Lack of faith

Because our minds are completely informed by signals conducted along our nerves, our minds' union with the physical world is tenuous. For the most part our perceptions reflect reality, or at least we all agree on the same misconceptions. This kind of thinking isn't new, either. Illusions and magic have been around for as long as the human race. But problems arise when perceptions which do not reflect reality are made to affect reality through social structures and systems.

Early in human history we made an effort to defend ourselves from dependence on information by creating "rigorous systems" like geometry or law, which tried to reduce the chaotic and unreliable world to manipulations of symbols or abstractions.

As Turing proved, machines can be just as good as humans at manipulating symbols and these abstractions necessarily leave out the chaotic or exceptional parts of reality. This was surprising at the time, but maybe it shouldn't have been. Looking back, the whole idea of rigor is in fact to suppress human failure, exceptions, and chaos.

Because they are easy to work with we have become dependent on rigorous systems to tell us how to live. While some systems like math and engineering depend on consistency with the real world to be useful, systems like law, government, and finance are not necessarily rooted in any aspect of physical reality. Rather, they deal with information transactions between information processors, with relationships between people.

But as Maturana described our physiological structure, minds are isolated from reality by nerves which stimulate parts of a preexisting biological structure. The information upon which we rely to shape the immensely consequential transactions of law or government is not reliable but subjective, and, because the computer mediates much of it, malleable. The structures on which we rely for order in an inherently disordered world are predicated on a stability of information which we as a society are beginning to realize is simply not there.

With her description of the flickering signifier Hayles uncovers one of the central paradoxes brought on by the "changing state of knowledge" (Lyotard 3), which really is the changing state of information. If what we perceive can change instantly through nontransparent chains of referentiality and consequence (as in a computer), we can not and should not have faith in our perceptions. Information and our manipulations of it have been demonstrated not to be rooted in reality but rather in ourselves.

As a result of this lack of faith in information, and in the light of the present financial crisis and the theatrics of the upcoming election, I've begun to wonder whether we should maintain faith in the informational cathedrals of law, government, and finance we were born inside. If any information could do for our perception of reality (as shown by the computer), and if the existing institutions are failing or misleading, than the preexisting should have no more weight than the as-yet-unimagined alternatives.