I’m reading Glut by Alex Wright. It’s not about food. Unless information is food, which might be true for an A.I. sopping up gobs of data. The book, subtitled “Mastering Information Through the Ages”, takes a long-view sweep from hunter-gatherer notions of classification through cuneiform, the alphabet, scroll-to-book transition, scientific taxonomies, encyclopedias, and of course, the Internet. Today’s post targets the book’s midsection with anecdotes of Bacon.
That’s Francis Bacon – philosopher and empiricist who served as Lord Chancellor of England in the early seventeenth century. According to Wright, Bacon had trained in the scholastic art of memorization as had many monastics and academicians of the times. But Bacon rejected this “tendency to celebrate… elaborate memory feats [and] intellectual gymnasticism”, finding them ostentatious. Bacon carved a new path with his famous work Novum Organum which “proposed nothing less than restructuring the enterprise of scholarship… [laying] the philosophical foundations for a process that would later become known as the scientific method, a radical departure from the scholasticism that sought pathways to truth through esoteric practices and belief in disembodied ideals.”
While Bacon wouldn’t have labeled himself as a scientist, he championed the direct observation of natural phenomena. He would have been comfortable being called a magician. There is speculation he was an alchemist. Bacon even wrote that “the aim of magic is to recall natural philosophy from the vanity of speculations to the importance of experiments.” Wright writes that for Bacon, “the duty of a philosopher… was not to reject magical traditions out of hand but to delve into them with fresh eyes and a critical perspective.”
Bacon is credited with the method of inductive reasoning and is considered a father or perhaps grandfather of what we today call the scientific method. He championed “research as a collaborative process” but was also an elitist, “believing that the great uneducated masses posed a severe threat to the integrity of scholarship”. There is a post-modern flavor to Bacon’s “idols” – barriers to understanding because of human and societal limitations. As individuals, we have implicit biases. Our perceptual umwelt is limited and colors our conclusions. Meaning is constructed socially and defining words is a slippery business. Mythology and ideological beliefs get in the way.
It is hard work to be a master of information. Having just read an entire book about the history of the encyclopedia, it was interesting to learn that the point of Bacon’s empiricism was to “formulate a new philosophical framework for classifying all of human knowledge. He postulated that all human intellectual pursuits revolve around three essential facilities: memory, reason, and imagination (or, in more familiar terms: history, philosophy, and poetry).” In subsequent chapters of Wright’s book there are figures showing Diderot’s Encyclopedie and Jefferson’s library catalog. Both men utilized Bacon’s categories (rather than using an alphabetical list). I also learned that Jefferson donated his personal library, one of the largest in the world at the time, to restart the Library of Congress after the original library was destroyed by British forces in 1814.
There’s an argument that information is not the same as knowledge is not the same as wisdom, and there’s an increase in quality along that continuum. However, defining each of these terms is a slippery business. There are multiple ways to quantitatively define information, but each of these is to some extent context-dependent and likely observer-dependent. What does it mean to master information? Can we define knowledge in this way, as the mastery of information? If I say that someone is knowledgeable in an area, am I saying that this person demonstrates some level of mastery or expertise? This likely implies not just having a quantity of information, but also having organized it in some way to be useful, although usefulness is also in the eye of the beholder. I’d say I’m knowledgeable in the field of chemistry. But do I demonstrate wisdom in chemistry? I don’t know. Does wisdom even apply? Or is it I that must apply wisdom?
Taxonomy and classification loom large in Wright’s book. Implied in his long-sweep history is that organizing information into “useful” categories plays a key role in the technological advances of human-kind. We’re all a little Homo habilis: tool-makers. As a teacher, organizing information is what I do for my students, so they can get up to speed quickly and efficiently. And chemistry curricula at most colleges are organized hierarchically – perhaps more so than any of the other sciences (even physics). It’s challenging to incorporate the glut of new chemical information pouring in – we do it through special topic electives that are populated by seniors. I try to sneak in bits of stuff as early as first-year General Chemistry, but there’s not much room to maneuver within the strictures – which I’d argue are self-imposed in a confluence of history, being practical, feeling stuck in a system, and sheer laziness.
In the closing chapters, Wright argues that to a large extent the way we organize and acquire information on the Internet is molded on the shoulders of giants. We certainly have lots of information at our fingertips – and yes hypertext is cool (but not novel, even for novels) – but by-and-large it has settled into a command-and-control structure. The Wild Days seem to be a forgotten dream as tech behemoths consolidate their early gains. This is even true for Wikipedia. Throughout his book Wright drums at the tension between top-down hierarchies and bottom-up networks, and the constant push-and-pull between the two. As someone who researches the chemistry of the origin of life, I think Wright is on to something. I suspect that this dynamic interplay is an inherent part of life’s structural underpinnings. The glut comes under control; but it cannot be contained and new life eventually finds a way. Rinse. Repeat.
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