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

data need not be constantly engaged with.

mutual information,

it’s one thing for information to be encoded in matter, like the ink on a page or electrons in a silicon chip. It’s a whole other thing if that same information can now exert influence over the matter encoding it.

Just because we don’t fully understand something, that doesn’t mean it exists outside our known parameters.

knowledge of one thing reduces uncertainty about another thing.

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.

we’re missing what’s right in front of us. Evolution has been tinkering with ways to better propagate information on Earth since the get-go four billion years in the past.

When I say that an organism “has information,” what I mean is that it encodes something about the external world in itself.