Chaitanya Jyothi Museum Opening, 2000

RAMANAM
In the Name of The Father, and of The Son and of The Holy Spirit, Amen.

Countrymen,

ORBIS NON SUFFICIT
SOLUS DEUS SUFFICIT

Early in the movie The Hunt For Red October, Admiral James Greer (James Earl Jones) summons Analyst Jack Ryan (Alec Baldwin) to a meeting chaired by Dr. Jeffrey Pelt (Richard Jordan) and comprising military and intelligence chiefs.  Red October, a new Russian Typhoon-class (missile) submarine, has put to sea and vanished from sonar detection by an American Los Angeles-class (attack) submarine tracking her.  The meeting is to determine, if possible, what is going on.

Dr. Pelt, the President’s National Security Adviser, asks Admiral Greer, Deputy Director of the CIA, for his conclusions.  Admiral Greer says:

Well, sir, the data support no conclusions as yet.

I want to examine the use of the word data in Admiral Greer’s statement and in general usage today.  I am going to point out that the word is meaningless because it has a nominal but no actual referent.  I will point out that the word information should be used in its stead because it has an actual referent: it references what reality does, it describes how reality functions.

Data comes from Latin dare, to give.  Information comes from Latin informare, to shape, form, describe.  The difference is data has to be named (i.e., made) before it exists and can be used whereas information exists and can be used whether it is named (i.e., made) or not.

Data can be manipulated because it is made up.  Information cannot be manipulated — although it can be ignored or misunderstood — because it preexists its apprehension.

Data is an inert construct that can be used at will, which means brought into active reality or not depending on the wishes of the user.  Data does not act unless caused to do so.  Its existence is entirely nominal and therefore bereft of an actual referent.  It is neither self-organizing nor self-active.  Data lacks aseity.  The word data is meaningless.

Information, on the other hand, exits with or without the let and leave of a user, whether or not someone constructs it.  Information is active on its own, whether or not someone wants it to be.  Information has a universe of actual referents.  The only thing that happens to information is that it sometimes gets shaped and sent on errands.  But shaped or not, sent or not, information exists.  Information is self-organizing and self-active.  It has aseity.  The word information is meaningful.

To illuminate this reality, consider the common phenomenology that inspired the Uncertainty Principle by Werner Karl Heisenberg:

Observation affects the thing observed.

and two well-known aphorisms by Heraclitus:

War [strife, struggle] is the father of all things, including justice.

One cannot step in the same stream twice.

Were the world not already present to a man like Heisenberg or Heraclitus — or to any man — that man would have nothing to ponder and nothing could inspire and enthuse him.  The world that is already present is neither inert nor inactive.  Nor is it ever the same across any duration even though its base, its Logos, is constant.  Even bits of the world which sit in a box, so to speak, affect and are affected by that box.  Nothing does not give and take change.  The nature of everything is eventful, on its own!

Red October roams the seas whether she is on someone’s so-called data-tracker or not.

Each bit of the world, so to speak, is a something which has a character that is inter-active.  It is already formed into something different from other forms in its surround, its matrix, its neighborhood of reality.  Reality comes formed, not unformed.  And its most fundamental form is reason, Logos, which is common to all names and forms and thereby renders the world more or less intelligible.

Information is a fact.  Data is an affectation.  Information is real.  Data is nominal.

Finally, consider this description of information by Gregory Bateson:

Information is a difference that makes a difference.

What is already differs from what else is already as well as, definitionally, from what is not and what is to be.  And the intrinsically different generates differences from and among intrinsically different differences it encounters in the dance of life.

Admiral Greer states that the data support no conclusions as yet.  Of course they do not.  They never will.  How could they, they do not exist?  And in any case, conclusions are accurate and therefore valid, if at all, for the moment they are made and not one moment longer.  The NSA head states that the Russian Navy is hunting Red October, to sink her.  A heated discussion ignites the room of senior leaders.  During which Ryan, the Analyst, ruminates upon information, not data, realities recognizable anywhere, not artificialities stored nowhere.

An intellectual synergy stirring inside Ryan, inspired by differences that make a difference, produces this:

Βασιλεία του Θεού
Kingdom of God

Update 1: Here is an exercise.  Is Jordan Greenhall, writing, he says, about Dr. Jordan Peterson, articulating in a different way the foregoing, or not?

Update 2: Decades ago I had a brief online squall with some worthies who marked my ignorance for claiming that panta, as in Pauline tauta panta, (1 Corinthians 9:23) and penta, as in Frankie Pentangeli, are related and really versions of the same purport, because “the all” (panta) is “made of the five” (penta), namely Ether, Air, Fire, Water, Earth, at the root of the discussion, which is classical Greek/Vedic/Pythagorean mystical philosophy, which we inherit specified personally as Christian Logos Theology.

The worthies were not about to be convinced, especially when I readily offered that I am not a Greek scholar, such as they claimed to be.  I did tell them that I am familiar with cognates and their portages across virtually all Sanscritic languages, to include Greek, Latin, the Germanics, Slavics and Romances, Hindi, etc.  That made no impression on them so I left for more enlightened climes.  Panta and penta, of course, are cognates, with the ur-meaning being the pentagon and dodecahedron, that five-ness which includes all other structures and is therefore the strongest and most permanent of them all.

Update 3: David Archibald: Advice for Our Vietnamese Friends on China

Update 4: Myron Ebell and Steven J. Milloy: Wrong Again: 50 Years of Failed Eco-pocalyptic Predictions

Natasha Bajema: Pentagon Wants AI to Predict Events Before They Occur

AUM NAMAH SHIVAYA