Technology, Connected - What Is Information? Yuval Noah Harari on Networks, Truth, Power and AI

Episode Date: November 21, 2024

In the opening episode of the Thinking on Paper Book Club, Mark Fielding and Jeremy Gilbertson begin reading Yuval Noah Harari’s Nexus and examine its central question: what is information, and how has it shaped human history?The discussion moves from ancient myths and religious stories to political institutions, mass media and artificial intelligence. Harari argues that human societies are built through information networks that allow large groups to cooperate, but these networks don’t always produce truth.In this episode, we discuss:What information isHow information networks create powerWhy truth and information aren’t the same thingHow stories and myths help humans cooperateThe relationship between information, reality and beliefWhy symbols can carry different meanings in different systemsHow networks shape societies for better and worseWhat artificial intelligence changes about the production and distribution of informationWhether Harari’s account of human history is convincingHow Nexus connects ancient information systems with modern AIThis is a live and unscripted book-club discussion. Mark and Jeremy test Harari’s ideas rather than simply summarising them, asking where his arguments hold up and where they require more scrutiny.The episode introduces the main themes of Nexus: information, networks, truth, power and the growing role of AI in human society.Please enjoy the show.--TimestampsTIMESTAMPS(00:00) - Welcome: Disruptors and Curious Minds, CEOs, Founders, and Book Lovers(00:50) - Revisiting Previous Books in the Thinking On Paper Book Club(01:08) - Exploring the Brief History of Information Networks(01:33) - Debate: Dust Jackets on Books - Yes or No?(02:40) - Insights from the Nexus Prologue(03:08) - Is Yuval Noah Harari’s Perspective Too Dramatic?(04:54) - The Naïve View of Information Explained(05:58) - The Growing Spectre of Artificial Intelligence(06:48) - Understanding Delusional Networks in Human History(10:03) - Exploring the Relationship Between Truth, Wisdom, and Power(13:52) - Yuval Noah Harari's Definition: What Is Information?(16:58) - The Story of Cher Ami: Information as the Transfer of a Story(17:36) - Most Information Does Not Represent Anything – What Does That Mean?(19:49) - Misinformation, Disinformation, and the Dove of Peace(21:37) - Why Truth Is Not the Same as Reality(28:00) - Music as a Medium of Information and Communication(29:26) - AI-Generated Art and the Importance of Micro Decisions(31:07) - Music, Silence, and the Information You Don't Say(34:57) - Information in the Context of Quantum Mechanics--

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Disruptors and curious minds. CEOs, founders, book lovers. Welcome to Book Club Live. This is the rebellion to the 15-minute book summary. If you're tired of been told, you should read 30 books a month. You're in the right place. One book, one chapter, one one. week and we have a new book and that's why we're going live because we thought it would be a good

occasion to to test our nerve in front of a live camera the book is nexus by uval noah hurari it's book number six in the thinking on paper book club can you believe that jeremy book number six feels about right yeah it's exciting well if you want to read the others thinking on paper or XYZ. I'm losing track, but Nexus by Julio Otino, the Design of Everyday Things by Don Norman, Clear Thinking by Shane Parrish, The Order of Time by Carla Rovelli, and Quantum Supremacy by Mitcho Kaku. And I don't think we can be able to do that again. Is it like seven digits you can keep in your head, seven books? So, it's impressive, man. A brief history of information networks from the Stone Age to AI. We're talking about truth, power.

reality and pigeons I wonder where that would come into play yeah well it shouldn't be a pigeon should it should be a dove but we'll get to that can I can I start with something a little silly please before we jump in

I would love to get a vote from the people watching and you know if you're not watching live if you're watching you later on I have a I have a problem with book jackets, like a very serious problem with book jackets. They, they frustrate the ever-loving, you know what, out of me so much so that as soon as I get a book, the first thing I do is remove the jacket because you're reading it and it shuffles around. I see you have your book jacket on, Mark. Right, it's a softback. Oh, even, all right, so you're good. Okay. So,

reply in the comments, book jackets, yes or no, for my sanity. Okay. Well, just for your sanity, It's quite funny that you mentioned dust jackets and everyone is watching this completely live. This is not scripted. So we have no idea what each other is going to say. That's part of the beauty. But my son, Luca, was actually crying about his book jackets yesterday. He's five and he takes the dust jackets off because they get in the way. He doesn't like them.

So you have at least one person who is on your side. It's amazing. Awesome. Well, let's jump in. How do you, so today, today we're going to cover the prologue and we're going to cover chapter one, which is plenty like any the beginning of any really good book does a great job of setting the tone for the journey kind of like tickling some things to get us like thinking about where we're where we're headed mark so what jumped out at you in the in the prologger how do you want to

kick this off the the prolog so i it's going to read the first part of the the prolog power isn't wisdom and after a hundred thousand years of discoveries, inventions and conquests, humanity has pushed itself into an existential crisis. We are on the verge of ecological collapsed caused by the misuse of our own power. We are also busy creating new technologies like artificial intelligence that have the potential to escape our control and enslave or annihilators. Yet instead of our species uniting to deal with existential challenges, international tensions are rising, global cooperation is becoming more difficult, countries are stockpiling doomsday weapons and a new world.

World War does not seem impossible. If we sapiens are so wise, why are we so self-destructive? A bit dramatic. Happy Friday, everybody. A bit dramatic. No, Jeremy, do you think that was a bit over? No, I actually, I actually don't. I actually don't.

Like, there's a lot of, there's a lot of wacky stuff going on. And we all want to get to the root of the wacky stuff and why it's happening. And guess what? But most of the wacky stuff has this through line that, that, that, that, that, that, that, that, that, that, that permeats throughout history. Um, Mustafa, thank you for, for commenting. He's in the notebook jacket club. So we're, I'm outvoted. We're up to three, three against one. Keep them coming, guys. Keep them coming. Um, so no, I actually don't. I think, I think if you think deeply enough, there are, you could get overloaded with the challenges that we have as a, as a global society, right? Um, but. Um, but. Um, But a couple of things that popped out to me, power isn't wisdom. And if we are so damn wise, why are we so destructive? He asks these really great questions.

And, you know, we're good at accumulating information. We always think more information is better and it's going to lead to things. And, you know, we're good at accumulating information and power, but not so great at accumulating wisdom is what he posits in this first chapter. Yeah, and he uses some cautionary fables, some forewarning from history, doesn't he, to highlight that. We've got the Greek myth of Pathion, the son of Helios. We have Johann Wolfgang von Goff, who I didn't know that the sorcerer's apprentice was from that. So I learned something straight along. I actually didn't either.

That was pretty cool. Page two, Mickey Mouse, Walt Disney. There was an animated version of that. Yeah, so the prologue is setting the scene. So the second half of the prolog is outlining what the book structure is, but the first half is about teasing at what information is, what knowledge is, what power is, what reality is. And I think, and this is on purpose, I think it's something we should all be thinking about. The everything you read always has kind of the specter of AI loitering menacingly in the background,

doesn't it? Whenever he speaks about information, he says, you know, throughout history, many times. traditions have believed that some fatal flaw in our nature attempts us to pursue powers we don't know how to handle. I wonder what he's talking about. You know, it's always there, isn't it? Yeah, there's a lot of things in it. And it's interesting.

He goes beyond, you know, the steam engine or even AI. He talks about things like religion as systems and not particularly any, you know, I think it's religion as the ability to corral and connect people and point them towards. a certain mission, right? You know, as we get into what he defines, what he defines information as. Well, he calls these delusional networks, doesn't he? But for 10th of thousands of years,

Sapiens built and maintained large networks by inventing and spreading fictions, fantasies, and mass delusions about gods, about enchanted broomsticks, about AI, and about a great many other things. I'm going to just want to read the one bit about chasing power. Our tendency to summon powers we cannot control stems, not from individual psychology, but from the unique way our species cooperates in large numbers. The main argument of this book

is that humankind gains enormous power by building large networks of cooperation. But the way these networks are built predisposes us to use that power unwisely. So that goes against perhaps common conception of power is an individual. I'm power crazy. I've got a thirst for power, the power corrupts. These are kind of all individualistic notions, but he's saying no. Well, this this road of cooperation, this road of coordination that is built by connecting all of these different things, right, to make them move in coordinated fashion can be used for good and bad, right? It can be used to spread really good information to make society better. it could be really, it could be used to, to spread really bad things that, that put power

in control of, of someone that, you know, is going to do nefarious things, right? A couple other questions that jumped out. Yeah, speaking of which, like, why, this is a question in the prolog, why do human societies choose to trust their worst members? I was like, wow, that's, that's pretty big and it's happened in the past. And why is that? Well, probably, because, that information network was so profoundly efficient at distributing whatever message to coordinate that that particular individual disseminates, right? Yeah, like a few, it's like a trend, a few early adopters believe it, and then maybe people are buying into the fact that everyone else has trust in these nefarious rather than

themselves having trust in nefarious. They have trust in the group. Oh, they're saying it, so it must be right. they can't be that bad. Yeah. But maybe that's, I think the big question or the big takeover of the prolog is this naive view of information he calls it, which I think sets up chapter one and probably the rest of the book. Because the naive view of information, so what is information?

The naive view argues that by gathering and processing much more information than individuals can, big networks achieve a better understanding of, and then he lists these things. So the point is that the naive view of information is that more information is better. If you come to a problem, more information will solve it. There's nothing that information and more information can't help with. Am I wrong in that? Yeah. The view posits that in sufficient quantities information leads to truth.

Yeah, I think about this a lot. So in fact, there's a nice little graphic in the book. if you want to pull it if you can see there's one that has the information yeah truth wisdom and power right so the naive view yeah i think about this a lot and i'm not going to i'm not going to label this a certain type of view this is this is the this is the jeremy gilbertson view right so i i teach this concept of um how information goes on a journey through what i call knowledge and into wisdom right So like to me, and this, we'll get this into chapter one, but I wanted to put this out because it got me really thinking because I talk about this stuff a lot. You know, information is like the encapsulation of something.

It's like, you know, and it can be a lot of things, right? It could be the context associated with the physical object. It could be, you know, a piece of data, digital data, right? And, you know, that information becomes knowledge. It becomes known to the person digesting it. Then it kind of, okay, it's knowledge. it's kind of known, but then wisdom is the applied version of that, right? It's you take this in, you mix it with your experience, and you apply it, you play with it,

you do things with it to understand really its purpose. So there's a rabbit hole for you, but that's how I think, I immediately, I was like, oh, man, this is resonating because this is stuff I do all the time. The naive view is resonating with you. No, no, no, no, no. My view, I think is different from the naive view because the naive view. Naive view talks about all information, large quantities of information leads to truth, which leads to power and wisdom, right?

But, you know, as we'll learn here in a bit, I want to talk about truth because I talk about truth all the time and I think about truth all the time. It's very different than the naive. I don't subscribe to the naive view of information as the author doesn't. No, and a lot of the book is going to be about that. And despite or perhaps because of our hoard of data, we are continuing to spew greenhouse gases into the atmosphere, pollute rivers and oceans, cut down forests, destroy entire habitat, drive countless species to extinction and jeopardize the ecological framework of existence. So, yeah, so if more information- Again, big, big smiles on Friday, everybody, right?

like if more information is the route to wisdom, why if we have access to all this information, are we so shit? Well, I would almost, I would almost argue like there's a step before information. Hopefully, hopefully I can learn more from the author as we move through it. We're just in the prologue. We're already like spinning and grooving, right? That's why we do this. I know.

I know. I would almost think like information has a step before it. It's like data. you know, data is maybe a step before information and, um, which is something kind of without, without context is where, is where I think about it. And you look at IT departments today, you know, like, and I come from, you know, IT background, data center background, among other things that the, they, they're like, oh, yeah, we need to capture all of this data because we can make sense of a lot of this data. And now there's so many, uh, companies and services and businesses

is that actually clean up the data, right? They clean up the data to make it useful, so they discard like a third of it or half of it, right? So that automatically points to this naive view of information is a whole pile of information is not going to get you to wisdom, right? The right information is going to get you to wisdom. Well, that's a nice segue to chapter one of what is information? What is information?

Hey, and shout out to the chat. If anyone has read this yet, please chime in with your thoughts, and especially on like the what is information. This is a really interesting chapter because I think about this. I think about this quite a bit and I was excited to dive in. Let's start with the stars as the cosmic script, right? So you look at a star not just as like an individual. dot in the sky, but a star as a participating in a group of other stars, like billions, right, and interconnected with all of those, right? So there's this potential that exists in it versus

just being one thing. Cosmic script. Keep going. Okay. Well, then he goes into astronomy versus astrology, right? Right. With how you read a network of information. Some people, people read it totally differently. Some people look at the stars from an astrological perspective and read into the myths and the stories and the, you know, some other way to interpret that grouping of information. But then astronomers look at that from more of a scientific perspective. Okay. Let's just back up for the listeners then. So he, he says that information is like a slippery ear. It's very difficult to define exactly what it is. That's his first kind of observation. So now you're saying that astrology and astronomy. Unpack that for me again.

They use the same, as I read this, they use the same collection of potential, right? So if we think of like stars or information as an interconnected group of potential, right, little bits of information connected to be interpreted in different ways. You have astronomers that interpret the relations between the stars in one way and you have astrologers that interpret that same amount of information in a different way through a different lens. Okay, it's almost like the delusional view, but then, and then he posits that during history, astrology has actually had a lot of impact, and kings and governors would choose based on astrology. Delusional is relative, right?

Like, you know, the scientists are going to look at astrology and call it delusional, perhaps, and astrologists are going to look at certain aspects of science and do the same thing. But this is perspectives, and we get this down the road. Mustafa actually got another comment in here that's pretty interesting. Why don't you take a look at that and unpack that, Mark? My favorite part is the first few lines where Haravi admits that defining fundamental concepts is very hard, and yet he attempts to give us some definitions, which is why I'm interested in hearing what different definitions people would choose and why.

Okay, so Hauri, in everyday usage information is associated with human-made symbols like spoken or written words. And then he gives some examples where that's not the case. And he gives a story of Cherami, a pigeon during the war that carries a message. And information doesn't have to be symbols. It can be. But I think of information as the transfer of a story or knowledge or the transverse. of communication, let's say, it's communicating something between one source and another. That transfer, that communication is information.

But at some point in this chapter, he makes me question that. Because, to quote, most information in human society and indeed in other biological and physical systems does not represent anything. I want to spend a little longer on this complex and crucial argument because it constitutes the theoretical basis of the book. Probably want to pay attention to that. Yeah, I'll read that again. Most information in human society and indeed in other biological and physical systems does not represent anything. What does he mean it does not represent anything?

Mustafa, what does he mean when he says information does not represent anything? What did you take from that? So where, well, while you have a moment to think about that, Mustafa, let's let's go into what, so let's talk about the shutters. Let's talk about the shutters. Let's talk about the house on the Mediterranean that was opening and closing shutters to signal to the British troops out in the harbor or wherever they were as to the status of the Ottoman soldiers in, in the city. Right. So you're on the boat. You're far out. You're trying to figure out as a military strategist, what's going on in the village. I'm a villager that leans towards the British side. So I'm going to try and signal you, right? And maybe the open shutter means there's 10,000 and then a closed shutter means, hey, it's safe. You can kind of come in. But this, another question that I highlighted here, when is a shutter just a shutter and when is it information? So here's how I got my head around. communicate something. Right. It's used to communicate something. But the something that's communicated also has to be in there too.

So like an embedded context or an encoded context or I used encapsulated when I was earlier talking to it. So the reference that the shutter means something in a certain position, that's the encapsulated piece of it. And then the communicating of it gives it that information quality as well. So the medium is not the message. Right. Yeah, a little McLuhan was referenced in here, the pigeon. Could I just like on a lighter note? Could I take, take what? I can't remember the word, lost my words. It's not a pigeon. God doesn't send out a pigeon from the ark. It's a dove. And he talks about pigeons being, but it may be later on the book. It's all a big joke. And he's like his transfer of information is incorrect. But who's ever heard of the

pigeon, the pigeon of peace. The peace pigeon. They don't release pigeons. They release doves. Do you think that was an error and carryover from the story of the pigeon that had the military message in it? No, because he mentions pigeons again and there's a pigeon on the front cover.

And I, maybe this is Cherami, in which case it's okay, but if this is the pigeon of peace, they've got on the front cover. It's a big faux power. Okay, so are you, are you saying that Harari is actually demonstrating, he knows. He knows.

he's demonstrating misinformation and disinformation. Do you think this was done on purpose or by accident? I hope later in the book, he, he, well, is it misinformation or disinformation? So if I remember this correctly, misinformation is accidentally and disinformation is on purpose. So I think this is disinformation.

He's done on purpose because he knows damn well that it's a dove, not a pigeon. All right. If the author would like to come on our next show and talk us about the hidden gem we've uncovered, the nugget, the, the Easter egg within the book. That could be an interesting discussion. On information, so you were speaking about truth earlier, and he speaks a lot about truth and reality, truth then isn't a one-to-one representation of reality, rather truth is something

that brings our attention to certain aspects of reality. while inevitably ignoring other aspects. No account of reality is 100% accurate, but some accounts are nevertheless more truthful than others. Why is he, why does he spend so much time talking about truth with information here? Yeah, because I think it's important. Well, I think it's rooted in the naive view of information,

which is what he talked about earlier. I think that's why he's trying to reference truth and how his definition of information, information differs from that. And there was a piece in the prologue that I that I circled that I thought was really interesting, a common objective reality, common objective reality. How difficult is that? Like with it, you know, with the order of time, Carlo Revelli, like there's not, there's not a coordinated, you know, common objective reality. And then we dive into some of the other things that we learned in quantum supremacy,

the Mutuokouakou book and all the quantum mechanical stuff. Do we get into this like many world's interpretation of reality and wave collapses and all of that fun stuff? But not to get too deep back in that, but truth to me, I've thought about this a lot. Like truth to me is should be locked into a moment in time. So I always use this example. I've got this, I've got this tree, big tree that's outside my front window where I usually do a lot of reading and a lot of writing. And I look outside when I'm stumped on what to write or what's a journal. So I look around and I observe and I just kind of write what I'm thinking. Sometimes that tree has green leaves on it.

Sometimes they're red and they're yellow and sometimes there's no leaves at all. But at a moment in time when I'm looking at it, I would say, you know, Mark, those leaves are green. You would look at the tree and the leaves would be green. But, you know, I don't know, a couple weeks later, you know, the leaves are yellow, but they're still the same leaves, right? So it's a quality of information tagged to a moment in time is the way I think about it. So Carlo Revelli, maybe you can come and talk with Mr. Harari

and we could hash all this stuff out. Is that with the leaves? There is no truth with the leaves because there is no now if we're going to combine books. Carlo Revelli said there's no now, so there's no truth because there's no present. Truth is always evolving. I was thinking about this from a less poetic perspective than you.

I obviously need to get outside more into nature and look at the trees. I was thinking of information from an AI perspective, possibly because we had such an amazing show yesterday with Leonard Tang about language models and how to make them safe. And he talks about all of this information. Obviously, we get more and more. and more and more and more information. AI is going to both screw us and help us,

because it's going to screw us because you're going to create all this data, but it's going to help us to sift through it and find the truth, to find the information that matters. And I just feel almost like a crossroads or a junction where, like Jimmy Hendrix take, do you go left, do you sell his soul, just go this way and play music. Robert Johnson. Yeah, him.

And if you think about medicine, for example, there's one person studying one disease right now, the most advanced specialist on a disease in the world, will have so much information that they simply cannot know it all about for one tiny, tiny little domain that they're an expert in because there'll be so much more information available. But they need to be able to communicate that information to other departments, to other doctors studying other diseases.

They all need to be connected together, but there's so much information that it's just impossible for us to do that. So what role is AI going to play in helping the dissemination of that information? And hopefully he's going to get into that. Yeah, and you can also check out a lot of our, a lot of our episodes that dive deep into what AI is going to do down the, down the road. I think with anything, you know, technology supercharges everything. It's jet fuel on whatever, you know, whatever you apply it to, right?

And, you know, those jets can be used to fly and do bad things. Those jets can be used to fly and do really good things, right? So that's, I think about that a lot. Let's see. All right. So Ian chimes in and says we should hold the debate between Harari and Reve, belly. So we'll get, we'll get, we'll get, we'll get, we'll get our team on that. You know them, Ian?

Ian, just feel free to connect us and, and we'll make it happen. If anyone doesn't know Ian, Ian, um, Ian is the guy that did our video, right? So if you watch the pre-roll video, he does a great job, uh, connecting everything in, uh, helping us tell our story with information. So thank you, Ian. He, yeah, there's a, there's a message in there about information. We gave Ian, very limited information and he created something which encapsulated that very small amount of information in a very, very efficient way, as if he had lots more information. The opposite of the naive view of information, he used minimal information to create something

that most would think would need a lot of information. So, all right, so check this out. This is really interesting. So, Mustafa, your question, diving into the musical side of the fence here, I think the musical aspect of information using music as an example I think is really interesting what the author does here that the idea that music connects and coordinates people in an activity, whether it forces you to tap your foot or it takes you to an emotional response or whatever it is. But music isn't true or false. Like music, like when you listen to a song, well, that's true or that's false. No,

but it's information. So that's an interesting way to get your head around. around the idea of, as he defines, as Harari defines information, it's not about truth. It's not about truth or false. It's about connectivity, connection, and, you know, enabling something bigger by connecting it with other nodes. I think music as well, going back to that, you're communicating something. And music very obviously communicates in emotion between the creator and the listener,

between listeners. Between players. Yeah, there's a commute. It's, it's, it, music is communicating emotion. There you go.

That's, that's what it is and different music, different emotions, but it's still transmitting something between. I heard something very interesting about, I can't remember it was on a podcast, but they were talking about AI generated art. And I think it was Neil Stevenson, actually, Snowcrafts writer, maybe he was talking about it. And we like art because it tells a story of what the art, those micro decisions that the artist made when they created it.

So you're not just listening to a piece of music. You're listening to all of those micro decisions that the artist's. went through to make it. You read a book, how many hundreds and thousands and millions of decisions that the author had to take to create that piece of art. And you're never going to have that connection with AI generated art because you don't have that human connection of what it takes to create that, all those micro decisions that need to be made. And I thought that was very powerful because it goes back to the information is communication. And if you're not communicating something worthwhile.

The information is... Well, what about... So you mentioned, you mentioned, you know, us giving Ian a bit of information, not a lot of information that he took and did something pretty awesome with it, right? And the naive view of information, the subscription is a lot of information leads to something, right?

So in music, you know, tying music back into it, you know, great music can happen when someone puts one note down on the piano key, and there are like seven great musicians around that one note, and there's improvisation that happens with that. But there's also great music that happens on the front end with a lot of, I guess if you call it coordinated information on the front end, with the score and a hundred piece orchestra and that sort of thing.

I don't know where I'm going with that, but there's the riff for you. But also, as you like to point out quite often, is a lot of music is what you don't play. It's the non-communications. Space, baby. Space. It's the silence. It's the, those gaps, maybe,

and there's some kind of connection there between information and passing it on. I mean, like less is more. Oh, man, I'm going to stay on this because you, you pulled me back into this. All right. Do you know why, do you know why, like, grooves hit you so hard? Like a really funky groove gets you kind of, get you kind of make it see a little bass face and get you,

doing this. Do you know why? Is it, is it, because it's kind of getting my brain waves in sync somehow or some is, I don't know how. So really groovy stuff. Like one of my favorite drummers of all time, I've told this story a ton is leave on helm with the band. And he always played just a touch, just a touch behind the beat, right? And then you have Jay Dilla on the, on the opposite side of that, one of like, you know, one of hip hop's best. producers, beat makers was in front of the beat, right? Was ahead of the beat. So your anticipation of the beat and when it hits differently, that surprise creates

this creates you locking into that, which is, it's fascinating, man, when you really listen to it and figure out why things make you, why information makes you do certain things. How about that? Yeah, where he's communicating across the void to. your internal core about, yeah, anticipation. Okay, on that, just saying on that, we'll talk about rhythm. I understand what was the drummer's name who played just before the beat? Oh, leave on helm.

Leave on helm. Okay, so that's anticipation. You're anticipating something. Just after the beat, is that frustration? What's that that, the Jay Diller is? Oh, actually, let me, I have those flip-flop. I have those flip-flop. J-Dillow was early.

Levin Helm was late. Okay. So Jay Diller was early. Leavon Helm was late. Okay. So Jay Diller's given us like the anticipation. What's just after the beat? What is that communicating?

Is that like, like what does that make me? Is that frustration? I'd be like, oh, he missed it. Oh, you missed it. I think it's the lag. It's the lag that makes it interesting. And then it's the early that's like, whoa, what the hell is that? Right.

Um, all right. So I got a, I got a question for you. If we, if we think about like, The main powers, the defining feature of information as he writes in chapter one is connection and not representation. So if you think about like this node of bits of information, whether it's like synapses in your brain, stars in the sky, I don't know, whatever it might be. Is information really just like potential? is it like the potential of what those interconnections what those dependencies

can deliver what do you mean exactly the potato you're talking quantum again is it's like like the likelihood of things the potential of of this inner this disparate bits of things

the potential lying in their ability to connect and coordinate. It sounds reasonable. I don't fully grasp what you mean, but keep going. Oh, I don't know.

I don't know. I think I like the idea because now you're linking, show you now you're linking this to the quantum realm. So maybe all information is actually all information and it just the path of least resistance in the quantum realm is the information that we get

where if you, Think about ingredients. Think about ingredients in a cake. You're making a cake. Right. Yes. Got like 10 ingredients. And there's a pretty flamboyant cake. I know. There's a, there's a specific ratio of those 10 ingredients that will deliver a certain result, deliver a certain cake. If you tweak the ratios on that, the cake is going to differ, right? So the potential outcome of the ingredients coordinated in different ways is the cake. Is that information? Is that the potential of information? I'm going to say yes. That's called a pregnant pause audience.

We do that on purpose. Okay. This is why I really like what we're doing because we haven't read the whole book. We've read the prolog in chapter one. So obviously we're trying to make sense perhaps of the whole book just by reading what little we've read. And I think our understanding will mature and evolve over the weeks as we've. read more of it. Hey, disruptors and curious minds,

guys, the beauty, I think, of really locking in, taking in information and turning that into wisdom, right? You know, or turning that into something applicable, you have to be willing to do silly things, like smash things together in really weird

ways and generate references and try to connect the dot. And we're doing that in real time. We're willing to look silly real life. In time to to demonstrate the power of what that can do, the understanding that it creates versus me just reading the book by myself versus me, you know, and Mark pushing our ideas around. I love it.

Yeah. And a little teaser for next week. So in chapters two to five, we'll take a closer look at the history of information networks. We'll discuss how, over tens of thousands of years, humans invented various information technologies that greatly improved connectivity and cooperation without necessarily resulted. in a more truthful representation of the world. These information technologies invented centuries a millennia ago still shape our world

even in the era of the internet and AI. And the first information technology will examine, which is also the first information technology developed by humans. And, incidentally, my favorite. Also the sponsor of our last show, right? And the sponsor of our last show. And possibly the sponsor of our next show,

story. Story. There you have it. There you have it. Yeah, hopefully you enjoyed this. This is real-time knowledge acquisition with the hopes of something interesting. But I hope you guys are reading this with us. Jump into it next week.

Thanks to everyone who contributed live to the discussion. We'll continue to do that. You can find us at thinking on paper.xyZ. Where are our social handles, Mark? Where can you find us? You can find us. Well, let's transmit. it a more coherent story rather than 8 million channels go to thinking on paper.

xyz and choose your favorite. Oh, remember the stories like choose your own adventure back in the day. That's great. Choose your own, yeah. Choose your own thinking on paper vertical, Spotify, Apple, Instagram. It's all there. Choose your own. Maybe we should get Mustafa on the show next week, Jeremy, if he's up for it.

Sounds like a good idea. Hit us, hit us up. Be curious. stay disruptive keep thinking on paper bye bye