highlights & comments

• 
  Casey Gollan highlighted

  How big is its total information capacity, its memory space? What

  4 months ago · Like · 0 likes · Share

  • 
    Casey Gollan

    very kevin. zeitgeisty. is this just mtaphor of our times.

    4 months ago
• 
  Casey Gollan highlighted

  When photons and electrons and other particles interact, what are they really doing? Exchanging bits, transmitting quantum states, processing information. The laws of physics are the algorithms. Every burning star, every silent nebula, every particle leaving its ghostly trace in a cloud chamber is an information processor. The universe computes its own destiny. How much does it compute? How fast? How big is its total information capacity, its memory space?

  4 months ago · Like · 0 likes · Share
• 
  Casey Gollan highlighted

  by 1948 was proposing a new discipline to be called “cybernetics,” the study of communication and control.

  4 months ago · Like · 0 likes · Share
• 
  Casey Gollan highlighted

  We can see now that information is what our world runs on: the blood and the fuel, the vital principle. It pervades the sciences from top to bottom, transforming every branch of knowledge.

  4 months ago · Like · 0 likes · Share
• 
  Casey Gollan highlighted

  “Man the food-gatherer reappears incongruously as information-gatherer,” remarked Marshall McLuhan in 1967.

  4 months ago · Like · 0 likes · Share
• 
  Casey Gollan highlighted

  Until then, motion (for example) had been just as soft and inclusive a term as information.

  4 months ago · Like · 0 likes · Share
• 
  Casey Gollan highlighted

  Intelligence: that was a flexible term, very old. “Nowe used for an elegant worde,” Sir Thomas Elyot wrote in the sixteenth century, “where there is mutuall treaties or appoyntementes, eyther by letters or message.” It had taken on other meanings, though. A few engineers, especially in the telephone labs, began speaking of information. They used the word in a way suggesting something technical: quantity of information, or measure of information. Shannon adopted this usage.

  4 months ago · Like · 0 likes · Share

  • 
    Casey Gollan

    cant believe information as a thing didnt exist 75 years ago. such a given today

    4 months ago
• 
  Casey Gollan highlighted

  people thought they could see the clear purpose that inspired Claude Shannon’s work, but that was hindsight. He saw it differently: My mind wanders around, and I conceive of different things day and night. Like a science-fiction writer, I’m thinking, “What if it were like this?”

  4 months ago · Like · 0 likes · Share
• 
  Casey Gollan highlighted

  Economics is recognizing itself as an information science, now that money itself is completing a developmental arc from matter to bits, stored in computer memory and magnetic strips, world finance coursing through the global nervous system.

  4 months ago · Like · 0 likes · Share
• 
  Casey Gollan highlighted

  “Theories permit consciousness to ‘jump over its own shadow,’ to leave behind the given, to represent the transcendent, yet, as is self-evident, only in symbols.”

  4 months ago · Like · 0 likes · Share
• 
  Casey Gollan highlighted

  been just as soft and inclusive a term as information. For

  4 months ago · Like · 0 likes · Share

  • 
    Casey Gollan

    hardening terms

    4 months ago
• 
  Casey Gollan highlighted

  physics could not proceed until Isaac Newton appropriated words that were ancient and vague—force, mass, motion, and even time—and gave them new meanings.

  4 months ago · Like · 0 likes · Share
• 
  Casey Gollan highlighted

  “What lies at the heart of every living thing is not a fire, not warm breath, not a ‘spark of life,’ ” declares the evolutionary theorist Richard Dawkins. “It is information, words, instructions.… If you want to understand life, don’t think about vibrant, throbbing gels and oozes, think about information technology.”

  4 months ago · Like · 0 likes · Share
• 
  Casey Gollan highlighted

  it feels itself, with impressive certainty, to be a unit. The

  6 months ago · Like · 0 likes · Share
• 
  Casey Gollan highlighted

  By now the word code was so deeply embedded in the conversation that people seldom paused to notice how extraordinary it was to find such a thing—abstract symbols representing arbitrarily different abstract symbols—at work in chemistry, at the level of molecules.

  6 months ago · Like · 0 likes · Share
• 
  Casey Gollan highlighted

  a gene for inability to read animal footprints.…

  6 months ago · Like · 0 likes · Share
• 
  Casey Gollan highlighted

  correct the common mythology and thought a word might help. The

  6 months ago · Like · 0 likes · Share
• 
  Casey Gollan highlighted

  The drummers were not signaling but talking: they spoke a special, adapted language.

  6 months ago · Like · 0 likes · Share
• 
  Casey Gollan highlighted

  had pinpointed the gene in a protein-encoding piece of DNA. This

  6 months ago · Like · 0 likes · Share
• 
  Casey Gollan highlighted

  in 1910 a Danish botanist, Wilhelm Johannsen, self-consciously invented the word gene. He was at pains to correct the common mythology and thought a word might help.

  6 months ago · Like · 0 likes · Share
• 
  Casey Gollan highlighted

  Molecular biology, in its signal achievement, had pinpointed the gene in a protein-encoding piece of DNA.

  6 months ago · Like · 0 likes · Share
• 
  Casey Gollan highlighted

  a combinatorial code.

  6 months ago · Like · 0 likes · Share
• 
  Casey Gollan highlighted

  Of course, it acts and moves and procreates as a unit, and furthermore, in the case of at least one species, it feels itself, with impressive certainty, to be a unit.

  6 months ago · Like · 0 likes · Share
• 
  Casey Gollan highlighted

  a hen is only an egg’s way of making another egg.

  6 months ago · Like · 0 likes · Share

  • 
    Max Fenton

    *

    5 months ago
  • 
    Casey Gollan

    This point of view scares me. No idea what my schedule looks like in Jan but excited to (hopefully) make it to tbc for the discussion.

    5 months ago
• 
  Casey Gollan highlighted

  “We are survival machines—robot vehicles blindly programmed to preserve the selfish molecules known as genes.” He said this was a truth he had known for years.

  6 months ago · Like · 0 likes · Share
• 
  Casey Gollan highlighted

  If father and daughter are fat, people might be tempted to think that his fatness caused hers, or that he passed it on to her. But that is wrong. As Johannsen declared, “The personal qualities of any individual organism do not at all cause the qualities of its offspring; but the qualities of both ancestor and descendent are in quite the same manner determined by the nature of the ‘sexual substances’—i.e., the gametes—from which they have developed.” What is inherited is more abstract, more in the nature of potentiality.

  6 months ago · Like · 0 likes · Share
• 
  Casey Gollan highlighted

  Redundancy—inefficient by definition—serves as the antidote to confusion. It provides second chances. Every natural language has redundancy built in;

  6 months ago · Like · 0 likes · Share
• 
  Casey Gollan highlighted

  a deliberately extreme example: a gene for reading. The idea seems absurd, for several reasons. Reading is learned behavior. No one is born able to read.

  6 months ago · Like · 0 likes · Share
• 
  Casey Gollan highlighted

  We use DNA, just as we use lungs to breathe and eyes to see. We use it. “This attitude is an error of great profundity,” Dawkins wrote. “It is the truth turned crashingly on its head.” DNA came first—by billions of years—and DNA comes first, he argued, when life is viewed from the proper perspective. From that perspective, genes are the focus, the sine qua non, the star of the show.

  6 months ago · Like · 0 likes · Share