The Ascent of Information: Books, Bits, Genes, Machines, and Life's Unending Algorithm

the transition from non-alive to alive (and from non-life to life in the origins of all living systems) may be about changes in information-processing capabilities.

if the metalworld really has its own natural selection and evolution, does it too have a universal way of encoding forms and functions across generations?

Consider the overarching conceit that if we magically made “us” (organic life on Earth) invisible, some alien visitor might still think that this is a living planet based on the activity of the “metal.” On many levels it seems like they could easily draw that conclusion. Across all of the visible inorganic structures there is evidence of growth in

the dataome directly influences human behavior and drives our expenditure of time and energy.

we) also produce interpreted versions of reality that they place in a dataome. Every equation of physics, or every computer simulation of how planets, stars, and galaxies orbit and evolve, is a bizarre imprint of an interpretation of the universe by the universe, built into the universe by the rearrangement of its atoms into brains, books, and hard

when humans talk about meaning we’re usually referring to things that speak to our personal experiences, our aesthetic senses, and our intellects, or to our emotional inner lives and our ability to enhance our sense of satisfaction and happiness.

Both genomes and brains (and potentially dataomes) can be thought of as devices for gathering information that enables predictions about the future based on the recurring patterns seen in the past.

In the history of information theory, and science in general, one of the most influential research papers of the twentieth century is Claude Shannon’s “A Mathematical Theory of Communication,”

Compressibility and Shannon’s entropy provide a baseline measure of the intrinsic information content of data. But the health of that data must also relate to how robust it is; how well encoded it is to withstand noise and corruption. And when an organism’s data contains mutual, survival related information about the organism and its environment, t