Noise Cancelling and Sums ain't got It All

 I wanted to use the word Randomness or "Entropy as Noise" to get our minds around the possibility of other ways of thinking about ourselves as we are in the world. To get where I want to go, I'll have to offer an explanation of Gödel's Incompleteness Theorems. And I want to use information technology's lossy compression to inform our understanding of the way meaning works, specifically as presented by the post structuralist understanding of symbolic order in words and sentences. I'll try to start with the dainty ideas in this flighty expression lossy compression.

Lossy Compression in information science is when an electronic file is compressed to make it smaller, allows it to require less bandwidth when transmitted and less space to store. In the process of compression information is lost. Hence Lossy.

There's a big lossy factor to the way our brains handle information. And why? Here we have "Entropy as Noise" and/or Randomness. If too much information was to attempt to fill our brain networks at the same time ir would become garbled. The information would lose cohesion it would become a bunch of random words. As a result, instead of a book of stamps I might leave the post office with a six by ten envelope handcuffed to the back seat of a Sheriff's cruiser. Entropy is a measure of order within a system, low entropy is tidy and neat, high entropy is messy.

We evolved from the primal ooze this way. We know a lot, we don't have to use all of it all the time. It's there in your mind, making it useful, or at least germane to the matter at hand, doesn't require you to go back to the genesis of your ultimate purpose in life. 

Gödel's Incompleteness Theorem applies to all mathematics. What it said in 1931 to the shock and alarm of Empiricists like Bertrand Russell and what it still says is that there are things in math that cannot be proved by math. In other words, if Godel is right, there is no mathematical theory of everything.

Be brave, while math can slide between concepts in the same way language slides between meaning on a symbolic order, sums haven't got it all, hard to believe but there's still room in the world for whatever it is that might be going on between our aggravating little ears.

We do take short cuts and will continue to allow a library of vaguely defined words to carry meanings that slide between nuances of slippery understandings for us. Our means of transmission may well be lossy for purposes of efficiency, getting the basic message there quickly, at the same time they remain very imprecise when compared to numbers.