophical leap when Descartes seriously considered it.
With regard to the news, however, this question is banal. Questioning the truth of propositions is an everyday act that could not be philosophically less interesting. But we have also seen that perceptions and the news are quite similar—is not the news a particular collection of perceptions anyway?
We question the truth of the news but we question the Aristotelian causes of material objects. Perhaps the modern-day notion of information and the news is best understood as those things that we do not seek to explain further. Information—at least in our present attitude towards it—does not require a causal explanation. Information is explanatorily self-contained; it provides a thorough explanation about itself, so much so that an investigation about causes is irrelevant. We need only ask if the information is true. If it is true than our explanatory work is done; if it is false then we throw it in the trash. Compare this to the apple. Even if the apple is real, then we still can seek causal explanations of the apple.
I do not see why information should be let off the hook so easily.
Although information may be non-material, that does not imply that we should not investigate the causes—all of them—of informative propositions. Perhaps, even, the truth or falsehood of informative propositions is not as important as the cause of whatever proposition is written. Just as a hallucinatory or illusory apple may be causally investigated for what it is, we may investigate a proposition independent of its truth.
Information has, however, deceived us into believing that no such investigation is necessary or even applies to information. Information, once possessed, is thought to be self-contained and atomic; atomic in the sense that we believe we can build up a world of knowledge based upon 87
informative propositions, just as we believe we can build up a material world from self-sustaining atoms that require nothing outside for support. The assumed self-sustaining nature of information and atoms may explain the odd proclivity of many materialists to embrace or turn-to an informational ontology. These neo-materialists wish to strip the propositional nature of information away in an attempt to transform information into bits—literally. But unlike the useful Democritean theory of atoms in the void, informational bits lack motion and antitputia. Information is stagnant. It lacks directedness.
Once we transform information into ontological bits of substance, we open information up to the full range of Aristotelian causes and the Platonic world of appearances. No longer do we only ask if bits of information are true—we can ask if the bits really exist and if bits can present as illusory. But it would seem that bits are in some way beyond causal explanations. Bits have no material causes, at least not a necessary material cause because any material can give rise to the form of the bit. The formal cause of a bit is specified a priori and requires no investigation. A bit is its form.
Bits appeal to us ontologically as a way of atomizing the Platonic forms. No longer need we imagine a complicated observable world of objects participating in a heavenly realm of perfect forms; now we need only imagine the one true form: the bit. All other forms can be reduced to the form of the bit. At this point we approach an age beyond mechanistic science, and we can see the fullness of the transition by considering the difficulties in breaching the connection between mind and mechanism. We are still attempting to understand—if it even makes sense to ask—how atomic particles can come together to produce our experience of a meaningful, value-ridden, ambiguous, continuous, and uncertain world. If we go forth and embrace an informational ontology, the next gap, the next hard-problem will be to explain how bits come together to account for the matter and motion of a mechanistic world. How does the primal form, the bit, give rise to movement? There is no source of change or directedness in the bit, and we must surely augment our ontology if we are to use bits to explain the world. The Parmenidian solution to this dilemma is to contrast the world of appearances—in which things appear to change—to the true way of the world which is static and un-changing. There is the real world of bits, the apparent world of matter in motion, and the apparent world of appearances. Motion and matter and mind are illusory and only bits are real. As I have argued in Falsehood, appeals to illusion cannot be understood outside of our theoretical 88
expectations and history of transitioning judgments. Only illusion is objectively illusionary in that illusion has deceived us into believing that it (illusion) is an objective property of a situation. Of course illusion will no longer be illusionary once you see this—taking us back to illusion being dependent upon our history of transitioning judgments and theoretical expectations.
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2.4 Computation as simulated directedness We start with mass, energy, space and time. To these we add fundamental interactions, or forces. Interactions hold the world of mass and energy together; they give shape and form to the world. Particles influence each other through fundamental interactions—this is a type of communication, is it not? Fundamental interaction is physical communication between particles. In fact, particles do not communicate in any other way. When we take people to be aggregates of particles in a physicalist sense, then the only type of true communication between people can be particle interactions through the fundamental forces. A physicalist should not believe that brains make possible a type of linguistic communication where people interact with other people. People do not interact. Particles interact.
But we talk as thought computers and animals and people communicate all the time. On the digital computer model, one computer or process originates binary patterns that represent pieces of information that are transferred to another computer or process. The recipient computer has a place—in code, hardware, or memory—to receive external binary patterns, where these binary patterns may continue a cascade of processes that are ultimately useful to computer users. The transferred binary patterns have two general purposes: to replicate the binary patterns within another computer or process, and to act as commands that initiate other processes. One can further interpret replication of a binary pattern as the execution of a particular command (make a copy of this in you).
Communication, on the computer model, is all about executing commands.
Human communication of course involves making command statements, but not everything I say is intended as a command for you to ex-ecute. The cognitivist, the one who interprets thought as computation, may argue that execution of commands is all we do. When you speak a word, a sound enters the ears and is transformed into a train of electrical action potentials that sets off brain processes that terminate as the meaning or perception of the word spoken. There is no choice in the matter.
The brain responds how it must, according to its computational architecture. Physical properties act as inputs to the brain system; they are essentially instructional commands in the language of the brain. Just as a particular binary pattern in a particular channel will initiate a computational process on a computer, a particular physical property through a sense organ initiates processes that give rise to perception and meaning.
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Computers and brains are both command executing machines.
Those commands may come from external sources, in which case we call command execution communication, or from internal origins, in which we interpret commands as reflecting the operating system or computational architecture of the device. While exchanging commands explains what it means for computers to communicate—for they were designed in this manner—it is a metaphysical leap to presume that human communication involves only exchanging commands. More, particle interaction, which we take to be a fundamental type of communication between material objects, has nothing to do with exchanging commands. Against the command-view of communication and against communication as the exchange of meaning, I have suggested that the logical aspect of human communication at least involves giving reasons for the token presence of the elements of communication, and reasons for those reasons. For human beings these elements are perhaps sentences and sensations; for computers they are most often binary strings.
We can argue if computer algorithms will one day be able to produce ontological reasons for the presence of all binary strings, and reasons for the reasons produced by the algorithm, and reasons for those reasons and so forth—presumably reasons more insightful than ‘I was designed to do so.’ This aspect of communication, while helpful in explaining the logic of communication, does not address the nature of communication. Communication involves ontological openness or receptivity to intentional directedness. Directedness cannot be constructed out of material or abstract parts anymore than the void could be constructed out of matter.
Directedness has been overlooked because we have believed that communication follows from the transfer or exchange of something, that something being words, meanings, thoughts, commands, knowledge, information or particles. Let us call these elements of transfer, in line with our computer analogy, packets. The classical notion of communication depends upon the concept of transfer or exchange. Transfer is roughly the transition of a packet from one place or object to another. In communication, we typically assume that the packet is possessed by one object and transferred to another—as a person transfers possessed information or the electron emits a possessed photon—although a ‘naturalized’ understanding of communication will try to dispense with possession and say that the packet is localized within/at/on one object and transferred to another.
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On the naturalized, or mechanized, account of communication, a packet is localized to an object and moves from that localized object to another localized object. Again, localization is typically taken to mean geometric adjacency or insideness; it is a topological notion concerning geometric space-time. As such, a natural understanding tends to minim-ize the relation between the packet and the object apar