Stripped to its essentials, every decision in life amounts to choosing which lottery ticket to buy. . . . Most organisms don't buy lottery tickets, but they all choose between gambles every time their bodies can move in more than one way. They should be willing to 'pay' for information---in tissue, energy, and time---if the cost is lower than the expected payoff in food, safety, mating opportunities, and other resources, all ultimately valuated in the expected number of surviving offspring. In multicellular animals the information is gathered and translated into profitable decisions by the nervous system.
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p. 175Steven Pinker
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On the one hand information wants to be expensive, because it's so valuable. The right information in the right place just changes your life. On the other hand, information wants to be free, because the cost of getting it out is getting lower and lower all the time. So you have these two fighting against each other.
Stewart Brand
New-age woolly-hat Glastonbury mystics weary me, sometimes, but they talk about energy, the energy of a place, of a person. We all know what they mean, but at the same time it has to be said that this is not energy that is going to show up on an autometer. We’re not talking about energy in the conventional sense that physics talks about energy. To me, energy is information – I think you can make that bold a statement. The only lines of energy that link up disparate sites in London are lines of information, that have been drawn by an informed mind. The energy that we put forth is information we have taken in. We will see a work of art and it will give us inspiration, it will give us energy. It’s given us information that we can turn to our own use and put out as something else. That’s the kind of energy that we – and psychogeography – are talking about.
Alan Moore
When you buy a lottery ticket, you don't know how tickets have been sold. But sold they have been. And there is an underlying distribution for the game.
Robert Haugen
Evolution embodies information in every part of every organism. ... This information doesn't have to be copied into the brain at all. It doesn't have to be "represented" in "data structures" in the nervous system. It can be exploited by the nervous system, however, which is designed to rely on, or exploit, the information in the hormonal systems just as it is designed to rely on, or exploit, the information embodied in your limbs and eyes. So there is wisdom, particularly about preferences, embodied in the rest of the body. By using the old bodily systems as a sort of sounding board, or reactive audience, or critic, the central nervous system can be guided - sometimes nudged, sometimes slammed - into wise policies. Put it to the vote of the body, in effect. ...
Daniel C. Dennett
I will prove that there are infinite worlds in an infinite world. Imagine the universe as a great animal, and the stars as worlds like other animals inside it. These stars serve in turn as worlds for other organisms, such as ourselves, horses and elephants. We in our turn are worlds for even smaller organisms such as cankers, lice, worms and mites. And they are earths for other, imperceptible beings.
Just as we appear to be a huge world to these little organisms, perhaps our flesh, blood and bodily fluids are nothing more than a connected tissue of little animals that move and cause us to move. Even as they let themselves be led blindly by our will, which serves them as a vehicle, they animate us and combine to produce this action we call life.Cyrano de Bergerac
Pinker, Steven
Pinkney, Edward Coote
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