What Science Teaches
Information is the invisible lifeblood of all living systems. Everything that is visible as a shape or form at the material level exists because of the way information was processed. This is information’s role: it provides the ingredients for life to organize itself into a living system capable of growth and adaptation. This function is in the word itself: in-formation.
A system’s semipermeable boundary is its sense-making or information-processing function. Beyond the boundary there is always more data to process; chaos is the greatest creator of information—every moment is rich with newness. Using cognition, a living system decides what to pay attention to and how best to respond. From the booming buzzing confusion, everything alive makes sense for itself, transforming data into meaningful information. Cognition does not require a brain; even single-cell organisms such as slime mold learn and change in response to their environment.1 Every living organism must have cognition because it is the only way life takes form, through organizing information. Without cognition there cannot be life.
Many biologists and philosophers now understand life as an energy process for transforming information into physical form.
This is evident in our bodies—we have a physical form in which the cells change their material, yet we continue to be the same because a healthy cell processes information into the same form.2 (Cells create ill health when they process information differently, as in autoimmune diseases and cancers.) Information is the source of all growth and development in a living system.
Gregory Bateson, a brilliant social scientist, anthropologist, and a founder of Cybernetics, defined information as “that which changes us.” The poet Stafford Beer wrote, “Information is a difference that makes a difference.”
This is the role of information in living systems. But there is a second role in Information Theory, where information is defined mathematically as a unit of communication capable of being transferred. Until 1948, information transmission suffered from entropy; as it passed along wires, the original message became degraded because of noise and distance. In that year, Claude Shannon revolutionized communications by defining information as a precise mathematical unit, a bit. His simple equation, likened in importance to Einstein’s, made it possible to quantify information with absolute precision so that a transmission of any kind would have zero message distortion. “The idea that something as nebulous as ‘information’ could be quantified, analyzed, and reduced to a mathematical formula attracted tremendous attention.”3
Shannon’s work gave birth to the Digital Age. All information now used in any communication form—text, phone, radio waves, computers, visual images—is reducible to the same unit, bits. And these bits are transmitted with virtually no loss of accuracy whatsoever. This has facilitated the explosion of digital capacities such as artificial intelligence that require tremendous computing power and cloud storage that can hold nearly unlimited amounts of data. And technology isn’t close to reaching the Shannon Limit, where the speed of transmissions effects errors. Some estimate that the most sophisticated systems built to date for encoding and decoding only approach half of the Shannon Limit, which means that new technologies can be developed capable of processing masses of complex information at much greater speeds than now.4
This is one reason why those in technology are so wildly optimistic about the future.
What should we call this age we’re living in?
There are so many choices: the digital age,
the information age, the internet age, the computer age,
the connected age, the Google age, the emoji age,
the cloud age, the smartphone age, the data age,
the Facebook age, the robot age, the posthuman age.
The more names we pin on it, the more vaporous it seems.
If nothing else, it is an age geared to
the talents of the brand manager.
I’ll just call it Now.
Nicholas Carr, Utopia Is Scary