The movie 21 Grams riffed on a 1905 study that claimed that the soul weighed 21 grams. But when someone dies we know we lose information. Secrets are taken, wisdom is lost. Where does it go?
From a purely information theoretic position we know that brain can maintain complex states and that those states encode information. Those secrets, that knowledge of the world and other people disappears once the brain can no longer maintain the complex state it once did. Entropy wins and what we once had as a society is lost.
This fact has been riffed upon countless times in sci-fi with Altered Carbon's sleeves which are merely the meat that houses the information that can be stored and transferred. Putting aside the technical details and challenges of such a technology, it is interesting to me to ponder this invisible world of representation, of things unseen that are only obliquely represented in some state within the brain, the ghosts within the machine.
Within each person lies a universe accessible only to them. Anyone else can infer what is contained within. And our inherent ability to empathize is enabled by sharing a "sleeve" very similar to the other person. As the same species we can imagine what the other person feels. But before humans had the kind of language we had today that ability was severely limited.
Language is the glue that binds people together. Language is the magic that enabled a great leap forward for the species, not necessarily the individual. For with communal behavior our species increased its chances of survival and in fact eventually prospered far beyond what any prior species had. For all of the talk of individualism, human being are very social animals.
The spoken language enabled one very important skill, the ability to pass vital information from one generation to another in a way far more malleable and effective than genetics could. These nuggets of wisdom are called "memes", a label that suggests that they operate like genes. Putting aside the details of Dawkin's theory, it is clear what is passed is pure information that is transmitted via nurturing in a given society. This was done long before we had a written or perhaps even spoken language.
This universe in our heads is filled with objects. Many of them are representations of objects in the world of atoms. In our heads they inhabit a world of bits that mirror that reality. As human beings who must remain alive, the accuracy of that internal representation is vital and we are gifted with a brain that can do that.
The cultural memes that support the complex societies we form also are found as representations in our minds. The leaders, the people to be feared or pleased, the ideas of what constitutes justice all swirl in that complex dynamical system which encodes those abstract objects in our brain and allow us to function within the society. But they have no weight. A brain that has ceased to function weighs the same as the wisest person they were before their death. The creation of brain state does not require additional mass, only a functional brain. It is pure information.
Language in all its forms is likewise pure information. We need some medium with which to exchange that information, sound waves through air, marks on a clay tablet or paper, magnetic encodings or other solid state devices. But the medium is not the information, only the messenger. And the communications theory of Claude Shannon as adopted by communications theorists is as good as any for capturing how that is done. Taken collectively these waves of symbols are states of matter that have no meaning to the world of atoms but only the world of sentient beings. They are a shadow world.
The Enlightenment saw an explosion of knowledge and an ability to gain significant advantage over our physical world, that world of atoms, for the great benefit of our species. We could create things to extend our power both over the inanimate world but also the world of other living creatures including other men. But the extension of our power and will was largely limited by the reach of our language and life. A dead king quickly loses sway over the people as the power vacuum is filled.
With each new technological innovation we seem to be able to extend a person's power and project it farther in time and space. Whether it is propaganda or wisdom, our language has created new empires and enabled new entities that transcend individuals. We have corporations and political parties that take on a life of their own independent of the people who formed them. They exert great power over the people who interact with them. They are powered and maintained by information as much as by any physical manifestation. And the modern world of information science is morphing into a post-modern world of overt embrace of control not through the manipulation of atoms but of bits.
Public relations specialists, advertising executives, salespeople and so many others in our modern world prosper not by their brawn but by their brain. Our society is now far more driven by finance and sales than it is by manufacturing. What was once the world of factory workers is becoming the domain of automation. And what controls the automation but the world of bits that permeates our society. And those who understand how to master that world of bits are the latest class of people who are seeing their stars rise in the economic battle.
I happen to believe that the modern world that started with the Enlightenment is morphing into a post modern world by the ascendency of the masters of bits. Bloggers, politicians and yes, information specialists now both directly and through their services make an outsize difference in our world. And more often than not, there is no rearrangement of atoms in the world to mirror these tidal waves of social change. Ignoring the mass of pulp that was printed because of the sexual revolution of the 60s, there was little that overtly changed in the world. But the social changes were enormous. We now live in a world of social revolutions that allow most to keep their heads.
Of particular concern to me is the role of the software engineer in this new world order. The market for those who can create machines that automate manufacturing processes is obvious. The ability of those same engineers to create bots which impersonate humans to influence buying behavior or political opinion is just being seen. The ability to project a corporate presence into the rich and interconnected world of human communication is only starting. People are afraid of robots. But it isn't the robots that should be feared by the ability of humans to create social controls and influence that they are not even aware they are creating. For complex systems do not always have predictable behaviors. Like climate change, any complex adaptive system will find an equilibrium but predicting the steady state of that system is beyond our ability. It turns out that any machine that can predict it is unlikely to do so faster than the system itself finds its equilibrium. This in itself can be an alarming realization.
We seem to be largely unaware of the vast networks of bits in which we live. Convergence is quickly occurring yet we still see distinct media and believe that computer systems are merely tools of commerce or communication. We have only the dimmest realization that this shadow world of bits that represents not only the shards of our minds as captured by this vast web but also the agents of others and potentially even agents that become detached from any human that have the ability to live within our information networks to continue doing the will we originally programmed into them regardless of the continuing desire to have that will propagated.
We not only need the tools to actually see this shadow world of information, we need a philosophy to understand how it serves or harms our species and its environment. We need thinkers who can move beyond the modern world of markets and commerce into a new world that is a battleground for hearts and minds, and yes, control over human behavior. I am calling this a post-modern attitude toward software engineering until I happen upon a better phrase.
