Nobody asked but …
I am listening to the audiobook version of Zero History by William Gibson. The plot has not yet revealed itself to me but Gibson produces some of the most fascinating phrases, wherein he captures a cosmos of meaning in a very short expression. The case here is “emotional information.” Gibson writes that a suspected shadow is wearing a billed cap and thus is hiding emotional information. Note that he is not concerned with objective information, but with a kind of taoistic information which may range from pedestrian to universal. Maybe this information is like the “unknown unknowns” that Donald Rumsfeld referred to while toying with the media during the professed phase of the Iraqi war II. Emotional information, however, is the bane of the objectivist. Objectivism, aka the scientific method, requires isolation in a vacuum, and I as an engineer like objectivism as well as any man, but we must admit in the end that the world we live in courses, pulses, swirls with emotional information. And that is an objective observation of the evidence and the evidence which is not seen. It is also the heart and soul of unforeseen consequences.
Kilgore
