Someone asked me the other day about how to configure a hard disk and of course I had the correct information so his problem was quickly solved. In the process I had a flash of insight about the nature of information itself. It turns out that information is about the way we look at raw data rather than about the data itself. Data is just a collection of observations. If the data is," Looky! Looky! A stop sign!" there is only information if that observation is coupled to at least one other datum like, "Ooo a cop!" or, "A car's coming!". There's now enough data to provide some information. Unfortunately we believe that data itself constitutes information when it is really just a single piece of something larger, that being information . At some point we have to decide what the data means. We will call that meaning, information.

There is no guarantee that having lots of data will actually produce useful information. We might still claim to possess information simply because we have data, but there is no necessary connection between what've observed and what we think it means. We may have simply misunderstood what we've seen or put things in the wrong order or missed some essential observation. It may also happen that we may prefer that our data leads to some conclusion and arrange it to "prove" some point. We've all done it and we will do it again. Given some raw data we will manipulate it into whatever configuration suits us at the time. Because it's so easy and so common to manufacture information, little of what we think we know is trustworthy. No matter how much we believe we desire the Truth, what we actually want is for the Truth to be some particular way.

The fact that a hard disk will accept whatever we write to it with no discrimination whatsoever, makes the point that data has nothing to do with Truth. The additional fact that a hard disk will do whatever you want it to do with the data it stores, means that the information gotten from a hard disk is whatever we want it to be. The same can be said of any medium of data storage. A computer just makes it easier to collect and process data but without improving the accuracy or relevance of whatever information we think we've collected. The whole process of creating information is inescapably subjective. We will manufacture the information that suits us and reject everything else as either misinformation or lies. We would like to believe that our information at least, is accurate, that we are not motivated by any bias toward (or against) some particular outcome. I can think of no way of proving that claim but it is comforting.

Another attribute of a hard disk (or any medium of mass storage), is that it is finite. At some point it will max out and nothing more can be added. If this happens the computer in which it resides will crash. To prevent this we will either have to add another storage medium device or delete some stuff. The human mind doesn't seem to have this limitation. We can not only collect and retain data throughout our lives, we also manage to store all the information we have derived from that data. Even the ideas and conclusions we've later rejected are still in there somewhere. It seems that we can keep doing this forever without ever flushing out our memory to accommodate new data. This has some interesting ramifications.

If we never lose anything, then everything we think and believe is colored by all that has gone before. We gradually lose the ability for original thought simply because everything is connected to everything else. Our past determines our present in some very fundamental way. What we call an epiphany is the experience of something profoundly new and unexpected, something that comes from beyond ourselves. More likely this phenomenon is just a rearrangement of what was already there. We suddenly understand what we know in a uniquely different way. An epiphany could really be an insight from outside ourselves, but I can't imagine any way to know.

Even so, after a while we have collected so much data and have devised so many different ways to arrange it that it may be that the number of possible configurations approaches infinity. If I write a book of 400 pages with pages having about 4000 characters each, the entire book will around 160,000 characters I could store about 25000 of these books on a 40Gb hard disk. We could say that the hard disk can hold a significant fraction of human knowledge. Larger hard disks can hold even more and an array of large disks could hold everything ever written by everyone for all time. Pretty impressive. But a hard disk can only store data that can be encoded into a single byte of eight binary digits. This necessarily limits the kind of data it can store. If there can be data that cannot be represented digitally then there's things that can't stored on a hard disk.

As it turns out, almost all of what actually exists is non-digital and beyond any kind of mechanical (digital) representation. Everything we store on a hard disk is merely symbolic, an approximation. Any digital information is only a sampling of all the data present. We choose which part of the sample we will consider useful and ignore the rest. If I really did write a book it could never replace the reality I'm trying to describe, it can't be a substitute for what it represents. A book depends on the reader for any substance we believe it may have. In itself it can only create rough sketches, mere outlines that have to be filled out by a human mind. A book provokes the imagination of whoever reads it and it's their imagination that entertains and informs them.

Over many generations humans have learned to invest inanimate things with powers they obviously cannot have (they are inanimate, after all). A book and a hard disk are both inanimate just like rocks and puffy clouds. They have value and utility because of us and our ability to imagine meaning, because we believe in information and because we trust our data. The only fact that is entirely trustworthy is that human reality is entirely subjective. Regardless of how we collect the data, regardless of the sophistication of our instruments or the cleverness of our techniques or the ingenuity of our interpretations, everything we believe we have learned remains subjective. It all has to be presented to the human mind at some point and the human mind will filter it and manipulate it and, ultimately, change it in it's quest to "explain" it.

A hard disk cannot be a zealot simply because it is incapable of comprehending its purpose. A hard disk cannot understand the data it so faithfully stores, it is a wholly passive mechanism. Regardless of how many Bibles, Korans, Torahs, Vedas, Cabalas, etc. that I might store on a hard disk, it will never become religious. Storing every political treatise every written will not make a hard disk politically active. Data, in itself is forever neutral and supremely indifferent. The enthusiasm invested in any human enterprise, whether religious, political, economic, philosophical or anything else comes solely from the human mind. That the human mind is so variable and so subjective and so unreliable, should diminish our faith in our conclusions about almost everything. Yet loony fanatics of every kind proliferate endlessly.

A hard disk can store a record of our enduring folly but it doesn't seem to be of any value in helping us understand it. Worse, we come to believe that the data stored on a hard disk is of greater worth than whoever put it there in the first place. A hard disk will never experience and epiphany but we might. If we can rearrange the data we have already accumulated into new configurations, we might eventually see how pointless we've become. Maybe then we can stop taking our enthusiasm so seriously.