Information is a measure of difference and the extent to which we might assert that it possesses meaning is a function of the entropy or unexpected qualities it possesses or is perceived to have. Our minds are fine-tuned towards the recognition and differentiation of pattern from background noise but we quite rapidly desensitise to pure repetition and sameness. In this way, a song (or a person) we love can become a real burden and tedious when there is nothing but blind repetition. It is a matter of variable thresholds and cognitive aptitude as much as tolerance or maturity that we all differ as much as we do in what we each enjoy – as individuals, as tribes or as a species.
I really wonder sometimes, and as if the omnipresent intelligence deficit of fake news and political disinformation was not already evidence enough, if the primary purpose and persistent presence of extreme difference and dissociative pathological conflicts are not really the way that our world (quite unwittingly) reinvests in entropy as a function of randomness – just to keep us all interested and existentially-unbalanced enough to keep playing silly these human games.
It is also interesting to consider that where we measure, observe or assert patterns in the world (and even as science reveals that there are very many layers to these abstractions) that we still and inevitably only ever record or identify a vanishingly small proportion if all the deep complexity which exists. We choose axes of measurement and metrics of length, quantity or duration (among many others) but these are always quite arbitrary and must necessarily exclude the plausible infinity of other patterns, abstractions and symmetries that also exist.
What would happen to a human mind, not to mention – a technological civilisation, if it discovered a way to open the door to that much vaster space of abstraction and pattern? It really does appear that it is of the nature of living things to inhabit this hyper-inflating space of probability and possibility in ways to which our piecemeal and endemically reductionist and mechanically-biased logics of technological cognitive extension are quite unable to aspire.
Daedelus Kite 