Some context – and surely most of what is available — is necessarily lost when we try to understand reality. All we can really know is our personal cognitive model. A boundary exists all around that model, and it’s impossible to know much more about what’s beyond. Maybe there is no singular reality out there. And surely it’s not worth talking about except as a belief or a fantasy.

No matter how substantial that outer reality may be, the perspective of each observer is part of the truth. It’s a sample, one of many perspectives distilled by space and time, and even the sum of our perspectives is insubstantial — the light that reaches us, according to the inflationary theory, is only one billionth of the total universe. Odds are that our concept of the shape and workings of things is terribly distorted by sampling bias – we’re privy to a slice that has misleading clusters and an absence of most of the remarkable.

Given any lapse of time or space, or whatever other influences you might imagine, a signal will be changed. And by “changed,” I mean altered or distorted so that it no longer represents the truth that it held at its source, prior to transmission. That’s fine, if you think that our brains can distinguish such potentially altered transmissions and set them aside for closer inspection. Of course, we can’t, because everything that we sense — either from our eyeballs or from our antennae – has been distorted before it gets into our heads. Truth is lost as soon as we recognize the signal, before we even try to make sense of it. And even the cleanest reception is subject to all sorts of deception in the processing. Light tumbles against neurons; neurons stumble through mazes, and bias, judgment, and an existential mandate for efficiency strip the signal of any decoration, patch up the holes, and stuff it into a little, pre-sized box. What’s this? We wonder, as we pull it down from a shelf, moments or years later. A number that’s been scrawled into a table of a log book in fading graphite; a memory weighted by the insult, fear or shame by which the event was attended; a lesson that was carried in a rhyme, now decayed from inside, knowledge vanished like the empty pockets of an ossified bone, nothing but the singsong structure and whiff of playground remain.

Signal theory, and to some extent information theory, gives us ways to detect and correct for such changes. It could be argued that the most fundamental form of information is binary – in a state of either yes or no, or zero or one. (It’s not really the most fundamental form. As we’ll discuss a bit later, everything is a wave, and so simplifying behavior as binary states isn’t always thoroughly descriptive.) And so a signal could fundamentally be described as a packet of yes and no states. If the signal is a sound, for example, the states might describe the amplitudes and frequencies. Distortion is possible, even if there’s a known sender who has willfully coded and transmitted the message. 

We get self-generated signals about most important things happening inside our bodies, our means to knowing that we’re hungry or tired or anxious. And we observe our place in the world that’s immediately external to us by the common five senses – taste, touch, sight, hearing, smell – as well as by ones that aren’t so specifically attached to a single organ, such as our sense of balance and our sense of acceleration through space and our sense of the passage of time. As functions of our bodies, our senses are quite utilitarian — they’ve evolved to effectively observe those events that impact our ability to survive and thrive, and the effectiveness and efficiency of each sense is designed in proportion to the likely severity of those events. But there’s more to the universe than our puny existence, isn’t there? At least, our philosophies are inclined to seek beyond that. Maybe that curiosity is intrinsic to our adaptivity, and together they provide a sort of hedge for all forms of life to sustain in the face of unexpected adversities. I mean, this is the same curiosity that could universally infiltrate the consciousness of whales and butterflies; compelling enough to invite them to recognize the need to migrate; plastic enough to form a sense of magnetic orientation out of an already occupied neural network. I’m saying that there’s a purpose for all that extra brain of ours. The utility of curiosity is easy to poo-poo as extravagant because it’s so rarely called upon in the day-to-day travails of our lives and it can so often lead us into pointless musings and even dangerous dead-ends. Anyway, our attention is wired for the here and now. We’re not really made to appreciate – at least not easily —  benefits that are manifested over so many years and so many lifetimes.  I don’t think the whales remember or celebrate the day they learned to roam or the urgency to eventually return. They may not even rue the distraction that leads to stranding.

So we make antennae and probes; scopes and sniffers; scanners and litmus media and detectors. Out of some sense of necessity, we’ve wondered about the waves that we don’t ordinarily notice. And then we begin to notice all of the noise and we notice that most of it is meaningless. At least, there’s more information available than can ever hope to use. We can’t even count how much there is, because – really – its’ infinite. Fast radio bursts and particles rain upon us constantly from every direction of the boundless universe, and that rain has been falling forever, accumulating tracks and traces that are themselves information.

But collecting those observations as elegantly as our bodies’ senses do — with the same built-in filters and biases and efficiencies — takes some extra work. A radio antenna responds to a passing wave by exciting electrons in polar directions, forming an electronic sine wave simulacrum of the waves that transit space. But of course there’s noise, and that noise can easily confuse the signal. Richard Hamming devised an efficient way to sort the noise from a sent signal. The Hamming code devotes some bits of the signal to self-monitoring, so that the receiver of the signal can see the information as well as some indication of the quality of the information, or at least whether it differs from what was transmitted. And for a signal that has binary bits — yes or no; on or off — the Hamming codes scale the monitoring in the most mutually exclusive, comprehensively exhaustive way possible. Only four bits are used to monitor the quality of eleven bits of information. Now this efficiency is possible only because of some known structure of the network between a sender and a receiver. That is, the bits are arranged in positions, and both parties abide by a rule about which positions are used to indicate quality and which are used to convey information. That’s not so easy if there isn’t a discrete sender or a communication network that allows codes.

We have very good reasons for turning information into data. One is related to our persistent urge to simplify. Data, which we can segregate into manageable and distinct units, is simple to appreciate and simple to manipulate. Therein lies the power, but therein also lies the trouble. Information, details and context – little things that could be useful to our ultimate solution or at least to our sense of wonder — is lost when we boil it all down. So we’re not wrong to make data out of all the noise that surrounds us. Our brains were doing it anyway — distilling noise into little packets of fight or flight chemicals; remembering only the essential outlines of the beasts that haunt the outer darkness; turning existential fear into feelings of love; making little stories out of tragedies and religious out of death. And one meta-level up, our big and thirsty brains have chosen to gather extra information, saturating our senses and then building machines and antennae to harvest ever more. And with this surfeit we make data; we boil the noise down to its bones because it’s more manageable. We can cut and dice and our machines can mash it all together, render it as information once more. Noise to data allows us to identify amazing degrees of precision around the information, and that precision can be multiplied many times over by our analytics. Molecules are reshaped to make colors that would never have been visible to the human eye. But wait – is that color even real? I mean, nobody’s ever seen an electron. Yet we conceptualize them; we draw pictures of them; we build cities of light out of them, but we just the same can’t confidently describe where they are at any one moment, or even if such a moment exists. Maybe such precision never existed at the source. There may be no such thing as t + a fraction of a percent less than one Planck unit, yet our numbers suggest this very possibility, and our measures and experiments force our eyes upon something that isn’t even real.