Information Flow

This is a two part article. The first part deals with physical and observable information flow and how it relates to people and groups. The second part will deal in how information flow relates to spiritual matters and what this entails. This is not intended to be used as a professional opinion; I have no official credentials. So without further ado, I present to you 'Information Flow'...

Note: A friend summarized the point of this article, "Propaganda is brainwashing and therefore bad information containing little substance for the rational mind."

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Descriptions, definitions...
           Information is something representing concepts and ideas that can be communicated and understood on the receiving end. Information is usually a description of data that may or may not be transmitted. The key purpose behind information is to have something useful easily interpreted by those who own the information. Being in the information age there is a lot of information available to humanity in the form of printed media and the internet. Data itself is useless without a way to interpret and understand it, and eventually convert it into information. An example of this is a sky mapping program, where one must take a great deal of high resolution images each having meta-data attached describing where the image was taken and under what conditions. This may eventually be converted into a software program and the information it contains will be of use to astronomers. Information is constantly created and lost in the human brain as the brain interprets the 'data' from the senses and presents a perception of the world to the mind, which typically forgets the information due to the old becoming obsolete thus having no value in its storage.
           Now, getting away from the really general definition one finds there are many practical purposes to information. Within the civilian sector information describes just about all of the technology one encounters. From water treatment to computer production everything has a design on paper that other groups trained in interpreting the information can reproduce. Previously created information can be used to gather new data and create new information, thus increasing the collective knowledge of humanity. Information is necessary for people to travel, else they cannot determine how to get from Point A to Point B and what to expect along the way. This information is given through maps and charts, transit schedules, and road signs. It is also necessary to know how the body behaves to various things done to it, thus the research was done and we have medicine; the knowledge being passed on through education and books.
           There is value in information, some more than others. A great deal of information is available publicly that took a great deal of effort to create. While it is valuable to humanity, the chance of losing this information today is very low. It is so widespread and so many copies exist that to change its value the thing that the information describes would have to change such that the information does not apply to it anymore (much chaos and disorder if we're talking about physical laws here) or new more refined information comes about that has greater usefulness over the old. In the case where the information is not readily available it starts to have a great deal of value to interested parties. Industrial/corporate espionage is a profitable business because competitors wish to know what everyone is doing that they do not reveal. Attaining that information and transferring it successfully leads to a tidy profit at the expense of the company whose information was stolen. The term stolen does not refer to depriving the company of information, but rather that as soon as it is not a 'secret' the value of the information and of keeping it a secret instantly halves the moment another group possesses it. Hence every time information is resold it loses value because it slowly becomes common knowledge, as opposed to privileged knowledge. To safeguard this kind of information one uses encryption, thus technically it is only information to those who can decrypt it, random gibberish to those who can't, and data to be interpreted to those who wish to break it.
           It is worthy of notice that information representing a dynamic object or concept (one that changes over time, as opposed to static), if up to date, is valued far more than that representing a fixed concept. For example, being able to say where a plane is at any given moment in real-time is far more impressive then stating the identity and ownership of the plane, but the latter is necessary to get the most value out of the former. It is thus air traffic controllers are capable of saving lives with both sets of information available to them through radar and transponders, and are able to communicate instructions directing aircraft away from risky situations. In cryptography an algorithm that has variables based on dynamic information (i.e. certain sounds from white noise, temperature variations near a sensitive sensor) is much stronger because it is near impossible to crack without knowing the variables in real time and how they relate to the output (the encrypted information).

The Flow
           A double-edged sword to information is that there is so much of it. While that does mean there is a great selection to choose from, it also means that the information can be overwhelming, and slightly more problematic is that one cannot verify the veracity of all information they encounter. People can and do profit from lies, people can and do seek to improve their own wealth at the expense of others. Thus amongst all the information in existence a great deal of it is lies, propaganda, or outright rubbish that pollutes the mind. People lie to gain an advantage or to avoid some consequence, this false information, if stored by the receiver of the lie and used at a later point leads to damage, as it has no basis in reality in describing an existing concept or object. The sky is not a uniform shade of magenta and anyone who believes otherwise is easily corrected due to the availability of the outdoors (There are lots of them). Being informed by a source you trust that things are a certain way one is more likely to believe it and consequently base their opinions on that belief. A problem is that if down the road one discovers the lie, the connection to the established beliefs may not be immediately discovered, or is too well ingrained, to be removed with anything short of contradicting information to revise the belief. A practical example is being raised in a white community with an aversion to blacks. Once one learns about the concepts of bigotry and racism and realizes the community possesses those qualities, the individual may still retain an aversion to blacks because it is part of their knowledge base, which cannot be erased outright. This lasts until they find themselves in a group situation amongst blacks which presents the contradicting information that blacks are okay or even enjoyable to spend time with and the old ingrained ideas are erased to be replaced by more up-to-date information.
           This is the basis of propaganda, that a targeted population's only information about something is controlled. In war the opposition would be painted as inhuman monsters deserving of death. This propaganda is usually presented in as many ways as possible as frequently as possible; it begins to replace previous beliefs in those who do not feel motivated to resist the propaganda. Simultaneously, those in control will seek to remove anything that may contradict their propaganda. Thus it is their intention to prevent the general population from learning that the enemy is no different from them and shares the same values, making reasonable people feel they are killing their neighbor, instead of some rabid dog. The way this is done is by deporting those who may be from the country of the 'enemy' or placing them into concentration camps, thus isolating them from the population at large. At the same time the propaganda permits the unscrupulous to exploit the targeted group for all their worth, much as the Canadian government stole and resold the belongings of Japanese Canadians during World War II after sending them to concentration camps (to use one example, but this happens very frequently). Globalization and the internet helps to cut down these differences because of the advances in transmitting information around the world, but language acts as a barrier between various parts of the world. A person speaking only English cannot converse with a person speaking only Japanese without a translator, and when available the two parties do not know they may enjoy speaking with each other without an initial meeting to justify a translator; a catch 22.
           The media too bombards us with propaganda, not for military purposes but for profit; greed. In just about every country one can find billboards, posters, radio advertisements, television advertisements, people walking up to you to advertise, people calling you to advertise. This goes to the next level when computers are used to advertise. Spam, viruses, malware, popups, websites, all created for the purpose of reaching an audience numbering in the millions. All of it having a foot in the door of our lives if we frequent the internet. All of this information bombards our senses daily whether we desire it or not, seeking to exploit everyone it can by telling lies usually resulting in our having a mental filter to reduce the amount of information that reaches our conscious awareness. Those who do pay attention may find their intelligence level rapidly dropping (analysts excepted) because the content has absolutely nothing in it to develop the mind. There is no wit, nothing clever, and nothing intelligent in what passes for advertisements today. It acts as cheap entertainment to convince us to buy a product giving us absolutely no practical useful information relating to the product. There are also people whose job it is to figure out how to get past our mental block of their senseless bombardment, thus they design more shocking and subliminal ads that are aimed at maximizing profits.
           Of relation to all this is conditioning. Conditioning is training the mind or body to react a certain way to certain stimuli (Research Pavlov's Dog). This is the secondary goal of propaganda, whereby the existing non-interned population is trained to react uniformly and in a desired fashion to various events, news, statements, etc. This may be achieved with things like nationalism, whereby if you do not behave like everybody else in acting patriotic you are labeled as being against the larger group. This happens within exclusive groups and cults as well, to weed out the disloyal and encourage participation through peer pressure. While conditioning itself is a large topic I will mainly say that it serves those in control when they are able to elicit a predictable response from the population by way of a simple action or statement. "The enemy has infiltrated us!" suspicion, "A national hero was killed" mourning, "Our citizens are being killed by the enemy!" immediate support for any number of atrocious actions though all the statements may have been lies and there absolutely no one harmed by the 'enemy', although there are plenty of citizens hurt because of the witch hunt mentality created amongst the populace to create scapegoats for any number of real or imagined problems.
           A major problem from all the propaganda, and the capacity of the media to reach millions of people simultaneously gives us the problem of 'consensus reality' (Research it). This is where reality is what the majority believes it to be, and disagreeing with the majority and being vocal about it leads to one getting torn apart. Just to prove the point, I see nothing wrong with pedophilia (love or sexual attraction to children). Does that invoke feelings? It is a controversial issue, but just to avoid having the mobs or police coming after me I will explain that I do not consider it a voluntary thing, and there are multiple outlets to the feelings that do not require harming another being. Those who do harm another being out of their urges ought to be tried for harming another being, not because of their urges. Punishing someone for something they cannot control is completely insane and counterproductive. If anybody still feels uptight about it feel free to contact me for further deliberations. These are controversial and taboo subjects, but only because society (through the sensationalist media) made them so. One ends up thinking in only the fashion they were told to do so, a self-imposed mind control and extremely limiting in what one can think. This is very subtle and the most prohibitive to our self development. Also, words are loaded because of their excessive connection with bad things. The news media reports on grim events far more than positive ones and the use of the word 'pedophile' (to use the example a moment longer) is almost always associated with harming children for sexual pleasure, thus any mention of pedophilia brings up those connotations, when in fact the word has no relation to them.
           There ought to be a mention towards the point that verbal debates have decreased in quality significantly in recent years, especially online. I refer to where two or more groups are seeking to convince everyone else of their position being the correct one. In most cases both groups are flinging dung without producing a convincing argument to defend their position or demonstrate why the opposing position is wrong. An analogy for this is two drunks fighting, neither actually landing a punch though both believing themselves to be better and the winner. The other type of fight does not involve one trying to make a point, but to simply denounce an opponent to reduce their public image. Slander, trolling, black propaganda (pretending to be opponent) Idea is that the denouncer is chosen as the 'lesser evil', thus gaining a victory without doing anything positive. Also, by the time a person reaches adulthood they are fairly confident in their convictions, and to change long-held and cherished beliefs is a very unpleasant and messy process, thus these sort of fights are not so much to convince an opponent as to repeat it to oneself and get a pat on the back from those who share the same belief.

Word Problem
We are taught to interpret certain words in certain ways. This happens to the degree that they are associated with a whole string of images and emotions. "nine one one" is for emergencies, "nine eleven" is associated with planes crashing into tall buildings, as an example. English is limited in the ideas it can express, thus thinking in English and being unable to find a word for a concept may force someone to select a word with the next closest meaning, changing the whole meaning of the concept. This is equivalent to having thoughts controlled because one forfeits their own thought for a false own.

Note: To clarify, I do not support pedophilia, in the same way I do not support a lot of things, but I do believe that everyone, even people I disagree with, ought to have certain rights and a degree of respect.

Information Flow - Part 1