The Mudcat Café TM
Thread #59418 Message #1231767
Posted By: Amos
22-Jul-04 - 08:02 PM
Thread Name: BS: The Mother of all BS threads
Subject: RE: BS: The Mother of all BS threads
4. There are grosses of fat tomes available on the rationale of this approach to information representation. A switch represents whether or not person ìAî is in the room, whether a plane is in motion or not, whether a motor is running or cold. Eight switches can count up the number of times a fly breathes, or the gallons of fuel used in one minute of operation by a flattop. This power to represent extends from the instant to the dynamically changing: communications become possible as soon as an energy pulse can be agreed to represent a switch in an on state or an off state.
So far has this wave extended across our cutural horizons that these notions, once the bleeding edge of cybernetic theory, are now grade-school stuff. The machinery to combine and design more and more of these switches has become the hottest industry of the century in less than twenty years.
This is a migration past a third-order abstraction of awareness. This is not a difficult thing to notice.