Drop It

[Bill Nolan]

"HAROLD POSKANZER" <HAROLD_POSKANZER at smtpgate.radius.com> offers a moderate 
point of view.

[First, jporter says:]

> >> The thing that turns me off about the bomb is that it's a big 
> >> waste of energy. That, and the fact that it turns so much 
> >> interesting information into useless noise, so quickly.

[Then bnolan says:]

> >What about all those human beings that got turned into "useless" ash? Or 
> >were they not "interesting"?

[And Harold Poskanzer says:]

> Interesting...I read jporter's message as mourning exactly that:  the 
> complex, self-organising information nexus that was Hiroshima -- the 
> layout of the buildings, the words in it's books, the habits of it's 
> people, the DNA sequences of it's beings -- was instantly reset to 0.  
> That's an intense event.  It turns jporter off and makes bnolan angry 
> and sad.
> 
> To me, calling real humans "interesting information" does not deny their 
> humanity or pain.  (Some would say it doesn't deny their souls, either.) 
 
> We and everything around us is information.
> 
> -H

I just reread jporter's post and I note that it makes no mention of of any 
atomic attack on any Japanese city. But given the context -- the prevailing 
discussion right now on this list and in public life in general -- it was 
difficult not to leap from jporter's "the bomb" to my "attack on 
Hiroshima."

I stick by my main point, that to obscure so much pain and suffering behind 
ruminations on "energy" and "information," is an error -- perhaps a 
wrongdoing -- of monstrous proportions. But now I'm not certain exactly 
what jporter was talking about.

It's true, as you say, Harold, that everything is information. But 
sometimes it's a mistake to examine a phenomenon at the wrong level. 
Thinking, for instance, has some relation to brain activity. Would you 
rather read Pynchon's EEG or his books? Dead people are lives blotted out, 
not information randomized. To insist on seeing them as the latter is to 
exalt cybernetic fact over human truth.

And I know I'm drawing fire from all the po-mo gunslingers when I dare to 
utter the T-word in that last sentence. C'mon, guys, gimme your best shots.

--Bill
___________________________________________________________________________
Bill Nolan, Writer/Editor/Wiseguy            http://www.halcyon.com/bnolan/
Amid slender firs in the green and gray Northwest        bnolan at halcyon.com