2003-2004 Weekly Series of Brown Bag Lunch Conversations
"Information, Meaning, and Noise: What's the Difference?"
"Meaning is information that has been discarded: information that is no longer present and no longer needs to be. Information and meaning are rather like money and wealth. Real value, real weath, is a matter of...the money you have spent, money you used to have: utility values you have obtained by paying for them....Likewise information: It is only when you have got enough of the stuff that you realize it has no value in itself."
--Tor Norretranders, The User Illusion: Cutting Consciousness Down to Size
"Information lays claim to prompt verifiability. The prime requirement is that it appear 'understandable in itself'...because of this it proves incompatible with the spirit of storytelling....it is half the art of storytelling to keep a story free from explanation as one reproduces it...thus the narrative achieves an amplitude that information lacks."
--Walter Benjamin,"The Storyteller"
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