7.27.20
“Information is the resolution of uncertainty”
~ Claude Shannon (the father of information technology)
If information is the resolution of uncertainty, then it is also the obsolescence of trust. Trust is our capacity to traverse the uncertain, with intuition and inspiration as our poles. With certainty there is no traversing required, simply execution—the ontology of efficiency and teleology of language. The embarking into the Information Age is then embracing a societal system in which certainty is expected, produced and consumed. If done with abandon, our capacity for trust will diminish to a vestigial inconvenience (from the point of view of our new society). So then, what is the human without the need, want, or use of trust?
We may all become brats by way of our certainty, but that is regardless of our capacity for trust. Perhaps as expectation is certainty and certainty is expectation, we would internally find it alarming and violent to disrupt this continuity, which is certainly how then we would behave externally—alarmist and violently.
Trust must be the root of our generative ability, both physiologically and conceptually, naturally and artistically. So would it follow that we are entering into an age in which we will lose our virtuosity in mating and musing? The exercising of our will to pursue inspiration and yield to intuition is by nothing other than trust. If we may be certain of what is beautiful, by being informed, then fashion has conquered us and our inner voices are nothing but white noise. If I call inspiration and intuition by their colloquial names—our heart and gut respectively—then in the information age it might actually be perilous to follow your heart or listen to your gut. Yet it is hard to imagine mating or creating without the full engagement of both our heart and gut.
Notes:
“The fundamental problem of communication is that of reproducing at one point either exactly or approximately a message selected at another point. Frequently the messages have meaning; that is they refer to or are correlated according to some system with certain physical or conceptual entities. These semantic aspects of communication are irrelevant to the engineering problem. “
~ from Claude Shannon’s A Mathematical Theory of Communication