The Nature Institute

The Counter-Information Revolution:
From Information to Expression

Stephen L. Talbott


The world is not an informational system but a meaningful text.

Once, when addressing several hundred librarians, I asked whether anyone could tell me what information is. No one raised a hand. Nor have subsequent inquiries to various groups of librarians brought any satisfaction. This is odd. Librarians are "information specialists", and ours is an age that worships information as the very stuff of progress, the mediator of personal and social redemption. Can it really be that if a visiting alien were to ask us what this glorious stuff is, we would have to stand embarrassed and mute? Will it turn out that all this time we have been worshipping an idol, hollow and lifeless?

One thing is sure: we cannot hope to glimpse a post-informational age without first gaining some reasonable understanding of information itself.

The Strange Disappearance of Information

A good place to start is with the meanings implicit in the way we speak about and imagine ourselves using information:

To begin with, information is something we think of as reliably transferable. We gather and distribute it, store it in a database for later retrieval, upload and download it. Moving information from here to there (business people speak of "just-in-time information") is what computer networks are supposed to do. Error-correction logic in hardware or software is said to guarantee the integrity of the information we transfer.

Information is, in a more general sense, mechanically manipulable, which is what information-processing and information-management techniques are all about. Using machines and algorithms, we can sift through and filter information, combine it, alter it, and analyze it. Given properly performing tools, we expect the results of such analysis to be fully as valid as the information we started with.

Thirdly, information is quantifiable. We speak, both technically and casually, of information as consisting of "bits", and we often take the byte count of a computer file as a measure of its information. The idea of doubling the size of an information database makes perfectly good sense to us, as does the question, "How much information do you have?" Technical theory assigns to information a strict, quantitative value.

Finally (and drawing out the implications of the foregoing): information is something precisely definable. We can know exactly what we put into or retrieve from a database. There is no ambiguity about what we are transferring or manipulating or counting, and we can track its movement bit by bit. Each bit is unequivaocal and definite, so that we can, in principle, declare each bit true or false, valid or invalid, up-to-date or out-of-date.

Taken together, these four criteria embody the virtues of what I will call mechanical accuracy. I will refer to anything tending toward the satisfaction of the criteria as informational. We do, of course, also think in many other ways about information, as when we consider it the raw material of insight and understanding or the central cognitive resource for cultural advance. But it's one thing simply to assign many different virtues to a thing and quite another to demonstrate the reality and mutual consistency of those virtues.

This leads me to an unhappy observation. If we are dead-serious about these four traits of information — if we really want our information to be transferable, mechanically manipulable, quantifiable, and precisely defined — then this most treasured commodity of the information age turns out to be nothing much at all. The only language capable of perfect mechanical accuracy is a purely formal language such as the one given by the symbols of logic, or of mathematics, or of a computer programming language. But such languages have one massive drawback: they are not intended for expressing anything. They are, by themselves, wonderfully effective instruments for abstracting and articulating logical structure, but not for filling such structure with meaningful content.

The mechanical accuracy we ask of information, in other words, demands a language in which we cannot say anything significant. This is a statement whose full justification, I hope, will emerge over the course of this essay. But in the meantime, one line of thought should at least prove suggestive.

Much of the glamor and aura of scientific authority surrounding the word "information" derives from the mathematical theory of communication, which played such an important role in the computer revolution. Claude Shannon, who did much to elaborate this theory in the 1940s, made clear that the information he was talking about had nothing directly to do with meaning. Rather, it was a measure of certain statistical features of the "communication situation".

If you doubt Shannon's disclaimer, then consider this: one way to maximize the flow of information, according to the theory, is to set up a "random noise generator" — for example, a machine that transmits alphabetic letters in a completely random sequence. You cannot send more information through a communication channel than that. On the other hand, any time you do achieve truly meaningful communication you will have done so by reducing the flow of information compared to this maximum potential. So we see a kind of tension between the formal, technical, and precise notion of information and our desire for meaning and significance. In his introduction to Shannon's 1949 publication of The Mathematical Theory of Communication, Warren Weaver remarked on his own

vague feeling that information and meaning may prove ... subject to some joint restriction that condemns a person to the sacrifice of the one as he insists on having much of the other.

Random noise as the epitome of information; a trade-off between information and meaning — no wonder those librarians were a little unclear about the concept! I suspect, however, that they've got a much better handle on the problem than the culture at large. Librarians, after all, must continually serve clients who are looking, not for the technical virtues of information, but for meaningful insight.

Information to Expressive Depth

Surely insight and understanding are what our culture hopes for in its worship of information. The paradox, which I will summarize baldly before explaining, is that we will get what we want only when we are willing to embrace virtues nearly opposite to those embodied in the ideal of mechanical accuracy:

Instead of formulating thin, conventional thoughts that can mechanically and reliably be transferred from here to there, we must cultivate ideas whose unexpected insightfulness and expressive depth require the recipient to repeat the creative work that first went into their formulation. But, of course, the recipient's work can never be identical in all respects to the originator's; the idea will inevitably be compromised in its passage from one mind to another — compromised, but also enriched by the distinctive perspectives of the other. What would simply be inaccuracy in the transfer of information here becomes liveliness, complementation, and discovery.

Instead of quantities, we must pursue qualities. The qualities of things (contrary to our usual way of thinking) are what give them a substantial presence in the world, determining their nature and significance. If you took any part of the world and subtracted all the qualities from it — the colors, sounds, odors, tastes, textures, and so on — you would have no world left. Nothing would be there — nothing, at least, that we could ever know about. The one-sided drive to quantify everything and then ignore the qualities from which the quantities were abstracted is a drive to dispense with the world.

And, instead of precise, perfectly defined ideas, we will have to seek what cannot be fully captured and tied down, what never-endingly insists on being modified by the view from yet a different angle. This is the way it is, most obviously, with our knowledge of each other. It's also how it is with a profound text. Should we expect it to be otherwise with our understanding of the world — the world that has given rise to people and texts?

None of this is beyond our ken. We all experience a knowing that is qualitative and expressive, even if we have failed to provide an adequate place for this knowing in our society's primary cognitive enterprises. The dancer, musician, and painter all know very well that a particular gesture — a bodily movement or musical phrase or stroke of the brush — has its own distinctive qualities, and these fit or unfit it for combination with other particular gestures. Every attentive reader knows that the phrase "fathers old" suggests qualities rather different from "old fathers" — and we all employ such differences in order to convey our own meanings. Likewise, we all recognize different qualities in green and red — qualities that cannot be expressed through any mathematical relationships between the wavelengths involved.

We recognize these qualities and we can meaningfully talk about them, but we cannot fully and precisely capture them in language. We cannot mechanically convey our own meanings to the next person without loss or with perfect accuracy. We must look for a way to suggest our meanings, perhaps using metaphor. The results of suggestion, however, are never perfectly predictable and manageable.

The Contours of a Paradox

A page containing nothing but symbols of formal mathematics wonderfully satisfies our hunger for the informational virtues of mechanical accuracy. The symbols can, in their entire formal significance, be transmitted from one place to another; they are themselves the pure language of quantity; they lend themselves perfectly to machine manipulation, as by an ordinary calculator; and they are precisely defined and unambiguous.

Yet this information-laden page tells us little or nothing about the world. Only when we apply the mathematics by bringing these formally emptied symbols into association with a very different, a more ordinary and messy, sort of language do they begin to illuminate the world. But now, just because this other language does aim to express something about the world — for example, about force, mass, and acceleration in the case of Newton's second law — our formulations no longer enjoy the purity and precision of the formal symbols alone. (How precisely can we describe what a force is?) So in gaining real-world significance we have sacrificed the advertised virtues of information.

I am not sure we are willing to make this sacrifice. Part of the problem is that the virtues in question so evidently are virtues. How could we possibly prefer lack of clarity to unequivocal precision? What else could we desire but to convey our thoughts to others accurately, without loss due to fuzziness or vagueness? And it's true: we must not abandon the ideals of precision and accurate communication. We should pursue them ferociously. It's just that these ideals are, in the end, approximately and meaningfully achievable only if we also pursue quite different ideals — and these different ideals will always tend to subvert the absolute rule of the informational ones. Einstein once said,

Insofar as the propositions of mathematics give an account of reality, they are not certain; and insofar as they are certain they do not describe reality.

He was not arguing that we should give up trying to be as certain of our conclusions as possible. But it is a fact that if we want to lay hold of reality rather than be shut up within our own precise but empty calculations, then we must move, not only toward mathematical certainty, but simultaneously in a direction nearly opposite to such certainty.

An opposite direction? Yes, but the opposites here are strange ones. They not only war with each other, but also depend on each other. After all, it's not much use being perfectly accurate if our accuracy turns out not to be about anything — if it is mere, pedantic accuracy for accuracy's sake, divorced from any deep grasp of reality. On the other hand, what do we gain by planting ourselves firmly within the qualitative reality of the world if we cannot articulate the revelations we derive there with any degree of accuracy? So the concern for accuracy doesn't make much sense if its pursuit robs us of anything significant to be accurate about, but neither is it much good reveling in some vague sense of deep significance if we can't unfold and characterize this significance with any accuracy. Only when the opposite movements continually compensate for each other can we gain an understanding that is both reasonably precise and also about something significant.

Unfortunately, paradox — the need to move simultaneously in opposite directions, aiming for antagonistic ideals that nevertheless feed off each other — is not welcomed by many citizens of the information age. Such contrary movements don't compute. My very words here illustrate the need to transcend the informational virtues. The paradox I have been trying to convey is not precisely statable without ambiguity. It is not susceptible to purely mathematical or logical formulation. And I cannot automatically and mechanically convey my meaning to your mind, free of any loss or alteration. I depend upon your sympathies and your willingness to carry out some difficult inner work by shaping your thoughts, in your own distinctive way, to the contrary movements I am trying to evoke.

This, then, is my thesis: the mechanically accurate virtues of information carry us away from meaning and significance. They reward us with a definiteness and precision that is, however, about less and less. They tend to empty the world of its qualitative fullness and therefore alienate us from what is real and present. They incline us away from the flexibility of thought that can encompass apparent opposites harmoniously. So our worship of information threatens us with an imbalance whereby one movement of thought overshadows its opposite; we embrace the satisfactions of precision while letting reality slip from our grasp. Only by recovering the movement of mind running counter to the one predominantly celebrated in information can we gain the balance required for us to transcend the age of information. There is no overestimating the difficulty of this recovery.

Clearly we do have experience of meaning — something that would be impossible if our cognitive undertakings were fully possessed of the virtues we attribute to information. The problem is that we do not honor the "counter-informational" virtues, nor have we struggled to discipline them or give them a proper place in our science and education.

Machines Without Qualities

To rise above information is much the same as to rise above the machine. Our progressive reduction of the world to information has at the same time been a reduction of the world (in our thought) to a machine. A machine is what the world becomes when we strip it of qualities and bring only unequivocal, precise, mechanically susceptible thoughts to it.

More and more, in fact, the machine just is information so far as we are concerned. We increasingly conceive the pervasive digital machinery of our lives, in its essence, as software. The distinction between mechanisms for information processing and information itself is vanishing. The machine's disincarnation in a halo of information is one aspect of the overall disappearance of the world.

Only when we begin to pay attention to the qualities of things, incommensurate as they are with machinery and information, will we be able to regain the world, which is always and only a world of qualities. The revolutionary implications of this redirected attention are perhaps most immediately evident in the disciplines of artificial intelligence (AI) and cognitive science.

Researchers in these disciplines have for many years been motivated by a vision of the human being as a machine — a computer. But after years of hype and giddy expectation, the entire AI project has more recently been caught up in a seizure of doubt, confusion, and uncertainty — this because researchers have finally confronted the most basic of questions: how are we to reckon, on the computer model, with the so-called "qualia" of consciousness — that is, with the qualitative reality of consciousness out of which all knowledge and understanding arises?

The hopelessness of this problem has led some investigators to despair of the computer model altogether. But, perhaps more significantly, others are prepared to solve the problem simply by dispensing with consciousness as a kind of illusion, a phantom of the brain. Make the machine go through the right behavioral motions, they are inclined to believe, and that will be enough.

So it's not only the world that looks like disappearing into the informational abstraction of the machine, but we ourselves as conscious beings.

In sum, the age of information is the age of the machine, culminating in that perfected prosthesis for mechanical thinking, the digital information processor. At the same time, we have been engaged during this age in a sustained flight from qualities, which do not lend themselves to mechanical treatment. And, with our preference for the informational neatness of abstract, formal constructions stripped of all qualities, we have been abandoning the immediately given presence of both the world and ourselves.

The fundamental habits of thought underlying such deeply ingrained tendencies are not easily addressed, or even pointed at. It's rather like trying to point out the water to a fish: the fish has no experience of an air world or terrestrial world by comparison to which the water might be noticed. We have for several hundred years been adapting ourselves to an informational environment, and all references to a richer, more diverse world are bound to seem bizarre, if not downright incoherent.

Nevertheless, I would like to suggest ever so briefly what new, revolutionary vistas will open up if and when we escape the suffocating, mechanistic constrictions of the information age. I will do this by trying to indicate how some of the most vexing questions of our day reflect the imperative to move with our minds in a direction opposite to what information demands. I will look at the yearning for holism, the persistence of Cartesian dualism, the postmodern doubt of "absolute truth", and the character of science.

Qualities Make the Whole

Over the past several decades "holistic thinking" has become fashionable. But it turns out that you can't have wholes without qualities, and most of the thinking about wholes has failed to reckon with this fact. The holistic thinking we usually hear about is simply mechanistic thinking ratcheted up a notch or two in complexity by virtue of various network interactions, feedback loops, and so on.

Why can't you have wholes without qualities? Because in a true whole the parts must interpenetrate one another. That's how their isolation as separate parts is overcome, and how an integral unity can express itself through all the parts. This mutual penetration is possible by means of qualities. Without the blending capacity of qualities, you have only parts sitting side-by-side, interacting with each other externally, which is to say, mechanically. You do not have an organic whole.

You can see the role of qualities by considering a masterful painting. It is quite straightforward, in the spirit of the information age, to digitize the painting, transmit the digital representation from one place to another, and subject this representation to various machine manipulations — for example, darkening the entire painting by a given amount. But if you were given only the digital representation, say, in the form of a two-dimensional array of numbers assigning a color value to each of the many thousands of points, or pixels, in the painting, you would not be able to say anything about the unity or wholeness of the work. There is nothing in the mathematical relations themselves, considered apart from the qualities they were abstracted from, to satisfy your curiosity about the coherent form and unity of the painting. Only by contemplating the colors and textures, the gestural qualities of the lines, the felt weight of the massed elements, the dialog of light with dark, can you begin to read the painting as a whole. One part influences the other, and through this mutual influence the parts become what they are. Above all, the meaningful unity of the whole informs each part.

That's the way it is with qualities. They "contaminate" each other. When we look at a patch of color, we find that it changes depending on the surrounding colors. So, too, in any expressive language — unlike in a computer language — the qualitative connotations (and therefore the meanings) of a given word change depending on the surrounding words. To interpret a significant text based solely on the fixed, dictionary meanings of words without reference to the actual context typically produces absurdity. The meaning of the passage as a whole must be allowed to inform the part, making it what it is. In a genuine whole every part becomes what it is only by virtue of the whole expressed through the part.

Qualities, then, are a prerequisite for holism because only through qualities can the side-by-side otherness of things be overcome. By contrast, the entire purpose of the informational virtues is to preserve this otherness. In logic, for example (as the philologist Owen Barfield tells us), interpenetration is not only undesirable, but it becomes the sin of equivocation — "the slovenly confusion of one determinate meaning with another determinate meaning". The clarifying, distinguishing function of logic is essential for mechanical accuracy, but by itself it cannot give us wholes; it can only analyze wholes into parts according to their differences. The expressive power that overcomes difference and produces qualitative unity is lost from view.

Beyond Dualism

We have been able to sustain an indefensible dualism of mind and matter during these past several centuries only because we have stubbornly ignored qualities. The ignoring goes back to the explicit decision by the pioneers of the scientific revolution, beginning with Galileo, to heed quantities alone. This has spared us any substantial reckoning with the uncomfortable fact that qualities are neither wholly "in here" (in my consciousness) nor wholly "out there" (in the external world). The world revealed to us through qualities is neither an inner world nor an outer world, but an inner-outer world. The difficult camel we have got to swallow is the fact that consciousness is not something merely going on inside our skulls; it is the inside of the world.

What makes a quality a quality is its expressive or gestural aspect. But expressing or gesturing is always an act of consciousness. The essence of an expressive gesture is interior and immaterial, just as the characteristic form of a particular type of plant is interior and immaterial; you immediately recognize a new instance of the plant, not because you have seen those exact leaf shapes before and now recall them from memory, but rather because you recognize in these particular, never-previously-seen shapes yet another outer representation of the characteristic, immaterial gesture of the species.

The world consists of exteriors through which an interior is expressing itself, much as the face of a person expresses the soul and spirit within. The inner gesture and its outer embodiment belong together. There can be no exterior without an interior. To attempt a separation by force is to attempt the impossible, like trying to separate the marble from the artistic content of the statue or, more generally, the medium from the message. This separation is nevertheless what Descartes foisted upon the modern mind.

Descartes was a rationalist, seeking a foundation for truth in the pure light of thinking. But this is less important than the kind of thinking he allowed himself. Trained as a mathematician (he almost single-handedly invented modern, quantitative geometry), he famously sought in all his thinking for "clear and distinct" ideas. This meant, for him, abstract, mathematical, qualitatively emptied ideas — informational ideas — and these in turn dictated his crude conceptualization of the world as a machine. Given the kind of thinking he countenanced — and we can recognize in him a prophet of the information age — the mechanical picture of the universe was a foregone conclusion.

Moreover, while Descartes posited an "extended stuff" (matter) and "thinking stuff" (mind) having nothing whatever to do with each other, the fact that his thinking gave no dignified place to qualities guaranteed that the thinking stuff itself would ultimately be reconceived as a machine — in today's terms, a computer. As we have seen, once we enter the domain of information, the distinction between information and information-processing machine progressively evaporates.

Sometimes it appears that nearly everyone today disowns the "Cartesian dichotomy". What this typically means is that thinking has simply been reconceived as mechanism, so that one side of the dichotomy has been disposed of. The irony for those who imagine they have in this way become consistent materialists is that their cherished extended and mechanical substance has meanwhile been disappearing into the abstraction of software! So the would-be materialist ends up with a world substance that looks like not much more than abstract cerebration — a kind of thinking, but an extremely limited and one-sided thinking.

If we really want to rise above the confusion of the Cartesian split, it is no longer enough to accept the split itself and then proceed to make one side fundamental and the other somehow derivative or illusory. We must refuse to cleave the world in the first place, instead finding a different way forward. This way will become much clearer when we correct Descartes' disregard of qualities. Then we will no longer be tempted by the impossible notion of matter that has been stripped of its expressive interior — matter that is without qualities and therefore not even experienceable.

We are still a long way from doing justice to qualities, with their double, inner-outer aspect. The information age has seen the culmination of Cartesianism, not its dismissal. To move beyond the information age we will have to find a way to undo the Great Schism that Descartes first articulated so clearly.

From Truth to Meaning

The opposition, or tension, between informational austerity and qualitative richness can also be seen as the tension between truth-as-validity and truth-as-meaning. The notion of truth-as-validity governs those various formalisms toward which information is always tending. For example, the logician says that a series of logical propositions, or a logical argument, is "valid" rather than "true" because the argument makes no claim about any particular content of the world. The validity applies only to the internal coherence of the logical structure itself. Much the same holds for mathematical propositions.

It is different with meaning, which, as particular content, is irreducibly qualitative. "Meaning", in fact, is a near-synonym for "quality". To say that something in the world expresses a certain quality is to say what the thing means. We ourselves are always trying to express what we mean. That's just what expression is all about.

But, of course, if we are talking about anything very significant, then what we mean is not always so easy to convey. Where truth-as-validity has a crisp, absolute, yes-or-no quality about it, this is exactly what meaning does not have. To speak of the meaning of an expression or quality is therefore misleading. Meaning — whether expressed in a line of text, a musical phrase, a dance movement, or an animal's behavioral gesture — is never univocal. We can always deepen our understanding of a meaning, state it in different terms, see it from new angles. Potentially, we can recognize the entire animal and its habitat in that one gesture. There is no limit to this elaboration of meaning, but neither is it merely arbitrary.

Truth-as-validity is the pre-eminent virtue of the information age. Such absolute, yes-or-no truth is the mark of rigor, of scientific respectability. By contrast we don't really know what to do with meaning, which, judged according to this one-sided virtue, appears merely vague and soft-headed. And we don't often stop to consider that, without meaning, we have mere validity — propositions that, however rigorous and self-consistent, tell us nothing about the world we live in.

All this throws light on the so-called "culture wars". These wars have come to their sharpest focus in a series of nasty disputes between postmodernists and physicists. The postmodernists, denying any notion of absolute truth, assert the relativity of all knowledge claims. These claims, they say, are always cultural and psychological statements, but cultures and psyches continually change and we have no way to declare any particular cultural context canonical for the assessment of truth claims.

Hogwash, comes the reply from physicists. Science gives us a set of proven tools for the steady accumulation of indubitably true knowledge about the objective world, regardless of cultural context. The inevitable imperfections in this knowledge — especially at the "cutting edge" of science — do not detract from the immense and ever-growing background of achieved truth framing all current investigations.

It is not hard to recognize in this dispute the gross confusions arising from the imperialistic over-application of truth-as-validity and from the widespread disregard of truth-as-meaning. (Since the idea of truth today is largely reduced to truth-as-validity, I will abbreviate by speaking simply of the tension between truth and meaning.) All too briefly, here is how the culture wars look from the vantage point I have been sketching:

The biologist E. O. Wilson says of prescientific cultures that "they are wrong, always wrong"; they know nothing about "the real world" but can only "invent ingenious speculations and myths". This simplistic, categorical judgment is hopelessly inadequate to the reality. On one hand, the classicist, Francis Cornford, reminded us that "the properties of immutability and impenetrability ascribed to atoms are the last degenerate forms of divine attributes". He was speaking of early Atomism, but a similar point could be made about every fundamental term of modern science. On the other hand, these terms themselves remain so troubled and problematic that many scientists refuse to leave their equations and laboratory apparatus long enough even to talk about them. The physicist Hans Christian von Baeyer describes a conversation he had with Claudia Denke Tesche, a scientist exploring problems with quantum mechanics. The question of the meaning of her work arises, and the conversation takes an all too familiar turn:

"Meaning is a philosophical word", she shrugs, and then turns her attention to a leaky vacuum pump.

Yet it may well be that what the scientific imagination needs most today is a little refreshment from ancient springs of meaning.

Beyond Informational Science

The age of great scientific discoveries, we have heard at various times, may be drawing to a close. Especially in the most rigorously quantitative disciplines such as physics and cosmology, the latter-day dream of a "final theory" tantalizes many brilliant minds, and there has been vigorous debate about the "end of science".

The odd thing is that we also find a nearly opposite expectation. Among a few of the more philosophically minded physicists, and throughout the "softer" sciences (not to mention the New Age movement), many foresee an impending collapse of science or, at least, a dramatic paradigm shift. But similar thoughts have increasingly affected the mainstream of the hard sciences. Speaking of the work on complexity theory, the Nobel Prize-winning chemist, Ilya Prigogine, professes

a new vision of matter, one no longer passive, as described in the mechanical world view, but associated with spontaneous activity. This change is so deep that we believe we can truly speak of a new dialogue of man with nature.

And science writer James Glanz summarizes the fundamental doubt about the existing structures of knowledge this way:

It comes as unwelcome news to some physicists that just as their field is enjoying unparalleled success, its relationship to reality is being questioned with a pointedness not seen for decades.

We can now see that both the triumphalism and the skepticism are justified to a degree. Those who view science in the strictest quantitative terms, eschewing the "obfuscations" of meaning, naturally find their discipline contracting toward the kind of neat, formal closure that every purely logical system strives for — a prospect that may seem exciting so long as they ignore the growing distance between their satisfying equations and any full understanding of the world around us.

At the same time, those who are open to questions of meaning discover the basic terms of their science continually being transformed. This is the way it always is with meaning, which you could almost define as "whatever is susceptible without limit to enlargement and elucidation".

The layman can hardly avoid chuckling to himself when, after hearing a group of physicists straining toward the last, mathematical chinks in a conclusive "theory of everything", he then hears these same physicists wondering whether time flows forward or backward or not at all; or proposing particle transactions that work backward in time, and "wormholes" that take a shortcut through spacetime, linking two different times; or suggesting that our universe may have many more than three spatial dimensions; or talking about a shadow universe sharing gravity, but no other forces, with our own universe. If these are indeed meaningful inquiries (and if not, what sort of understanding is the physicist claiming to offer us?), then we look much more like standing at the beginning of our quest for knowledge than at the end.

The seemingly insuperable obstacle for many scientists is to realize that even if they had their final theory in its own remote, constricted, and abstract terms, they would remain novices when it comes to understanding the world. They would, in Einstein's terms, have their certainty and still be left wondering about its relation to reality.

We can grasp a great deal about the challenge of understanding by applying ourselves to a meaningful text. Here there is no such thing as a fundamental level of meaning from which all else can be derived in a bottom-up, explanatory manner, from parts to whole. Even during an initial reading we are struggling from the very first words to seize upon the larger thought producing these words. We begin with the whole, fragmentarily apprehended, and we end with the whole more fully apprehended. Our understanding can always be shifted toward a different perspective or carried to a deeper level.

This should suggest to us that the physicist's investigation of "particles" will never lead to some final, bedrock level of explanation. There can be no fundamental particles because a qualitative and meaningful world just is not built up that way.

The world is not an informational system but a meaningful text. And in a text, the individual word arises from, and is shaped by, the meaning expressed through it. If the physicist deals with qualityless atomic entities that cannot be "shaped" in this way, it is due to a retreat from the expressive world into abstraction. It is rather as if you studied a text by restricting yourself to an analysis of the fixed-form alphabetic letters; you might discover interesting statistical relationships among the letters, but you would have put the text's meaning out of reach. However, to call the meaning nonexistent merely because you have determined not to look at it is hardly justified.

Science will never progress from an informational to an expressive world without first coming to terms with the Cartesian diremption of matter from mind. It's not as if we receive no encouragement in this. For example, many mathematicians believe with G. H. Hardy that "mathematical reality lies outside us". It's hard to know what this means if not that the pure conceptuality, the "thinking substance", of mathematical truth is out there. But others, such as the Nobel physicist Percy Bridgman, consider it "the merest truism, evident at once to unsophisticated observation, that mathematics is a human invention".

Yet why should we have to choose between two obvious truths — that is, between a mathematics that is discovered "in here" and one that exists objectively "out there". We could better say, "it is out there because we find it in here; our own interior is one with the interior of the world". Physicst Bruce Gregory writes,

Despite the abstract nature of mathematics, most mathematicians seem convinced of the objective reality of the world of which they write. But does this tell us something about the world or something about the way we speak?

But, again, it's not either-or. Mathematics tells us about the speaking that expresses itself in the world and it is this speaking that begins to reach self-consciousness in the mind of the mathematician.

I have mentioned Owen Barfield, and I wish to acknowledge that everything I have written here is a reflection upon, and occasionally a direct invocation of, certain pregnant words of his. Among these words are the following:

Penetration to the meaning of a thing or process, as distinct from the ability to describe it exactly, involves a participation by the knower in the known. The meaning of what I am writing is not the physical pressure of thumb and forefinger, or the size of the ink lines with which I form the letters; it is the concepts expressed in the words I am writing. But the only way of penetrating to these is to participate in them — to bring them to life in your own mind by thinking them. ("The Rediscovery of Meaning" in The Rediscovery of Meaning, and Other Essays)

Barfield goes on to say that if we want to "read" the meaning of nature, we must "apprehend it as a series of images symbolizing concepts" — that is, we must apprehend "the outward form as the image or symbol of an inner meaning". And he wonders whether there is "any possibility of scientific man's ever recovering the old power to 'read', while retaining his hard-won treasure of exact observation and manipulative control ... ?"

The question remains as decisive today as when Barfield voiced it four decades ago. We have spent centuries learning to corrode and attenuate the world's expressive text until now we are left with the precise, contentless, and eminently manipulable codes embodying the virtues of information. These are, in their place, real virtues. But the meaning we began with has not disappeared simply because we have closed our eyes to it. If we want to move beyond the information age, we will have to learn to open our eyes again.

Notes

Stephen L. Talbott is a Senior Researcher at The Nature Institute in Ghent, New York. This paper was published (in German translation) as "Information oder Bedeutung?" in Was kommt nach der Informationsgesellschaft? (Guetersloh, Germany: Bertelsmann, 2002).

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Steve Talbott :: The Counter-Information Revolution