We have seen that all living organisms are informavores. They collect information, process it, and act on it.
Keywords
entropy, hertzsprung-russell diagram, iridium, noösphere, corroborees, goldilocks conditions, natufians, pastoral nomads, arthashastra, informavores
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Knowledge is like a sphere; the greater its volume, the larger its contact with the unknown.
The current state of knowledge can be summarized thus: In the beginning, there was nothing, which exploded.
The first law of thermodynamics tells us that the ocean of energy is always there; it’s conserved. The second law of thermodynamics tells us that all the forms that emerge will eventually dissolve back into the ocean of energy.
This is the “power rating” of a human being: 120 watts, just slightly greater than the power rating of many traditional lightbulbs.
One of the most famous definitions of information is “a difference which makes difference”
In an RNA world, genetic information could easily get lost or distorted.
We have seen that all living organisms are informavores. They collect information, process it, and act on it.
.. That’s why, when a human solves a puzzle, the brain gets the same buzz it gets from food and sex.
The achievement, apparently unique to our species, means that today, one tiny part of the universe is beginning to understand itself.
Was it, as American neuroanthropologist Terrence Deacon has argued, a new ability to compress large amounts of information into symbols (deceptively simple words like symbol that carry a huge informational cargo)? Or was it the evolution of new grammar circuits in the human brain that helped us combine words according to precise rules so as to convey a great variety of different meanings, as the linguist Noam Chomsky has suggested?
Put simply, farming was an energy and resource grab by a single, very resourceful species with access to increasing amounts of information about how to exploit its environment. Through the magic of collective learning, humans had discovered how to increase their share of the energy and resources flowing through the biosphere by diverting more and more of those flows to human uses, just as humans would eventually channel major rivers onto their own fields and into their own cities.
Intense symbiotic relationships often lead to changes in the behavior and the genetic makeup of both species.
It was potential knowledge, like potential energy - knowledge held in reserve that could be activated if and when it was needed
While foragers normally thought of themselves as embedded within biosphere, farmers saw the environment as something to be managed, cultivated, exploited, improved, and even conquered.
collective learning gave farmers the knowledge they needed to manipulate their environments, farming gave them the food and energy flows they needed to multiply and to transform their surroundings over larger and larger areas and with increasing power and virtuosity.
Like all living organisms, they mobilized information, too, because more information gave them access to more energy and more resources.
In foraging societies, the slow accumulation of knowledge encouraged migration into new environments rather than the accumulation of material goods.
As surpluses grew, specializations multiplied.
As Karl Marx noted, peasants had no more unity than potatoes in a sack.
Thinking about such processes in ecological terms reminds us that wealth never really consists of things; it consists of control over the energy flows that make, move and transform things.
Particularly important were technologies that accelerated exchanges, such as new forms of money or improved ships or roads. The empires of Afro-Eurasia were all great road-builders, ..
There was also a sort of garbage tax paid to entropy. This was energy from which no one really benefited, and it includes the energy wasted during wars and natural or epidemiological disasters
Investors, inventors, and engineers understood that improved pumps could earn them huge profits and revolutionize the supply of coal to English homes and industries.
If the sharing of information is what makes us humans so powerful, computers multiplied that power many times over.
This is because wage earners, unlike peasants, cannot survive without governments. Farming villages could exist quite happily beyond the borders of the great agrarian civilizations, but wage earners depend on the existence of laws, markets, employers, shops and currencies
Information –expert knowledge– is what counts, rather than the generalized skills of peasants.
“The hardness [of all great myths], “Joseph Campbell writes, “is balanced by an assurance that all that we see is but the reflex of a power that endures, untouched by the pain. Thus the tales are both pitiless and terrorless– suffused with the joy of a transcendent anonymity regarding itself in all the self-centered, battling egos that are born and die in time”
Alertness, determination, and hope– these are the crucial virtues of anyone on a quest, because the journeyer who misses opportunities or who gives up too soon or who despairs must fail.
In 1930. In an essay entitled “Economic Possibilities for Our Grandchildren.” the British economist John Maynard Keynes argued that within a century, productivity would be high enough to guarantee the necessities of life to everyone. At that point, he hoped, people would stop working so hard and think more about how they lived.
With the support of governments, more and more people will drop out of extreme forms of the rat race.
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entropy, ai