I like to read, including a lot of biographies and non-fiction and I enjoy sharing what I discovered in case it interests other readers. I recently read The Information by James Gleick. The book spends a fair amount of time discussing what is “information”, the forms it can take, how it is communicated, and the technological developments that have promoted its communication. Gets a little visionary at times in terms of the almost religious take on information as reality, but the basic text is tremendously informative. Gleick is an excellent writer who explains even difficult concepts very well. An example is entrophy, a very troublesome idea, but made clearer by Gleick. Entrophy has many potential meanings, it is a measure of disorder, a measure of uncertainty, a measure of potential work and as that work is done, does “order” increase of decrease in total. Some believe that due to entrophy the universe is inexorably headed toward dissolution. Information theorists believe that creating and communicating information, as broadly defined, may reduce entrophy in some ways and increase it in others.
One of Gleick’s most interesting reflections is about the development and evolution of life as reflecting a very sophisticated information transfer process mediated by incredibly complex molecules–DNA and RNA. His description of the history of the creation of machines that could process information from the early work of Boole and Babbage to today’s quantum computing ideas is also excellent. As always when you read books like this, you are prompted to ponder many things about the nature of reality and life and as always, I am struck by the limitations of being human–we evolved in a certain manner, with the ability to perceive only certain things and that may limit our ability to fully comprehend all aspects of whatever reality is.
Everything in the book reminds me that the only things humans know, and therefore can communicate, is what they have an awareness of knowing. Self-awareness is the essence of consciousness; it is that meta-cognition that leads to intelligence and progress. Most other forms of life appear, as far as we can tell, to lack that self-awareness capability, and that capability is what accounts for the astoundingly rapid technological developments from humans. I would strongly encourage reading this book; it is well worth the time.
