A small number of fundamental concepts that run counter to religious, metaphysical, or ideological ways of thinking are enough to overturn the usual idealistic and subjectivist understanding of our humanity (and politics). The concepts examined here (information, narrative, after-the-fact, exteriority) are all well known and verifiable by everyone, and there would be no mystery or difficulty if materialist (ecological) conceptions were not so vexing and did not conflict with our narratives, which is why they are constantly denied or repressed in order to preserve the fictions of unity that keep us alive. We will see, moreover, that these fundamental concepts touch on the most sensitive debates of our time (digital technology, democracy, identity, racism, sociology, etc.).
Information
It is most paradoxical that there is such a general misunderstanding of the concept of information, which is considered superfluous even though we are immersed up to our necks in “the world of information” as I described it in 2004 (before the iPhone). Jean-Marc Lévy-Leblond judged that there was nothing really new in this book, in which he was undoubtedly right, but I did not claim to have invented anything, only to provide a precise understanding of the nature of information, which remains very vague for most people. Henri Laborit, as early as 1974, and then Jacques Robin had already heavily emphasized the opposition between the era of industrial (entropic) energy and the era of information (negentropic) that was dawning with the digital age, but without always having a very clear vision of it. It was this necessary clarification that I set out to achieve at the time by gathering all the characteristics of information, its specific mode of existence (neither matter nor energy), all in order to dispel the confusion between the materiality of information and its immaterial content, the dualism of sound and meaning, of signifier and signified, of the pointer and what it points to (the finger and what it designates).
The aim here is not to repeat the arguments of the book or to set out all the implications of a philosophy of information and non-linear immaterial work, which is no longer measured by time, but simply to indicate the importance of a good understanding of what information is, given that it is at the very root of life. Structural (genetic) information and circulating (perceptual) information involve material supports with which they are not to be confused, and which can communicate, transmit, and be recorded on other material supports. Even if information is not matter, there is no immaterial mind floating in the air and acting through magical operations.
Nor is there information without uncertainty and ignorance, without a subject seeking to reduce uncertainty. More precisely, information is inseparable from learning processes and a memory that records the past. This is what enables living beings to overcome universal entropy locally, to endure and multiply. Reproduction, repetition of what works, and responsiveness to information bring about a reversal from the world of material causes to the world of vital ends (from quantum determinism to freedom of movement, the first level of freedom). Reducing information to automatism or a slogan, as Deleuze did, was really to understand nothing...
The concept of information has fundamental implications in physics, biology, economics, politics, philosophy, and, of course, computer science. As information is an element of a communication system, it does not refer to a simple quality but to a composite structure (of biological origin) that is fundamentally different from a simple physical signal. The most general definition of information is subjectively “what we did not know” (repeated information is no longer informative) and, objectively, “a difference that makes a difference.”
Information is an element of a whole connecting sender and receiver, communication between an exterior and an interior, internalization of exteriority (feedback loop) which implies their original separation.
Information involves a more active process than we think. Not only is information improbable, discontinuous, disproportionate, and raises uncertainty while remaining an indirect, imperfect, and temporary indication requiring constant corrections, but above all, it requires a receiver for whom it makes sense, a receiver who is not indifferent to it, whose reaction is triggered by the information (an effect that becomes a cause).
We cannot eliminate subjectivity, the anxiety that precedes information and constitutes its relevance, or its limited receptivity (too much information kills information). The receiver's attention must be focused away from ambient noise and therefore “motivated,” finding interest in relation to their internal goals (we only hear what we expect to hear).
The value of information depends on its novelty, but above all on the degrees of freedom, the totality of possible choices, and the capacities for action from which we must choose. It is objectively linked to its uncertainty and subjectively to its decisive value, i.e., its anti-entropic function.
Information about future risks makes us responsible for the future. The information age is also the age of ecology and human development.
The narrative
With information, starting with the simplest cell, we have a first level of individual and historical subjectivity, but this cannot be reduced to subjectivity and human consciousness, which are essentially distinguished by narrative language that brings into existence shared worlds outside of immediate presence.
If the first Sapiens already had a fairly evolved language, we can imagine that it was still an animal language, phonetic and expressive, capable of designating or naming and describing hunting scenes with forceful gestures, but little else. This remains highly hypothetical, but it seems clear that human cultures (hunter-gatherers), as we know them from ethnology, emerged with the Upper Paleolithic between 65,000 and 45,000 years ago, notably with cave art and a diversification of cultures according to tribes and environments. The mother tongue (if it existed) can be dated to this period, as can the first myths. We could probably go back 85,000 years before the exodus from Africa for a small group, from which we are descended, characterized by an omnivorous diet, brain development (similar to ours), and a decrease in testosterone (visible in the chin) allowing for larger groups.
This remains highly speculative and controversial, but what is certain is that is that narrative language and larger groups allowed for a proliferation of stories and the transmission of myths that constituted a culture and a shared world, as well as cumulative knowledge (before writing), the importance of which we do not sufficiently appreciate, opening up fictional worlds and distant communities, but also the narrative of the self that humanizes us, without which there is no true responsibility.
There is no need to identify narrative language with a decisive break in our prehistory to appreciate how much storytelling transforms our representations and our being in the world, without which there would be no world at all. The narrative of what we cannot see takes us into the world of the mind, which we can imagine as purely immaterial, giving existence to what does not exist, giving meaning to what is only words, and finally personalizing abstractions (as politics in particular demonstrates). We speak of symbolic thought when we are actually referring to narratives that give meaning to these symbolic representations. This fictional world that detaches itself from reality (second level of freedom) is once again the world of separation, between the here and the beyond, between presence and meaning, between oneself and the narrative of oneself, between being and ought-to-be, always in search of its lost unity.
Empiricism, which is the natural attitude, in the evidence of reality as it presents itself directly to us, ignores language and culture, the hallucination of words and the prejudices of common sense. “A priori synthetic judgments” are made possible primarily by education, culture, and everyday discourse, rather than by forms of sensibility, and are very effective at conceiving of things that are outside of space and time (mathematical truths that really exist, as opposed to ghosts and gods that do not exist). The imaginary is poorly named, as it relates more to language and its systems of opposition (while we can easily imagine a horse, it is more difficult to imagine a dog and impossible to imagine an animal). When we are caught up in language, we forget ourselves in what we say, just as perception is forgotten in what is perceived (noesis in noema), but, precisely, it is no longer vision, perception, practical experience, or even authentic speech or intersubjectivity that structure the world, but rather the stories we tell ourselves, the knowledge and meanings we inherit (ideologies and religions), the limits of phenomenology, which must give way to ethnology and sociology.
With narrative comes the birth of lies that invoke their own truth and a whole imaginary world (which is therefore made up of words rather than images). Fake news is not limited to false information; it is alternative narratives. Not only is there no longer direct access to reality, to “things themselves” covered by discourse (which it is not enough to deconstruct), but most narratives feed illusions, dangling impossible happiness and fictional creatures before us. “Every sentence is a fantasy,” Julia Kristeva exaggerates somewhat. The business world has already understood the importance of storytelling, but we need to be more aware of what narratives imply in terms of reconstruction and repression, not take them at face value, concealing as much as they reveal—and there is no escape from discourse.
The aftermath
Armed with this indispensable narrative language for transmitting manufacturing recipes and the memory of collective history, our intelligence is therefore just as confused by misleading stories and false beliefs. There is no transparency of reality, as the rationalism of the Enlightenment believed, but a profusion of imaginary discourses that collide with reality—just as scientific hypotheses are confronted with experience, so often contradicting our initial assumptions. This is why the question of the truth of narratives arises, a truth that only triumphs after the fact, in light of the results, not of the good intentions of ideology or voluntarism, nor of our genius.
This is the principle of cybernetics, or the science of government, that not everything can be programmed (there is no absolute knowledge), and that the objective can only be achieved through error correction and adjustment to the result, the principle of the thermostat and homeostasis. The aftermath is all the more decisive because it is not just a matter of approximation but of dialectics, where the action taken turns into its opposite (as with prohibition). There is no pre-established harmony that would guide us directly to our ends, and no other way to reach reality than to adjust to the result. This is why, unlike the loss of quality in analog magnetic recordings, digital technology is able to eliminate entropy in reproductions by using error detection (checksum verification, parity, etc.) to correct them. This ability to overcome entropy through error correction is absolutely essential, as it is the basis of life, its repair mechanisms, and natural selection, which is nothing more than a post-hoc selection of the viability and reproducibility of organisms.
We ourselves are subject to hindsight, to the final judgment on what we will have been, what we will have accomplished, what we will have believed. Learning in general changes our view of our previous ignorance, so we learn from the future the meaning of our past existence, heavy with remorse and regret, far from sovereign control of our lives, as we claim, and from the narcissistic novel we make of them.
Exteriority
All these cognitive limitations of imperfect information, fictional narratives, and the retrospective sanctioning of our judgments merely express the exteriority of the world, of a reality that eludes us and a truth that cannot be absorbed by knowledge, a reality that we bump up against and that brings our romantic delusions back to a more modest level, fictional freedom subject to the necessities of the moment. This reality manifests itself in many ways, in culture as in the biosphere, in pleasure as in suffering, in science as in natural disasters, in everything that contravenes the sacred history of a self-consciousness of the Spirit and a final reconciliation, beautiful stories we tell ourselves, true fairy tales in the face of the harsh reality, a reality that is above all changing. There is no end to evolution (or co-evolution), no fixed situation, no immutable environment. It is impossible to bring the eternal Heaven back to the turbulent Earth. We can only correct our mistakes and try to improve things as much as possible, that is, to overcome entropy locally each time by adapting to changes and remaining responsive to our missteps, external aggressions, and a foreign nature, which is so often cruel and remains relatively unpredictable despite all our predictive tools.
Turning idealism into materialism of exteriority reverses the relationship between subjectivity and objectivity, where it is no longer the subjective that constitutes the objective, but the subjective that is the product of its environment, as stipulated by the theory of evolution. Idealism lives in a motionless eternity, that of geometry or justice, while the outside world is in constant transformation, bursting into our daily lives, disrupting our habits, and staying several steps ahead of us. Recognizing the primacy of exteriority over repetitive interiority implies an ecological philosophy, where the cause comes from outside. This is not just a matter of material or biological exteriority, since technical evolution is just as much a part of it, where it is not humanity that makes its tools but tools that make humanity, ecology being inextricably linked to evolution. An ecological philosophy is just as much an evolutionary philosophy.
Such an ecological conception, of organisms shaped by their environment and history, precludes reasoning based on an animal essence, a species of large dog that can become a whale and resemble a fish through adaptive convergence. Similarly, we cannot define a human essence because if existence precedes essence, it is not that we are free and create ourselves, but that we adapt more or less well to new environments, particularly to their artificialization. There is therefore no trace of a human origin, but rather of intermingling and convergence dictated by the most advanced techniques and linguistic abilities. These adaptations are neither spontaneous nor easy, but occur only under pressure from the environment, climate change, or war. It is remarkable that even Sartre found it difficult to dispense with an individual essence in the form of a supposed “fundamental project” that would somehow predestine us. There is certainly a specific genetic code for each individual, corresponding to a past situation, but this does not prevent us from having to adapt to new situations that we have not chosen and that transform us. To exist is nothing more than to step outside oneself and one's accepted narratives to encounter the unknown of an external reality that we discover as long as we live.
No longer assuming an inner essence developing autonomously, but rather a brain that is constructed through interaction and learning an external culture and language, renders obsolete many philosophies of personal development, from Spinoza to Nietzsche, and any promise of happiness. There is no such thing as the realization of the individual, just as one cannot “become what one is.” The individual dissolves into their era, their generation, whose fashions and tastes are dated. The sociology that has studied it for over a century, however, still seems as unacceptable as ever. It is quite rare for scientific research to be demonized to such an extent by politicians, yet sociology is constantly attacked for revealing our choices and our destiny, for its culture of excuse and its denial of free will, even though it is based on overwhelming facts.
It is not only human essence that is unfindable (there is no standard genome, only variations), but obviously the same is true of abstractions such as a supposed essence of nations or race, pure products of the mythical narratives we construct, of “our history” as we call it, and which lead to violent and absurd conflicts of identity. The impossibility of giving substance to these overly vague abstractions reduces them to the narcissism of small differences, simple and more or less minor traits that serve as markers of the supposed incompatibility of ways of life or thinking. There are certainly national differences, linked to different languages, religions, literatures, institutions, and their particular histories, but these cannot constitute a specific genetic essence, let alone an immutable one. Their internal unity, covering all their actual divisions, is only possible through opposition to a common enemy and through the narrative constructed around the assumption of its continuity, a narrative that can always be countered by multiple other narratives. It is indeed nationalist intentionality that entirely creates this empty object, seeking its unity in a hodgepodge of bits and pieces, struggling to give it form, forgetting that all these elements are the result of external causes...
Technical evolution
These fundamental concepts allow for a more accurate understanding of technical evolution and the most recent technological acceleration that perfectly illustrates it, being emblematic of the paradox of a clearly human production that does not depend so much on humanity, which rather adapts to it (starting with the first humans, whose hands adapted to the size of stones). Therefore, even if it tends to become more humanized and soften over time, as Simondon notes, to the point of becoming computerized, technology is not an essential part of human nature, which merely uses it and adapts to it. This technological acceleration also shows very concretely the weight of the after-effect and that, instead of developing an inner essence, we are subject to the exteriority of the world, which contradicts our progressive fictions.
The humanization of the world is obvious, as is its artificialization, with its considerable ecological devastation threatening our very survival as overpopulation increases, but this is a largely autonomous process that cannot be said to be intentional. While technical progress is spreading everywhere along with destructive globalized capitalism, for which we do not hesitate to blame an evil humanity (or the previous generation), this globalization is, on the contrary, a sign of an evolution that is beyond us and does not depend on our will, except to try to correct its perverse effects after the fact.
This certainly challenges the belief that humans are the actors of history—a belief that has been held since the French Revolution, which inspired Europe before giving way to the Empire. It is undeniable that people act according to their goals and the stories they tell themselves, but this is not enough to account for a sense of history in which Hegel saw instead a “cunning of reason” that uses individual ambitions, including criminal ones, to rationalize the world and advance freedom. It is rarely the best or the greatest minds who seize power, even when they claim to represent the people or religion. The narratives we construct of our historical actions do not triumph over the exteriority of reality any more than they do elsewhere. Once again, it is the positive or negative aftermath that remains decisive, much more so than our goals. Thus, human progress does not depend so much on trade union struggles, which may have succeeded in providing a certain degree of social security, as on the fact that it has proved positive for the economy, just as compassion and care for the weakest have been selected by evolution over the long term. History does not escape natural evolution, which has become technical evolution, which is just as blind.
Most critics of technology act as if we could choose our (soft) technologies through democratic decision-making, reducing technology to an ideology, but neither science nor technology are democratic or, more generally, political. Science and technology do not depend on consensus, as we are led to believe today, but solely on what works. Thus, relativity and quantum physics were long held by a minority against common sense before they proved their effectiveness beyond doubt. “Man's part is only the part of error,” Poincaré rightly said. The development of mathematics, science, and technology is clearly an autonomous development, a process without a subject of cumulative progress, just as industrial capitalism, as a system of production, stemmed from scientific progress, mechanization, and investment, which increase productivity tenfold (digital capitalism is very different).
Of course, everyone can choose their tools for their own tinkering, even the most primitive ones, but on a global level, technical progress has been inevitable since prehistoric times, under the authority of hindsight, not through ideology (of a so-called proletarian science) or progressive narratives, but through the reality of their effective power (wars and armies are thus even greater accelerators of progress than competition). Reinstating technical progress in the natural evolution means returning to materialism against idealistic ideologies in order to better control these anarchic developments, without being able to prevent them by any ethical committees. The vital question remains that of forced adaptation to external developments and to the blows of fate, embarked on a planetary adventure whose end we do not know.
In any case, technology, as it embodies the union of mind and matter, linking “theory and practice, thought and action” (Kostas Axelos), combines subjective activity with practical objectivity, where external existence precedes inner essence, where the state of technology precedes its application, just as ideological or religious narratives precede our intimate beliefs, values, and goals. Technical evolution, which culminates in information technology, is the materialization of our internalization of externality, making us the product of adaptation to cognitive progress under pressure from the environment, but continuing to be tossed from one error to its opposite, in a dialectical, trial-and-error approach to external reality, where falsehood is undoubtedly a moment of truth, never fully attained, however, nor known in advance.
Subject to its environment, to material constraints and to the beliefs of the moment, there remains a vital place for our subjectivity, which cannot remain passive in the face of threats and injustices, trying to correct our mistakes and avoid the worst, but our subjectivity is thus inscribed in an objective planetary history that contradicts it more than it determines it. This history is not the sacred history of the self-awareness of the Spirit, where everything ends well, nor is it the history of the production of man by man, but a hard learning process about the inhumanity of the world, the uncertainty of the future, and the aftermath of history's relentless judgment, about a future that disappoints all the expectations of the fantastic stories we told ourselves, yet leaves us entirely responsible for the world in response to the bad news as it comes in. Let us repeat it (repetition is the mother of learning): “The information age is also the age of ecology and human development”.
