User:Cristinac/unrulyobject

_Snippets from 'The Noise of the Observer'_

_by Peter Weibel_

Noise, therefore, threatens information in several ways. The classic communication theory of information theory or cybernetics firstly simplified the problem of noise by excluding semantic problems, and secondly. viewed it naively, for example, by interpreting the observer not as a source of errors but as a corrector of errors. In a way, it represents a partial retrogression to the time before the thermodynamic theory of entropy. The approaches of quantum physics and chaos theory to information and entropy, as derived from thermodynamics, appear to me the most promising for neutralising the paradoxes and aporia of the theories of entropy and information, as exemplified by Maxwell's Demon, Szillard's machines etc. because they place the problem of the observer at the centre of attention. The noise of classical communication theory is more or less the noise of one's own signal, where the observer acts to correct errors. The noise in quantum physics is the noise of the observer, unavoidably and necessarily producing errors.

The world is only ever defined at the interface between the observer and the rest of the world, Thus, the observer's position, is a regulator that can be moved on a frequency between paradise (information) and hell (error). Information is therefore unavoidably observer-relative. Of necessity the observer creates noise. He can escape this noise of observation only by himself becoming a part of the information model.

Observation by an observer is, therefore, no longer sufficient to increase information; rather, what is required is an increased correlation and co-variance of observers and observations. It is questionable, however, whether we can grasp these correlations.

Quantum physics has acquainted us with the fact that in observing systems and objects we must not dismiss the role of the observer. Niels Bohr promulgated the famous theory that the act of observation in turn influences the very object of our observation. Archibald Wheeler went even further by saying that a phenomenon is a phenomenon only if it is also an observable phenomenon. Here, the informedness of the observer is of central importance. A condition noted by the internal observer is different from that which "objectively exists" and can be observed from the outside. Quantum Demon therefore describes the problem of the noise-generating observer within information systems.

A quantum theory of cultural theory is sorely needed. We must part with the traditional historical notion that there is a pure and objective description of the occurrences in the world of the mind, where the observer's contribution to the phenomena under observation can be disregarded or subtracted. We must take leave of this cliché and this illusion. For, on the contrary, in the world of the media in particular, Wheeler's Theorem applies that only an observed phenomenon is a true phenomenon. Only what is represented in the media also exists. and the form in which it exists in the data space equally depends on the position of the observer. Thus, the critic and the theoretician of culture act, willy-nilly, as real-life observers. The observed object's own signal becomes inseparably mingled with the observer's own signal or noise.

Information and the observer can no longer be divided. The noise of the observer, the indeterminacy-relation between information and observer is not arbitrarily reducible. In the present world, in which, from medicine to economics, access to information and the spread of information are gaining an ever-more fundamental and central importance worldwide, the above-mentioned limitations are particularly noteworthy, since quite obviously there is a danger; firstly, of mistaking noise for information and, secondly, of not eliminating this noise with any increase in the amount of information, but of increasing it, in accordance with the theorem of quantum- and endo-physics, where the internal observer does not know that he is an observer and takes his own noise for the information from the situation under observation.