The Ascent of Information PDF Download
Are you looking for read ebook online? Search for your book and save it on your Kindle device, PC, phones or tablets. Download The Ascent of Information PDF full book. Access full book title The Ascent of Information by Caleb Scharf. Download full books in PDF and EPUB format.
Author: Caleb Scharf
Publisher: Penguin
ISBN: 0593087259
Category : Computers
Languages : en
Pages : 353
Get Book Here
Book Description
“Full of fascinating insights drawn from an impressive range of disciplines, The Ascent of Information casts the familiar and the foreign in a dramatic new light.” —Brian Greene, author of The Elegant Universe Your information has a life of its own, and it’s using you to get what it wants. One of the most peculiar and possibly unique features of humans is the vast amount of information we carry outside our biological selves. But in our rush to build the infrastructure for the 20 quintillion bits we create every day, we’ve failed to ask exactly why we’re expending ever-increasing amounts of energy, resources, and human effort to maintain all this data. Drawing on deep ideas and frontier thinking in evolutionary biology, computer science, information theory, and astrobiology, Caleb Scharf argues that information is, in a very real sense, alive. All the data we create—all of our emails, tweets, selfies, A.I.-generated text and funny cat videos—amounts to an aggregate lifeform. It has goals and needs. It can control our behavior and influence our well-being. And it’s an organism that has evolved right alongside us. This symbiotic relationship with information offers a startling new lens for looking at the world. Data isn’t just something we produce; it’s the reason we exist. This powerful idea has the potential to upend the way we think about our technology, our role as humans, and the fundamental nature of life. The Ascent of Information offers a humbling vision of a universe built of and for information. Scharf explores how our relationship with data will affect our ongoing evolution as a species. Understanding this relationship will be crucial to preventing our data from becoming more of a burden than an asset, and to preserving the possibility of a human future.
Author: Caleb Scharf
Publisher: Penguin
ISBN: 0593087259
Category : Computers
Languages : en
Pages : 353
Get Book Here
Book Description
“Full of fascinating insights drawn from an impressive range of disciplines, The Ascent of Information casts the familiar and the foreign in a dramatic new light.” —Brian Greene, author of The Elegant Universe Your information has a life of its own, and it’s using you to get what it wants. One of the most peculiar and possibly unique features of humans is the vast amount of information we carry outside our biological selves. But in our rush to build the infrastructure for the 20 quintillion bits we create every day, we’ve failed to ask exactly why we’re expending ever-increasing amounts of energy, resources, and human effort to maintain all this data. Drawing on deep ideas and frontier thinking in evolutionary biology, computer science, information theory, and astrobiology, Caleb Scharf argues that information is, in a very real sense, alive. All the data we create—all of our emails, tweets, selfies, A.I.-generated text and funny cat videos—amounts to an aggregate lifeform. It has goals and needs. It can control our behavior and influence our well-being. And it’s an organism that has evolved right alongside us. This symbiotic relationship with information offers a startling new lens for looking at the world. Data isn’t just something we produce; it’s the reason we exist. This powerful idea has the potential to upend the way we think about our technology, our role as humans, and the fundamental nature of life. The Ascent of Information offers a humbling vision of a universe built of and for information. Scharf explores how our relationship with data will affect our ongoing evolution as a species. Understanding this relationship will be crucial to preventing our data from becoming more of a burden than an asset, and to preserving the possibility of a human future.
Author: Charles Eisenstein
Publisher: North Atlantic Books
ISBN: 1583946365
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 577
Get Book Here
Book Description
The author of The More Beautiful World Our Hearts Know Is Possible explores the history and potential future of civilization, tracing the converging crises of our age to the illusion of the separate self Our disconnection from one another and the natural world has mislaid the foundations of science, religion, money, technology, economics, medicine, and education as we know them. It has fired our near-pathological pursuit of technological Utopias even as we push ourselves and our planet to the brink of collapse. Fortunately, an Age of Reunion is emerging out of the birth pangs of an earth in crisis. Our journey of separation hasn't been a terrible mistake but an evolutionary process and an adventure in self-discovery. Even in our darkest hour, Eisenstein sees the possibility of a more beautiful world—not through the extension of millennia-old methods of management and control but by fundamentally reimagining ourselves and our systems. We must shift away from our Babelian efforts to build ever-higher towers to heaven and instead turn out attention to creating a new kind of civilization—one designed for beauty rather than height.
Author: Thomas A. Goudge
Publisher: University of Toronto Press, c1961, 1967 printing.
ISBN:
Category : Evolution
Languages : en
Pages : 248
Get Book Here
Book Description
Author: Bruce McGhie
Publisher: Ruder Finn Press
ISBN: 9781932646283
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 358
Get Book Here
Book Description
Rendered quadriplegic at 22, aspiring Air Force pilot McGhie writes a straight-forward, compelling autobiography of the challenges, disappointments and successes of his life. Now in his sevenites, McGhie has been CEO of his own company and is also a certified glider pilot, father, artist and photographer. The book shows how those with disabiling injuries can live productive lives on equal terms with those without disability - and in some cases accomplish even more.
Author: James F. Harris
Publisher: Transaction Publishers
ISBN: 1412847605
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 273
Get Book Here
Book Description
The Ascent of Man develops a comprehensive theory of human nature. James F. Harris sees human nature as an emergent property that supervenes a cluster of properties. Despite significant overlap between individuals that have human nature and those that are biologically human, the concept of human nature developed in this book is different. Whether biologically human or not, an individual may be said to possess human nature. This theory of human nature is called the "cluster theory." Harris takes as his point of departure Plato's comment that in learning what a thing is we should look to the ways in which it acts upon or is acted upon by other things. He commits to a methodological naturalism and draws upon current views from the social and biological sciences. The cluster theory he develops represents one of the very few completely novel theories of human nature developed in the post-Darwin era. It will prove most useful in dealing with philosophical questions involving such contemporary issues as cloning, cybernetics, and the possibility of extraterrestrial life. The fundamental conceptual issue is how plastic and elastic is the nature of human nature. Just how different might we imagine human beings to be and still be human in the sense that they still possess whatever it is that accounts for a unique nature? The theory of human nature developed in this book is a descriptive, dynamic, bottom-up, non-essentialist, naturalist theory. Harris is well versed in classical philosophy and contemporary behavioral science. He writes in a graceful, open-ended way that both educates and illuminates renewed interest in what it means to be human.
Author: Thomas Anderson Goudge
Publisher:
ISBN: 9780598184757
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 236
Get Book Here
Book Description
Author: Thomas Merton
Publisher: HMH
ISBN: 0547537077
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 357
Get Book Here
Book Description
The author of The Seven Storey Mountain explores the mysticism of Saint John of the Cross. The only thing that can save the world from complete moral collapse is a spiritual revolution. . . . The desire for unworldliness, detachment, and union with God is the most fundamental expression of this revolutionary spirit. In Ascent to Truth, author and Trappist Monk Thomas Merton makes an impassioned case for the importance of contemplation. Drawing on a range of thinkers—from Carl Jung to Pope Pius XII—Merton defines the nature of contemplative experience and shows how the Christian mysticism of sixteenth-century Spanish Carmelite Saint John of the Cross offers essential answers to our disquieting and troubling times. “For any who have the desire to look into meditation and contemplation . . . this is the book for which they have waited.” —New York Herald Tribune Book Review “For those who may be curious about mysticism, and for those who may be called to a life of contemplation, this is an excellent book.” —Catholic World
Author: Laurence Leamer
Publisher: Harper Collins
ISBN: 0062039237
Category : Sports & Recreation
Languages : en
Pages : 448
Get Book Here
Book Description
Willi Unsoeld, a legend among mountaineers--a man whom Bill Moyers calls one of the few giants he has ever met--fearlessly challenged the world's highest peaks and inspired a generation of climbers with his legacy. Ascent is the story of his life--a thrilling tale of physical and spiritual adventure that captures the hypnotic force behind this extraordinary personality. From his triumphant conquest of Everest's forbidding West Ridge to the tragic loss of his daughter on the treacherous slopes of Nanda Devi to his final, fatal attempt at Mount Rainier, we see Willi as guru and guide, lover of danger and philosopher of risk--a man whose indomitable spirit triggered such devotion that people followed him fearlessly to extraordinary heights and, sometimes, even to their deaths. A dramatic saga of bravery, daring, and the search for spiritual truth, Ascent brilliantly captures the mythic figure of Willi Unsoeld.
Author: Jacob Bronowski
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Civilization
Languages : en
Pages : 302
Get Book Here
Book Description
Author: Henry Drummond
Publisher: Jazzybee Verlag
ISBN: 3849644189
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 345
Get Book Here
Book Description
Though its stand-point is Evolution and its subject Man, this book is far from being designed to prove that Man has relations, compromising or otherwise, with lower animals. Its theme is Ascent, not Descent. It is a History, not an Argument. And Evolution, in the narrow sense in which it is often used when applied to Man, plays little part in the drama outlined here. So far as the general scheme of Evolution is introduced--and in the Introduction and elsewhere this is done at length --the object is the important one of pointing out how its nature has been misconceived, indeed how its greatest factor has been overlooked in almost all contemporary scientific thinking.
