On a related note, I went to college with Richard Rorty's daughter
In The Information, James Gleick makes a sideways, tacit claim that 'the infosphere' exists not just outside of any particular person, but outside of our intelligence and our culture. It's a weirdly essentialist argument, and appealing in a romantic sense. As far as turns of phrase, sure, we talk about things being 'out there' and having a life beyond us, but I don't think people mean it literally. At least I don't - cultural artifacts may persist beyond the culture that made them, but that doesn't mean they exist outside culture entirely. Things don't *mean* anything without someone to interpret them, I think. Do you agree?
Most of the biosphere cannot see the infosphere; it is invisible, a parallel universe humming with ghostly inhabitants. But they are not ghosts to us - not any more. We humans, alone among the earth's organic creatures, live in both worlds at once. It is as though, having long coexisted with the unseen, we have begun to develop the extrasensory perception. [...]
The library will endure; it is the universe. As for us, everything has not been written; we are not turning into phantoms. We walk the corridors, searching the shelves and rearranging them, looking for lines of meaning amid leagues of cacophony and incoherence, reading the history of the past and of the future, collecting our thoughts and collecting the thoughts of others, and every so often glimpsing mirrors, in which we may recognize creatures of the information.
This is not the main thrust of the book, which is a readable synthesis of information as a theory and a practice. Check it out if you're interested in such things - or if you believe in info-spirits. This entry was originally posted at http://bonspiel.dreamwidth.org/11937.html.
Most of the biosphere cannot see the infosphere; it is invisible, a parallel universe humming with ghostly inhabitants. But they are not ghosts to us - not any more. We humans, alone among the earth's organic creatures, live in both worlds at once. It is as though, having long coexisted with the unseen, we have begun to develop the extrasensory perception. [...]
The library will endure; it is the universe. As for us, everything has not been written; we are not turning into phantoms. We walk the corridors, searching the shelves and rearranging them, looking for lines of meaning amid leagues of cacophony and incoherence, reading the history of the past and of the future, collecting our thoughts and collecting the thoughts of others, and every so often glimpsing mirrors, in which we may recognize creatures of the information.
This is not the main thrust of the book, which is a readable synthesis of information as a theory and a practice. Check it out if you're interested in such things - or if you believe in info-spirits. This entry was originally posted at http://bonspiel.dreamwidth.org/11937.html.