I recently read a Norton pre-print book by Thomas S. Mullaney, a History Professor at Stanford University, called How We Disappear. As a person very involved in digital storage and long-term digital preservation, I found it a very interesting read.
I read most of the book while I was on a personal journey with my cousin in April to bring lots of family history stuff, after my mom died last October (my dad died in 2001), in a rented truck, from Sioux Falls, South Dakota to California, where now I live. Considering the topic of Dr. Mullaney’s book, it was a very appropriate topic.
Dr. Mullaney reflects on the deaths of his own parents and how human lives disappear, and the efforts people take to try to capture their family history and create meaning from what is left behind. In his book he ranges from discussing Claude Shannon’s information theory that enabled modern digital communication to discussing how he took a forensic approach to going through his dad’s office after he died to put all of his things into perspective, and the family secrets he unveiled in the process of doing so.
As Mallaney said, Shannon’s “information” could be anything from a string of random digits to a love letter. Shannon introduced the concept of entropy into information science from Physics. He sought to quantify the uncertainty, or randomness, of a message. Shannon’s information though, in order to last, must be maintained, because the natural order of the universe is for disorder to increase over time.
Mullaney says that, “Information is, quite simply, any set of entities, physical or conceptual, that have been put in formation for the purposes of forging, preserving, and disseminating meaning; and it’s also the abstract entity thus forged, preserved, and disseminated. It is both the arrangement of elements that makes storage and transmission possible, and the thing thus stored or transmitted.”
He goes on to state the rather profound insight that, “Life is the effort to sustain both our fragile, far-from-equilibrium lives and our far-from-equilibrium meanings—to keep these informations aloft, fighting against their tendencies to sink back to original states of disorder and arbitrariness.”
We only have to look around us to see that even though the universe is tending toward disorder, it appears to be getting more complex at the same time. In our personal and human history things don’t get simpler over time. Perhaps because he is a historian, Dr. Mullaney points out that, as old bonds are broken, new bonds are formed. As things unravel, “…so too are they raveling anew into other formations.” These new formations are much more likely to occur than for things to turn into a formless goop.
Thus, the complexity of our personal histories as well as those of our societies and even our planet is the consequence of dealing with the forces of disorder and the creation of greater complexity. He points out that the emergence of life lead to the creation of local order and the efforts to sustain life. Life in particular appears to have an agenda to create greater complexity over time.
We create information in the course of living and this information will decay if it isn’t maintained. It is important to remember where we came from, what we did, and why we matter, and if we don’t do this, we will all disappear.
