Information

I can't define it, but I know it when I see it.

That's the famous paraphrase of U.S. Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart's 1964 attempt to define obscenity.

It's what came to mind when I started thinking about information.

Most of us never stop to ask what information actually is. We take it so much for granted because it surrounds us constantly. It is so pervasive, and appears in so many different forms, that defining it is far more difficult than it first seems.

There is written and spoken information, conveyed through language and symbols. There is biological information, encoded chemically within living cells and passed from one generation to the next. There is computational information, represented by the ones and zeros of digital computers, and at an even smaller scale, by the qubits of quantum computing.

What could these seemingly different things possibly have in common?

The clue may lie hidden in the word itself. Information in-forms. It gives form within. Once received, it reshapes us. It influences what we know, how we think, what we perceive, what we feel, and ultimately how we understand and act upon the world.

Perhaps information cannot be defined by what it is made of any more than music can be defined by the material of the instruments that produce it. Music is not wood, brass or vibrating strings; it is a pattern expressed through them. Likewise, information is not ink, sound waves, electrical impulses or molecules. These are merely the media through which it travels. Information is better understood by what it does than by what it is made of.

It can be transmitted, stored, received, transformed, interpreted, encoded, compressed and copied. Yet none of those properties quite captures its essence.

I'm hardly the first person to wrestle with the question. Scholars have debated the nature of information for decades across mathematics, computer science, physics, biology, psychology, philosophy and many other disciplines. The subject has become so influential that some regard Information Theory as one of the defining intellectual achievements of the modern age.

Yet information does not require consciousness. Plants process information. Immune systems process information. Even a thermostat responds to information. As anthropologist Gregory Bateson famously suggested, information may simply be "a difference capable of making a difference."

That insight points toward something deeper. Information is not defined by the material that carries it, but by its capacity to produce change. Data becomes information only when it informs—when it alters the state of whatever receives it. It may teach us something new, confirm a suspicion, correct a misunderstanding, trigger a response, or reveal a pattern that was previously invisible. Therefore, information is less a thing than an event: the act of one system changing another.

Similarly, thinkers are also still grappling with a definition of life itself. Is it a 'thing' or a 'process'? Maybe life itself is nothing more—or less—than the continual gathering, interpreting and acting upon information. Every living organism survives by sensing differences in its environment and responding to them.

What about computers? They gather, store and process information too. Does that make them alive? Of course not. Computers manipulate symbols according to formal rules, but the symbols have no intrinsic meaning for the machine itself. The computer's internal state changes, but nothing is 'understood'. 

Data (stored as a pattern of ones and zeros, for example) has no meaning. Meaning is what information provides.

Which brings us back to Justice Stewart.

"I know it when I see it."

He wasn't really offering a definition. He was describing a transformation. Seeing something altered the state of his understanding.

Perhaps that is the closest we can come to defining information. It is whatever has the capacity to make a meaningful difference in the recipient. The means of conveyance doesn't matter. The material it's made from doesn't matter. All that matters is that it leaves us differently formed than we were before we encountered it. It's the receiver, the viewer, the perceiver, the mind, that determines whether it's information not the transmitter.  

That means anything can be information, or not. 

We may have arrived at a definition of consciousness as the process of turning data into information, and information into awareness.

Hoping Brazil Wins

He was sitting in the lounge of the Empire Hotel

He was drinking for diversion, he was thinking for himself

A little money riding on the Maple Leafs

Along comes a lady in lacy sleeves...

- Raised on Robbery, Joni Mitchell

It wasn't the Empire Hotel, they weren't the Maple Leafs, and she didn't have lacy sleeves. But I was watching a FIFA World Cup soccer match in the lunchroom at work the other day when a co-worker came in to check the score.

She is an accounting clerk. A young, petite, impeccably coiffed Chinese woman with an outgoing personality who collects Hello Kitty merchandise. Not someone you would instinctively picture as a sports fan.

Brazil was playing Norway.

"Who's winning?" she asked.

"It's tied," I said.

"I hope Brazil wins," she said.

"Why? I didn't know you followed soccer."

"I don't," she replied. "I put a bet on the game."

I was genuinely surprised.

"You gamble?"

She looked at me defensively.

"Are you judging me?"

"No," I said. "You can do whatever you want with your money. I just didn't take you for a gambler."

Then I asked her something rhetorical.

"Why can't people just enjoy the beauty of the game? Isn't that enough?"

The conversation stayed with me.

Because my co-worker had taken an interest in something she otherwise had no interest in, and didn't know much about. She was only interested because she had a few bucks riding on the result. It wasn't about soccer it was about gambling.

She appeared to have simply absorbed an activity that has become remarkably pervasive in our society. I imagined this was how people took up cigarettes decades ago. 

That's what unsettled me.

Gambling has assumed an historically unprecedented place in our culture. Driven by the explosive growth of mobile sports betting apps, online casinos, and digital prediction markets, the industry is breaking financial records year after year.

The commercial gaming industry has posted four consecutive years of record revenues. The global gambling market is expected to exceed $650 billion, while unregulated online gambling accounts for trillions of dollars in wagers annually. Prediction markets, once a niche curiosity, have exploded into a multi-billion-dollar industry of their own.

The economic costs are staggering. The human costs are greater.

Millions of Americans are estimated to suffer from gambling addiction, and young people appear especially vulnerable. Their brains are still developing while algorithms, personalized advertising, and frictionless betting apps train them to associate excitement, uncertainty, and reward with placing a wager.

Some people undoubtedly possess a biological predisposition toward addiction. But addiction is also learned. Brains are remarkably adaptable. The neural pathways that connect anticipation with reward become stronger through repetition. Habits become compulsions. What begins as entertainment gradually becomes necessity.

But all the pervasive gambling, in so many facets of our daily lives, reveals something even more troubling than addiction.

It changes the way we experience the world.

A soccer match ceases to be simply twenty-two athletes displaying extraordinary skill, discipline, and creativity. It becomes a financial instrument. Every pass, every foul, every goal is filtered through the question: How does this affect my bet?

The game itself becomes secondary. What matters is the payout.

This is what I found so striking about my co-worker's answer. Brazil and Norway meant nothing to her. She wasn't captivated by the beauty of the passing, the tactics, the athleticism, or the drama.

She wanted Brazil to win because she had money riding on the outcome. Increasingly, this seems to be how we engage with the world. We don't simply watch. We speculate. We don't merely appreciate. We monetize.

We don't experience events for their intrinsic worth. We seek an external stake that makes them feel important.

That strikes me as a profound cultural loss. And it tells us something about what we feel constitutes importance.

The greatest works of art, the finest athletic performances, have always possessed value in themselves. They required nothing beyond our attention and our capacity for wonder.

If we now need the additional stimulus of financial risk to become emotionally invested, what does that say about us?

Perhaps the greatest danger of the gambling boom isn't simply addiction. It's that we're slowly losing the ability to value things for their own sake. If the beauty of the game is no longer enough, maybe the problem isn't gambling, or rather it's not the cause so much as a contributing factor of a sort of widespread malaise.

Perhaps the real problem is that we're forgetting how to be interested in life.

Brazil lost.

The Sweet Science

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Married thirty-three years.

Thirty three years of talking,

rehashing the same old conversation

in different words and tones.

Starts with

I want…

and ends with I feel…

In between there are pauses,

like pugilists to their corners.

We’ve been talking less and less lately,

my wife and I. 

As if it’s taken thirty-three years

for the conversation to wind down,

realizing that all the back and forth

was really shadowboxing,

learning The Sweet Science.

And when you’re evenly matched

and gone the distance, as we have,

bruised, swollen, sweaty and exhausted

from gut-punches, 

upper-cuts,

right hooks, 

left hooks,

there comes a point when 

you fall into each other’s arms:

Then time reverses,

you stand there, surrounded by well-wishers,

wrists held by a bow-tied man centre ring

under lighted canopy,

await the ceremonial chime of a bell

and fateful words: 

We have a decision.

Hugs of congratulations,

and consolation.

You've done your best,

given everything you have,

held nothing back.

The America I Once Knew

For America on its 250th birthday

The America I once knew believed that all people are created equal.

The America I once knew was founded on ideals.

The America I once knew believed in basic human rights and dignity.

The America I once knew cherished individual liberty.

The America I once knew believed in government of the people, by the people, for the people.

The America I once knew believed that voters should choose their politicians, not that politicians should choose their voters.

The America I once knew believed in the rule of law.

The America I once knew believed that no one is above the law, and in equal justice under the law.

The America I once knew respected the independence of its courts.

The America I once knew believed that public office is a public trust, not an opportunity for grift, corruption and self-agrandizement.

The America I once knew understood that power exists to serve the people, not the other way around.

The America I once knew believed that leadership carries responsibility.

The America I once knew believed that great power came with great responsibility.

The America I once knew believed that democracy depends on compromise.

The America I once knew defended freedom of speech, even when that speech was unpopular.

The America I once knew respected a free and independent press.

The America I once knew valued truth over propaganda.

The America I once knew believed that facts matter.

The America I once knew understood that patriotism is not blind loyalty or nationalism, but love of country.

The America I once knew welcomed disagreement without treating opponents as enemies.

The America I once knew valued kindness, decency, and good works.

The America I once knew believed that freedom carries obligations as well as rights.

The America I once knew believed that opportunity should depend on talent and effort, not birth or privilege.

The America I once knew revered innovation, expertise and education.

The America I once knew believed that diversity is a source of strength.

The America I once knew welcomed immigrants and refugees—a haven for people fleeing violence, persecution, and oppression.

The America I once knew measured strength by character rather than military power.

The America I once knew believed that alliances made America—and the world—stronger.

The America I once knew believed in free and fair trade.

The America I once knew believed in competition on a level playing field.

The America I once knew believed in the dignity of work.

The America I once knew believed in an honest day’s pay for an honest day’s work.  

The America I once knew protected the vulnerable and gave assistance to the needy.

The America I once knew kept its word.

The America I once knew stood against totalitarianism and fascism.

The America I once knew believed it could be a force for good in the world.

The America I once knew believed that every generation had a duty to leave the country better than it found it.

The America I once knew believed that hope is stronger than fear.

I miss the America I once knew.

Interesting People

Lately I've had the uneasy sense that I'm in danger of becoming a dullard.

When people I haven't seen for a while ask how I'm doing, I almost invariably answer, "Not much." Which isn't true. There's always plenty going on in my life. As there is in everyone else's.

Maybe too much has happened to distill into a single anecdote on the spot, so "not much" becomes the easiest way to move the conversation along.

Or maybe I've begun to assume that real life happens online, posted somewhere—on Facebook, Instagram, or whatever feed we've curated for one another. Note: I don't have Facebook or Instagram accounts.

I've been thinking about this since hearing Alain de Botton in conversation with Sam Harris. They were discussing self-reflection and, more broadly, the ways people lower their emotional barriers and come to know themselves.

At one point De Botton asks a deceptively simple question: Why are people boring?

His answer surprised me. Human beings, he argues, all lead immensely complex inner lives. Yet we've all met people around whom our own minds seem to go blank. We know we have things to say, but somehow nothing comes.

He suggests this has less to do with intelligence or experience than with self-exploration. A genuinely interesting person is someone who has spent time opening the doors of their own mind—not in an egotistical way, but with curiosity. Other people unconsciously sense that curiosity, and it invites their own. Conversation flourishes because both people are interested in making sense of experience rather than merely reporting it.

I've certainly experienced that. There are people who make you feel more articulate simply by listening. They ask how you are because they genuinely want to know. Their interest gives you permission to think out loud.

And then there are the opposite encounters. People ask the same question, but only as social lubrication. The exchange is transactional. According to De Botton, these are often people who haven't cultivated much curiosity about themselves either. They may travel widely, collect accomplishments, and accumulate experiences, but those experiences become content to upload rather than material to reflect upon. The outer life expands while the inner one remains largely unexplored.

When I answered "not much" the other day, I immediately regretted it. It felt dismissive, almost disrespectful.

Part of me suspected the other person wasn't really looking for an honest answer. Few people seem to be anymore.

But another part of me wondered whether I'd become complicit in exactly the habit De Botton was describing. Maybe "not much" wasn't simply an efficient reply. Maybe it was evidence that I hadn't done the work of turning experience into thought.

After all, something is always happening. The question is whether we've spent enough time with our own lives to know what it means.

Once we begin to think of ourselves principally as online personas, and experiences as 'content', it not only drains our real-life exchanges of vitality; it drains our own lives of meaning and interest—even to ourselves.

Answered Prayers

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Everyone is so sad these days

about the general shittiness of things—

how we neglect

and carelessly destroy

the world and each other

in small ways

in big ways.

Yet there are mornings we rise

to discover that

overnight the rain 

has glazed the streets

for the summer sun to bake the day

like fresh bread.

People stream into the streets

to ply their trades:

the scent of cinnamon buns

sweetens my walk to work;

a policeman blows his whistle

and waves traffic through;

above us,

welders stitch I-beams together

with birthday sparklers

to shape a bridge;

below,

street crews in orange jumpers

connect underground pipes

so that I need only 

press a park fountain button

when I am thirsty.

The music is undeniable—

one movement

after another,

like so many daily prayers 

answered

we barely notice.

The rhythm is poignant,

intervals of internal 

sadness

while outside the celebration

never stops.

Canada Day!!

Happy Canada Day!’

Y’all better be celebrating this great country you are privileged to live in!