The term information literally means to take form (latin ‘informatio’). Form refers to structure and structure, in turn, refers to order. There are many ways order can manifest itself but here we need only to consider it in reference to a system of signs. To us humans, information is expressed either as natural or conventional signs. A tree standing in the field is a natural sign; it is concrete and pure resemblance of itself. The word “tree” is, on the contrary, a conventional sign; it is arbitrary and assumes no structure or order of resemblance between itself and what it signifies. In the former case information is ordered as a physical manifestation; as atoms that form structures that eventually comprise a tree. It is something directly experiential through the senses; it is an “ordering” of structures without mediative form. In the latter case, however, it is only through consciousness of information as potential that we arrive at any sensible relation between signifier and the signified; conventional signs are then the basis for realizing information as meaning. Information as potential necessitates a priori consciousness, as it only exists in our species. In a system of signs, signifiers function as media for signifieds and thus are inherently connected to shared social experience, whose existence can only be mediated though this common system of signs. It follows that information as potential does not exist without shared experience. Cultural evolution can be defined as conscious ordering of potential existing in our environment. Jaron Lanier refers to information quite aptly as “alienated experience” (see Lanier 2010, 22): it lies dormant as potential as long as it remains outside experience. In fact, I would rather call it alienated potential.
The argument on information as potentia[1] is by no means a novel one; perhaps only reformulated and -contextualized. The difference is perhaps best seen as one between ontology and epistemology. While e.g. Foucault’s notion of ‘will to knowledge’ – as underlying trajectory on the development of Western epistemology – stems from epistemological shifts that he places in the time of Plato (see Foucault 1971, 218), to consider ‘will’ as represented by the instrumental orientation to mediation is to argue for an urge inherent to human nature, an ontology of instrumentalism. Lyotard’s propositions concerning the metaphysics of development seem to entail a tendency toward greater capacity and continuous modulation of form (cf. Lyotard 1991, 6), and that this process is not a conscious human enterprise, although it is obvious it can be accelerated by ideologies etc., seems to echo a more ontological foundation. It is essentially an evolutionary proposition that constitutes a reciprocal dialectic between humans and environment(s) or objects (ibid.).
The human condition can thus be argued to exhibit a curiously continuous complexification with information as the underlying scale of change. Only hypotheses can be raised here to illuminate the telos of this process, if it indeed even has one. But the suggestion need not be more complicated than the closing of the mediative gap to reach an existence of unmediated and pure communication. Call it the reclaiming of the divine presence of Paradise, if you will. Peters (1999, 75) uses an analogy of angels as the ultimate example of unmediated information; angels are “bodies of pure meaning” (ibid. 75) which practically refers to a complete mental synthesis of subjects. Such a condition literally fuses the signifier and signified into one entity, into a transcendental sign – which in the strictest sense is annihilates all possibility of mediation, fusing information and meaning and imploding into singular consciousness. Singularity has no dimensions and thus all such predicative notions of ‘becoming’, ‘mediating’, ‘communicating’ are supplanted by mere ‘being’. Singularity of form can be likened to eternal present. Such union is devoid of constraint and friction; i.e. it lacks the “third party”, an in-between.
This “angelic” condition also lays the foundation for the phenomenology of technological/cybernetic totalism (cf. Lanier 2010, 94), which seriously entertains the possibility of future computation accelerating to a point of implosive singularity where technological development becomes instantaneous – meaning “super” machines designing ever more powerful copies of themselves. Technological singularity, coined and defined by Vernor Vinge (1993)[2] would annihilate all bases for mediation and thus renders the human species, at least in the current biophysical form, obsolete. It defines the boundary of informational acceleration at which human intellectual capacities are overstretched and meaning, in a manner of speaking, transforms into automatic response to oncoming stimuli.
In the humanistic side of things, technological singularity is always refutable by the infinite regresses of spatial-temporal relations to which we humans are mortally bound. This binding is a matter that concerns exactly the part of human condition that is actualizes us a mediative beings. Medium anchors us into existence.
Singularity as technological instantaneity and intelligence, no matter how intangible and fantastic, is a theoretically defendable proposition. If one is to consider it in light the history of technological development on the general cultural evolutionary trajectory and the intensification and complexification of the role of information on it (see e.g. Coren 2001; Kylmälä 2011), several arguments for teleonomic tendency can be found. The human species (from Homo s. Sapiens onward) has practically replaced organic evolution with cultural one due to which the general process(es) of evolution have become more informational in nature (Coren 2001, 2002; Avery 2003, 109).
As to our own age and informational evolution, Floridi (2002, 127) states: “No previous generation was ever exposed to such an extraordinary acceleration of technological power over reality, with corresponding social changes and ethical responsibilities.” The underlying potential in technological development is information as the increasing complexity of structures. This implies that information has a special function in human “hands” and that this function manifests itself primarily in the instrumental relationship between humanity and environment.
It is conceivable that the instrumental understanding of medium has established itself as a cognitive “lock-in” of sorts, constraining perceptions to alternative and novel trajectories of change. This is troublesome because technology advances with or without us. To be sure there is some sort of a “reontologization” taking place on the informational scale and this has been going on for a long time. Ever since the 1960s advancement in processor speed has been exponential and measurable on the informational scale, asMoore’s law would have it. Today, some 30 odd years later, the cultural plane is practically digitized. Digital technology is now embraced for its capacity to process this stupefying information build-up. Wright’s observations support this:
“Human beings now produce more than five exabytes worth of recorded information per year: documents, e-mail messages, television shows, radio broadcasts, Web pages, medical records, spreadsheets, presentations, and books like this one. That is more than 50,000 times the number of words stored in the Library of Congress, or more than the total number of words ever spoken by human beings. Seventy-five percent of that information is digital” (Wright, 2007, 6).
Information as potential
When information is defined, a difference should be made between information as potential and information as realized. The former is constant, either as existing as atoms in the universe, reserving energy as potential or unmediated consciousness considering this potential. The latter becomes possible only as a function of conscious action, whose intensity depends of the level of consciousness of the entity in question. It is not difficult to imagine that the “higher” the organism, the bigger the role of information to its existence. Information in itself is everywhere as potential but only its realization, (i.e. mediation), makes it a relevant issue.
Consider, for example, a stone on a field under which a species of mollusc lives. It didn’t choose its habitat; it happened to evolve to a state that necessitates conditions as produced by the underside of a rock. In a sense, it can be said to occupy the first “dimension” of existence in which no sense data, no choice or question ever arise. It can hardly see potential in anything, beyond in its immediate instinctual relation to its environment. Lacking all but the basest instincts to survive, its condition remains informationally low and consists of no spatial or temporal plane, which herein simply refers to a state of unconsciousness – presumably a life form that cannot know itself, cannot have any relation to the information that affects its condition. Hence, the existence that is configured is free of all consideration: all factors influencing the condition of the being are external.
Next consider a fox on the field. It may take refuge from the hunters behind the rock, yet it cannot deduce the reasons why such an action is beneficial for its survival. Rather the question is of an instinctual necessity that relates to a certain level of consciousness. This could be called the second dimension of existence, characterized by fight-or-flight instinct where information already exists as potential. Because of this instinctual competence the condition of the 2-dimensional being is bound by space. Namely, the condition offers two states of action based on the primacy of the instinct survival. There is no element of choice involved, only an instinctual reaction to information pertaining to the survival of the system. The choice is flight or fight. Either/Or.
Next, consider a man running down the field. He grabs the stone and uses it to kill his pursuers. He can also sit down and fashion a sculpture out of the stone. The matter of survival has become one of choice. Pure instinct doesn’t lead to voluntary self-immolation, it requires reason. The existence of conscious choice relative to other(ness) leads eventually to the question of right and wrong. Each superseding question of right and wrong increases the informational quotient of this man’s condition and its role to his existence. Due to the awareness of all three dimensions (space, time and information as constitutive of the two) his existence is unlimited in spatial variability (typological potential) but nevertheless bound to a linear temporal progression. In effect, each question of choice, or each emergent dimension, introduces a new form of informational being. Four dimensional being would be one not bound by either space or time and could thus get rid of choices altogether. The fourth dimension is the same as unmediated singularity, pure and instantaneous communion, absolutely released from falseness of meaning. Morality, right and wrong, go out the window as there is no consequence, and as there is no consequence, there is no choice because there is no relation, and as there is no relation, there is no need of consciousness, at least in the bound sense particular to humans.
In a more concrete plane, the past few centuries of technological development give ample evidence of the severity and intensity of (realized) information growth, which can mostly be attributed to the mechanization and technologization of existence driven by industrial capitalism. Recently, Moore’s Law[3] has proven empirically the increasing complexity of human inventions and resulting increase of scale of information. There are futurologists (e.g. Mannermaa, 2004; Schwartz & Leyden & Hyatt 1999) who hypothesize the “information society” to last only 25-50 years, until a paradigm shift to bio-society begins, which, in turn, could last only 15 years until a new shift to a fusion society would take place – if the industrial society can be said to have lasted approximately 200 years, the pace of change is certainly picking up and, arguably, it is being fuelled by information. From mechanized printing technology of the mid-1800s to the invention of the microchip, all of these escalations involve an increase/intensification in the role of information to human mediation processes. And as information’s role in the human context increases, it is only natural to predict more advances in information processing systems that try to take advantage of this fact. The argument that can be formed on the basis this developmental trajectory is that difference in media forms relates primarily to a difference in the scale of informational quantity.
[1] Aristotle’s Physics (http://classics.mit.edu/Aristotle/physics.mb.txt) gives a binary quality for matter as both potentiality or actuality.
[2] “[w]e are on the edge of change comparable to the rise of human life on Earth. The precise cause of this change is the imminent creation by technology of entities with greater than human intelligence.” see http://www-rohan.sdsu.edu/faculty/vinge/misc/singularity.html
[3] For an illustrative example of Moore’s Law see http://www.technologyreview.in/article/21886/page1/
