Gustible - under the rubric of [$_SELF]

I have lately done a lot of reading on various knowledge management related topics. The most fascinating aspect of what I have come across, is to do with the way that information is being treated in certain modern specializations of physics, information science and economics.

In keeping with the recognition that our world is anything but linear, the realisation is growing that information is not linear either – in fact, the question of WHAT information is, exactly, has become a central question to a number of disciplines – not least of these the dismal science, economics. Why is this ?

The reason is straightforward – our world has changed. It has changed to the extent that new paradigms are being forced on us – the old ones simply do not work anymore. One cannot say that information is just “something” people have at their disposal anymore. The old arguments that labour and capital are the primary resources on which to build an economy ring patently false. Labour and capital have become the resources that are used to build stores of information and knowledge, which in turn are used to build the economy. Google was built on an idea. So was Microsoft and Apple. The “stuff” came later.

Mathematicians, physicists, philosophers and logicians  are blurring the boundaries between the abstract and the real – more and more. We have started to understand that scale is everything – the world is strange at the quantum level, and even stranger at the level where we live and dream. Our dreams are just flows of electrical impulses, measurable and observable … until we look deeper, and deeper, and change the dreams by looking at them. By looking, we dream our world.

The mathematical boundaries between the world of thermodynamic entropy and information entropy has lately been breached. A physics of information is being studied next to the physics of high-energy particles and mechanical systems. We are, for the first time, getting a glimpse of a world without boundaries, of infinite complexity, and of gracious simplicity.

How will this impact us ? I intend to talk more about this – to talk about virtual worlds, and what it would really mean to live in a world that is defined by data…where does the information come from ? Can this world embody knowledge ? What kind of knowledge, and how is it related to the real world ? Is the world real ? Are there virtual worlds without humans ?

Watch this space.