Energy / Information

It's interesting how a historical account of the development of these early computational machines raises in extremely clear fashion some of the main philosophical issues concerning modern, especially digital, technology that one might encounter in the theoretical literature. I'm thinking especially of the question concerning the nature of information, but also of the relationship between human and machine. These two questions seem to appear immediately the moment a human being – Charles Babbage – decides to translate meaningful logical or arithmetical procedures into mechanical processes, which in turn produce mechanical results that are nonetheless readable as information. This could be described as a circuit involving human and machine for the exchange of information into energy and vice versa. I am not sure how – if at all – this exchange between energy and information could be understood. But it seems clear that any account that reduces one to the other would be inadequate: one the one hand, if everything is viewed from the standpoint of energy, the machine is reduced to a meaningless set of cogs, and the human, who builds, programs, and reads its results, to a mass of organic matter; on the other, if everything is viewed from the standpoint of information, then the mechanical detour the machine performs in order to process the information remains totally opaque, like a kind of external prosthetic unconscious.