-information (în´fer-mâ´shen) noun

1. Knowledge derived from study, experience, or instruction.
2. Knowledge of a specific event or situation; intelligence.
3. A collection of facts or data: statistical information.
4. The act of informing or the condition of being informed; communication of knowledge: Safety instructions are provided for the information of our passengers.
5. Computer Science. A nonaccidental signal or character used as an input to a computer or communications system.
6. A numerical measure of the uncertainty of an experimental outcome.
7. Law. A formal accusation of a crime made by a public officer rather than by grand jury indictment.

- in´forma´tional adjective

So, this is the Age of Information. After the assorted feudal, industrial, stone and other ages, the ages of slavery and conquest, the nuclear age and the anti-ageing-age (which is still not over), here we are: drowning in information. From the human point of view, too much information is no information at all. While I'm writing this, the office colleague responsible for the newspaper's travel section decides to throw away all the beautifully designed, colorfully illustrated catalogues from travel agencies. "Some years ago", she said, "they were about so much", and she holds her hands about half a meter apart. "I could sift thru them, find interesting offers and bits I could criticize, compare prices, form an opinion." Now, she sits behind a wall of paper. Because the paper comprises too much information, it's just paper. Even in the relatively focused world of German travel agencies, it's impossible to keep informed. You have to rely on others to "inform" you, meaning "infiltrate" you since they are interested parties. Information becomes random. Chaotic. But chaos breeds life, doesn't it? Or does the sheer amount of information and the number of connections it gets by being hooked up to each other kind of transmogrify plain ol'ordinary information into magical information?

In the simplest everyday terms, "information" suggests a practical chunk of reified experience, a unit of sense lodged on the hierarchy of knowledge somewhere between data and report.
Erik Davis, "Techgnosis: Myth, Magic & Mysticism In The Age Of Information"

 

information explosion (in-fer-mâ'shen eks-plo`zhen) noun 1. The current period in human history, in which the possession and dissemination of information has supplanted mechanization or industrialization as a driving force in society. 2. The rapid growth in the amount of information available today. Also called information revolution.

At the turn of the twentieth century, Einstein, Heisenberg, and Schroedinger, amongst others, turned the world of intelligence on its ear; the world, according to the new physics and quantum mechanics, is infinitely more mysterious and strange than ever previously imagined. One outcome of this important update was the redefinition of what constituted "information." In light of living in a universe of greater uncertainties, information was redefined as "the unpredictability of a message". This means, the more unpredictable the message, the more information there is in it.
Antero Alli, "Occulture - The Secret Marriage of Art and Magick"

When a message is transmitted through a channel, or medium, such as a wire or the atmosphere, it becomes susceptible to interference from many sources, which distorts and degrades the signals. Two of the major concerns of information theory are the reduction of noise-induced errors in communication systems and the efficient use of total channel capacity. Efficient transmission and storage of information require the reduction of the number of bits used for encoding. This is possible when processing English texts because letters are far from being completely random. The probability is extremely high, for example, that the letter following the sequence of letters informatio is an n. This redundancy enables a person to understand messages in which vowels are missing, for example, or to decipher unclear handwriting. In modern communications systems, artificial redundancy is added to the encoding of messages in order to reduce errors in message transmission.
atomjack of FUSIONanomaly

 

Chaos often breeds life, when order breeds habit.
Henry B. Adams (1838-1918), U.S. historian, "The Education of Henry Adams, ch. 16 (1907)"

 

 

Chaos (kâ´òs´), in Greek mythology, the vacant, unfathomable space from which everything arose. In the OLYMPIAN myth GAEA sprang from Chaos and became the mother of all things.

In all chaos there is a cosmos, in all disorder a secret order.
Carl Jung (1875-1961), Swiss psychiatrist. Collected Works, vol. 9, "Archetypes of the Collective Unconscious," pt. 1 (1959
)

collective unconscious: In Jungian psychology, a part of the unconscious mind, shared by a society, a people, or all humankind. The product of ancestral experience, it contains concepts of science, religion, and morality, for example.

 

The 23rd hexagram of the I-Ching signifies chaos, Disintegration."A chao (pronounced "cow") is a single unit of chaos...therefore, chaoboys and chaogirls wear designer genes of future myths..."

from The 23 Erisian Mysteries

The dragon of Chaos wore a far more honorable face in the East, where it was known as the Tao. For ancient sages like Chuang-Tzu, the subtle order of natural chaos was rich and bountiful compared to the bankrupt legalism and moralistic strictures of Confucian civilization -- which paradoxically produced the very disorder it wanted to suppress. The Taoists felt that only by tearing down the State of things -- including ordinary consciousness -- could we return to the golden age, the mixed-up harmony symbolized by the wonton (which derives from Mr. Hun-tun, Chuang-Tzu's lord of chaos). If these anarchic dreams could not be realized in society -- as Lao Tzu hoped to do -- then at least they could be realized in the body, through spiritual and physical practices which would open up the spontaneous chaos within.
Erik Davis, ,"Spiritual Chaos?"

Freedom is just Chaos, with better lighting.
Alan Dean Foster, To the Vanishing Point

Chaos is a name for any order that produces confusion in our minds.
George Santayana (1863-1952), U.S. philosopher, poet. Dominations and Powers, bk. 1, pt. 1, ch. 1 (1951).

 

 

Chaos is present everywhere in countless ways and forms, while Order remains an unattainable ideal. M.C. Escher, 29 December 1947

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