Information
&
Uncertainty

Now we know that in a world where

giant ubiquitous tech companies make their profits

from the amount of information about you that they can sell to other people,

we need to be critically aware of how and why that information is being looped back to us.

But it seems that few people have any kind of grasp

of the scale and detail of that information gathering.

And the ones doing the gathering

know that most people don't care,

as long as their tech seems to do what they want it to do,

happily unaware and unconcerned

that their digital friend feels exactly the same way about them

In our daily lives we are bombarded

with information from all sides,

much of it deliberate distortions of the truth

to push opinion in a certain direction,

at the behest of politicians, advertisers and self-publicists,

using statistics

to tell not-quite-lies.

So as we pick our way through this world

we treat different kinds of information

with different kinds of rigour.

Adverts for the latest cleaning product

will probably be given less credibility

than statistics on the nightly news.

Uncertainty as to what to believe

also relates to what kind of information is being communicated.

There are different kinds of information,

quantifiable and non-quantifiable,

figures and feelings,

and much money is spent on using what can be counted

to influence what is intangible.

But that intangible nature of information

has proved very useful in a field that is highly dominated by numbers,

the world of science.

For information can exist and travel,

but has no mass.

In the age of information, much of science begins to use the language of information

to describe its understanding of the world,

much as in previous centuries the world explored by science

was described in clockwork mechanical terms,

then in electo-magnetic terms

as we still do with the brain,

and now cosmology and physics

are being imagined in terms of information.

Now information as a scientific term

is used to get around uncomfortable contradictions

in discussions of what happens in black holes,

and the massless immateriality of information

can conveniently sidestep

the faster than light speed needs

that are associated with quantum entanglement.

Quantum phenomena are strange enough

without the involvement of information.

If information has no mass

what does that mean for our understanding of the nature of matter?

So as we keep rediscovering, the further and the closer we look,

we and our world and the heavens that surround it,

seem to grow ever and ever less solid.

What is measurable becomes ever more shifting and impressionistic.

What was the point of origin of all this,

the burst of information that filled the universe?

Not what was quantifiable,

that came soon after.

What happened was not quantifiable

God said

“Be”

and it was.