https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=kPHkXxRQllM
So I know a number of you who have been on the Discord server or know me realize that there’s a few themes that I’m weaving together and I’m leading up to a few things specifically and what we’re doing in these early videos anyway is laying some groundwork. And one of the things I think is important for people to understand, irrespective of laying the groundwork for we’ll say bigger and better work, is the idea of information. We don’t really think about it very much, but when we’re talking about information, what are we talking about? Why is this important and how does this sort of fit into all the other stuff that I’ve been talking about and then laying that groundwork is going to help to explain later on some models that we’ve been working on on the Discord server for a year and a half now, a bunch of us. So understanding what I mean by information and how people are using it will help us to move forward and hopefully also tie together a bunch of things in the world to enable you to interact with people a little bit better and perhaps more articulately yourself. So information is an interesting word because it tells us everything that we really need to know to use it correctly, which is sort of weird and unusual for words. When we’re talking about information, we’re talking about formation in something or relative. So you can’t be in formation if you aren’t in something. And then form stretches back to Plato’s forms, which is the term I like the term I-dos better, which is where you’re talking about the ideal or perfect thing. And you’re in some situation or some frame or you’re in relation to something and that’s what gives you the formation that you have. And so your formation, maybe of your physical body, is constrained by where you are in space or where you are in your imagination, if it’s mental. And this is actually important because in order for something to be in formation, you need to say within what? What are the constraints or frames or larger sort of things that are relative to you? Because it would just not to say all things are relative, but it is to say that information is a term that takes the relativity out of the situation. So if you get a piece of data, data in and of itself isn’t in formation, right? Because data can technically be noise and noises, definitionally not information, which isn’t to say you can’t turn it into information, but the way it’s come into the system, it’s noise. It’s not available to help inform you or guide you or give you an affordance. So probably affordance is the best way to think about information as such once it comes into your awareness, right? We’re constantly being bombarded by information and most of it we ignore. We ignore most of the signals around us, whether they’re noise or information or not. Everything we’re not paying attention to is technically noise. Now, obviously we have control over our attention or at least some, but probably a great deal of control over our attention. A lot of it is done subconsciously. That’s not to say we don’t have control over it. I think we do. Things we are controlling without consciously controlling them, we’re still controlling. There’s a bunch of things we’re not controlling. So we’re not controlling the weather, right? Subconsciously or consciously. But things we are controlling subconsciously, we are controlling. And we can take better control of subconscious things, I would argue. And that’s important. It’s an important distinction to make. And that’s why I bring it up. But also, you can think about these things in other terms. Like we get information from the world, right? But also, so the world informs us, right? There’s a formation of us relative to the world that provides us with affordances. And at the same time, we inform the world, right? Because the world relative to us gets information. And this is easy to see between people, right? Without using language of really any kind, the fact of your existence is information to other people who can perceive it. So one way to think about this is if you have two people roughly in the same space, I can see that person. And if I’m not communicating with them and they’re not moving, I still know that they’re an obstacle, potential interaction that they might be able to move if I know that they’re a human, right? There’s all sorts of information that’s coming into me as a result of paying attention to that particular area in space. And this may seem a little abstract, but if you give it a moment, it’ll sort of sink in. So when you walk through the woods, for example, there’s a bunch of information you’re sending, like your footfalls making all kinds of noise. And that information may scatter the creatures, right? It may make the birds go squawk, right? And these things happen. This is how tracking is done in the woods, right? So there’s lots of ways that we send out information into the world. We inform the world and the world informs us, right? So our very interaction of our footfalls tell us a bunch of things about the world that we’re in. Now, not the world at large necessarily, although that too, because every small piece of information about the world is a piece of information about the larger world, right? So that’s important to know. It’s like, oh, I see. So there’s really no way in which you are dealing with the scale, a small scale of the world that you aren’t also dealing with the large scale of the world. And there’s lots of reasons for this. One is all the small scale of the world things are in the world. But also most of them are repeated elsewhere. And so once you have experience with a swamp, you have experience with a swamp. It’s not to say that it’s necessarily useful everywhere, but all swamps have a lot of things in common. Again, they have a form. They have an IDOS. They have a platonic ideal that they conform to, right? That they’re close to. And you can use those things that they have in common to know how to navigate most swamps. Not perfectly, but it’s better than no information. And so information even about a small part of the world gives you information about the world. And as you again, as you walk through the woods, you’re informing the world. We also inform the world by moving it physically, right? We’re taking it and forming it, right? Which is a way of informing. And you can rightly argue we’re getting sort of far afield here. Bring this back. But it’s actually sort of important to understand the scale that information operates at. So I’m saying literally it’s the largest scale and the smallest scale and everything in between. All of that is information and it’s bi-directional. We can’t be in the world without affecting the world and informing any effect on the world is informing it. And we also can’t be in the world without information from the world, right? Otherwise we die immediately. So and you know, that’s hard. I’m not overstating that. It’s hard to sort of wrap your head around. It’s like, wait a minute. We’re sort of beholden to the world, right? And the world is beholden to us. There’s an interaction there. There’s an interplay. And the only thing we have control over is the degree of that interplay. We can control how much of the world we pay attention to. We can control how much of the world we move and change and interact with, like what our footprint is. Not just our carbon footprint, but like our total footprint, chemical footprint, right? Our footprint on how much destruction we cause when we walk through the woods. I have a little meadow out here. I try to be careful because there’s often little ground spider webs. So I try not to disturb those. I don’t always succeed, but I try. Right. I look for these things. Try not to crush the flowers. I kind of pick these weird, windy paths. So I’m not crushing flowers. Got to crush some of them though, right? I’m just trying to lower my footprint as part of how I’m informing the world. And a lot of times, you know, we can get stuck subconsciously because a lot of the information that’s coming to us is indirect. So there’s a difference between direct and indirect. The indirect stuff sort of comes into your subconscious, right? Or it’s stuff that you’ve got inside you in terms of information that you’re not able to access in, we’ll say, a useful way. So a lot of times when people appeal to common sense, right? They’re appealing to something that they perfectly understand, perfectly well believe, but cannot justify logically or rationally or maybe can’t even articulate. Usually you can’t articulate. That’s why you resort to saying, oh, it’s just common sense. Well, if it’s common sense, explain how it works. It’s like, oh, and most common sense is axiomatic, which is not to say that it’s wrong or right, just axiomatic. It usually represents a relationship in the world that is obvious to you, but it may not be obvious to everybody else. And we just assume that it’s obvious to everybody else because we grew up with it. And the problem with information is that if you try to shrink it down to something bite size, you get into this indirect versus direct problem. And that’s where you have problems talking about what you know, right? Because the things you know are based on information that you have. And you can change what you know without changing the information. But what you change instead is you change your arrangement of the information relative to other pieces of information or relative to the frame you originally got it in. And so this is what’s called abstraction. So if I go walk in the swamp on my property, I can abstract some of that information and go walk in other swamps and it will be similar. You know, wetlands are largely wetlands. And so they have certain properties like you have to be careful where you step because you might sink. And once you sink, you have to be careful what you do from that point forward because it kind of matters. You could make it worse by taking another step forward and then sinking both your feet. All right. So, yeah, you got to be a little more careful. And this is all about, you know, once you participate in something like walking through the woods or walking through a swamp or walking through a desert, whatever terrain it is, or interfacing in any way with anything in the world, it could be an institution, it could be anything. All of this informs us. And this information, most of it’s nonverbal. We’re not interacting with it as something we’re rationalizing. We’re not interacting with it logically. We’re not interacting with it in the form of speech. We’re not interacting with it in a form that’s conscious to us. We just kind of, you know, participate in it. We know what to do in that participation. And so that kind of knowledge is very sneaky because we take it for granted. It’s the knowledge that’s deep within us, that information is deep within us and forms our knowledge. And it can also form bad knowledge because, again, knowledge relies on where the information is relative to you. And so that’s why this is important. The fact that it’s not all language is really significant because, again, we’re not thinking, oh, there’s a person over there. They could be an object. They could be an obstacle to movement, right? Or they could be something that can help me because I need help with something. Or they could be a threat, right? Or they could be a friend. It could be anything. And the way that interaction works is with information, right? Things inform us. And so you may notice that they have, you know, fatigues on and they’ve got a gun. This informs us as to what their intent might be. They might be a hunter. They might be there to kill you. They might be ex-military and just, you know, coming by to say hi. Don’t know. But there’s all this information just inherent in the things that we see and interact with that’s not verbal. It’s not stuff we’re talking about. But it is informing us and shaping us, right? Because that’s what information does. It shapes us, shapes our thoughts, it shapes where and how we interact, shapes everything. And the problem with some of this is that we need to acknowledge the fact that we are interacting with information all the time. And a lot of that information is coming in indirectly and it’s just stuff we do. When you walk somewhere and you have to duck down, you just duck down. You don’t rationalize it. You just know to duck down. You know, it’s, you know, even if you could walk under it safely, often we just duck our heads, right? Because we’re informed by the thing that we should be lower than it so that we don’t take a chance on bumping our heads or scraping or whatever. And this is kind of sneaky for us. But we need to know what information is coming into us that we’re responding to. Otherwise, we can be possessed by it, right? We can be responding to it without realizing it. And this happens all the time. And that’s why things like mindfulness, although I don’t necessarily agree with the quote, the mindfulness movement, are important, right? It’s important to look at yourself. Figure out what you’re responding to and reacting to and why and do that as a practice because it works over time. You’ll be more aware generally if you practice being more aware and it’ll just sort of come naturally to you eventually. That’s why a lot of the stomach practices and a lot of the practices that say John Vervicki talks about a lot of the meditative practices, a lot of the mindfulness practices help you with that. And they’re useful because they up your awareness of your own self and the things that are informing you and how you’re reacting and interacting with those things that are informing you. We know when to step up and over things, right? We know when we get to a threshold of a room, we’re going to step over the threshold. We’re not going to shuffle our feet because there’s usually a thing there that causes to trip, right? We know what to do with stairs. We intuitively grab railings. There’s all these ways that the world informs us this agent arena relationship that we know about that we participate in. We don’t rationalize and sometimes rationalizing it helps. Sometimes it doesn’t. It’s a total waste of time to rationalize most things. But sometimes knowing that we’re doing something and then being able to ask ourselves, oh, why did we do it that way is really helpful. And maybe the answer is, oh, we’ve always done it that way. Maybe that’s a sufficient answer. I’m not saying that you have to upend everything you’re doing or understand all of it. But sometimes other people can help with this. Like, oh, I did this. Oh, that’s a good idea. Or, oh, that’s not a bad idea. There’s a bunch of little ways that we can inform ourselves. One little trick I used to do that I always found it funny that no one else does this. Really? I used to have a dishwasher. I don’t anymore. And with my dishwasher, when I would run my dishwasher, because I’m lazy, I would load the dishes as they were dirty and just wait until the dishwasher was completely full. I’m a big efficiency freak, or at least I used to be. And then I would, you know, put the dish soap in, lock the dishwasher, run the dishwasher. And then I would leave it locked. Why? Because if I wanted one clean dish, I would unlock the dishwasher, take the clean dish out, and lock the dishwasher again. Why? Because now I know not to load it with dirty dishes. And people, when people find out that I did that, that’s amazing. I should start doing that. And I’m like, how are you not all doing this? Because I want the dishwasher to inform me as to my last action so that my next action is correct. Right. And we use things to inform ourselves. We don’t really realize what the things around us are capable of doing for us. Right. Or how we’re interacting with them. There’s a way of interacting with your dishwasher so that you always know if clean dishes in it or dirty dishes are in it. You use the lock. And maybe this works better with the older dishwashers where they have a physical handle lock. You know, again, I don’t have a dishwasher. I mean, I’ve wanted in years. So there’s little ways that we that we have information that’s available to us that we’re not using. And there’s little ways that information is informing us. We’re just reacting to it without realizing it. And without other people, without other perspectives, it’s hard to disambiguate that stuff and figure out. Wow, like I’m up to this stuff and I had no idea. And that’s why information, understanding information is important. And also, I wanted to make the you know, make the distinction between information and knowledge. Knowledge contains is is composed of information, but it is not only information. Right. Knowledge is the relationship of that information to other information, for example. And this could get into phenomenology, which is roughly speaking, like the experience of your senses. Right. You could say, well, everything is information. And all that information is coming in and signals. Some of the signals are good. Some of the signals are no good. Right. They just don’t contain enough enough data to be information or enough useful data to be informed or to inform. And this is going to become important later on if you stick with my videos, because I’m going to go more into signaling information and knowledge eventually as a way of helping with sense making. So understanding information is the key base component of sense making that we can rationalize, right, that we can understand at that level. The other levels of of of stuff basically is just signals, I think. And that’s much lower. But we can’t do much about the signals because we don’t intelligence that way. Starts with information and it moves up from there. And there’s definitely information that’s indirect that we have as a result of interaction and participation. And there’s definitely information that’s direct, that’s more communicative. Could be a sound of a bird, could be language like I’m doing now, could be body language, right. So called body language, which I might argue is not really a language, but we’ll get a video on that eventually. And I’ll definitely put it here when I after I make it. So these are the important concepts I’m trying to lay out so that you can understand what’s going on with you between you and the world and between you and other people a little bit better. There’s a lot of information that we’re not thinking about, that we’re not considering. It’s coming into us. It’s causing us to react and act in the world. And understanding this is super important just to get a handle on ourselves and to feel better about what’s going on. Because once we understand our relationship with information, we can control ourselves better. And hopefully if you’re a stoic, that’ll help you understand the stoic ethic. You’ve got all these signals, these information’s coming up. Some of it’s emotional, right. Emotional information comes up. We react to it. We need a little more time to create that space. All of its information, most of it’s indirect, but we can think about it and we can use other people to help us Intelligize, interact with information, interact with our own relationship to information that we’re getting. And I hope you find this helpful. I hope that it enables you to really think about the world in a way that helps you to grasp the world better, to grasp your own relationship to the world better because you have one, whether you’re thinking about it or not. And that’s where we kind of fall down, right. We try to take ourselves in our imagination away from all the things that are informing us and then see what would happen. And then those results don’t carry into the world that we’re in because we didn’t account for all of these other things that are happening, most of which are subconscious. So I hope that helps you. And I’m glad you stuck with the video this long, at least I’m assuming you did. And I thank you very much for the information that you give me by way of giving me your time and attention.