Matter is Information Solidified

I read an interesting quote: “Impressive displays of rhetoric and linguistic force are a good way to seem important and invite a particular kind of admiration, but they tend to silence dissent and discourage deeper modes of engagement.” - Emily Wilson

I agree with the latter part, that lack of a shared lexicon impedes communications and discourages healthy interaction, but I'm not so sure about the first. While some people, at least some of the time, may have "seeming important" as their goal, I think often it's just a curse of knowledge -- you get used to thinking the way you think with the concepts you have available, and in communicating in short-hand with others who share the same set of terms and concepts. It's easy to lose others who may be sharp and interested, but just aren't facile with the same terminology.

I've got a few points about globalism, competition, opportunity, equality, and the American Dream that I think are worth sharing and discussing, and I know I've spent a lot of time reading, listening, and learning, so I'm worried that communication fidelity will be poor and my influence will be nil. My goal is to "remix" some key concepts from others (everything is a remix!), so I'll attribute the underpinning concepts, while adding what may perhaps prove to be, hopefully, my own novel personal contributions and perspectives.

Before launching off in the coming days as I get some time to think and write over the holidays, I'll see if I can create a lexicon of terms and concepts for us to build upon.

Here's a good one: matter as a persistent store of information - fundamentally, it's just frozen knowledge. We're all used to the notion of communications -- sending information from here to there -- and perhaps more vaguely of signals, noise, entropy, and such, but the valuable facet here is more subtle: matter encapsulates knowledge and makes one person's skills and knowledge readily accessible to others.

Examples abound: you don't know how to design and build a car, or an oven, or probably even a hammer, yet you use these and many other devices everyday and obtain valuable utility from them. Such re-use is perhaps the single largest contributor to our complex society, with ever-expanding stratification and specialization.

So, if we can solidify and transport information via objects, and those objects add utility and value, then production itself is the replication of useful knowledge as much as it is an arrangement of raw materials. Computers that help with such replication, whether a complex AI or a simple process controller, are a related encapsulation of know-how, another form of information.

I'll just leave this concept here for rumination and comment, and then build upon it next time.