Culture and Information (Sir Francis Bacon)

by Michael Garren Tinney
(English major)

Sir Francis Bacon was the grand architect of a perspective on reality so revolutionary that the human mind has yet to break its mold. Although he was neither an accomplished scientist nor a prodigious mathematician, Bacon is accredited with the creation of the philosophy of science and the scientific method, and he so effectively reapplied the notion of inductive reasoning that he is often considered its father. Bacon was the first to embark on the pursuit to translate nature into information, and believed that held to "the torch of analysis" nature would reveal her secrets. Bacon was on the precipice of a new era in thought that has blossomed into technologies he could never have imagined. Upon inspection, however, there are certain uncanny parallels between his thought and the innovations of the information age. This observation is not to say that Bacon's mindset was identical to that of a modern man by any standards, but it is to say that the nature of information seems to submit to Bacon's perception of reality.

As a master of the English language with a passion for personal edification, Bacon recorded his revolutionary thoughts in such a way that he brought about the dawn of a new era in human thought. "He spurned reliance on ordinary scholastic philosophy, calling for a study of nature and the human condition on their own terms, without artifice" (Wilson 25). Bacon was not caught in the webwork of strict rationalism, however, and did not subscribe to an overly austere view of the cosmos. He warned against the idols of the mind, which he subdivided into four types: the idols of the tribe, the cave, the marketplace and the theater. There is an echo of each of these in contemporary philosophy, science, the nature of information and other arenas of scholastic thought. The idols of the tribe, in essence, might cause one to assume more order than exists in the chaotic universe. Discoveries in quantum mechanics this century have revealed that woven into the Universe at its most fundamental level is randomness. Despite all of the attempts of science to render the contingent aspects of the Universe less arbitrary, there are certain principles (such as the Heisenburg uncertainty principle) that cannot be penetrated by reason.

The idols of the cave are "distorting prisms" that might cause "the idiosyncrasies of individual belief and passion" to effect one's objectivity, while the idols of the theater cause an "unquestioning acceptance of philosophical beliefs and misleading demonstrations" (Wilson 29). For Bacon may not have been obsessed with empiricism to the extent that many modern scientists are today, but he definitively believed in subjecting nature to rigorous experimentation before drawing conclusions, and he strongly believed observation to be sovereign over intuition in the pursuit of a fixed rule. Wilson said the following of Bacon's process of thought:

Inductive reasoning, as applied by Bacon, is basically to make a statement of general truth based on specific data. The data of course is collected through the reductionistic approach indicative of science today, for which Bacon is so noted.

After having established the groundwork of some of Bacon's ideas, it is now possible to expose the profound parallels between his concepts and the nature of information. Information today is neatly packaged in the language of binary code. As Borgmann explains it, this is the most effective, the most reduced and the most simplistic form in which information can be encoded. Any symbol beyond two is superfluous, and less is inefficient.

Bacon sought to create a method of thinking that might isolate the properties of an element and the forces that act upon it, and reduce them to their most basic components so that they may be analyzed, manipulated and exploited. Information in its digital form is malleable, factual and universally comprehensible, almost as if it is the final result of a Baconian experiment. Binary information is imminently usable, as are the laws of nature Bacon's methods would uncover. The manifest forms of the binary parts of such information are subject to interpretation, although in partition they are completely factual. Data collected from an experiment is factual, while the conclusion one may "induce" is ultimately interpretive. Borgmann quoted Don MacKay when he said that information "enables us to speak quantitatively. It provides objective substitutes for intuitive criteria an subjective prejudices" (Borgmann 132). This statement could easily have been said in the seventeenth century about the results of an experiment conducted by Bacon's method.

Bacon's search for fixed rules, and one overarching theory encompassing all knowledge have been actualized in a form he could not have anticipated. The exactitude found in the strings of 0's and 1's in digital language are the fixed rules of nature in its most reduced fragments, this language capable of dissolving everything into its substance like the end of Bacon's quest for Universal Consilience. It is the "universal goo," the final medium, with a webwork so fine no grain of reality may slip through.

It was Bacon and his thought that began man's pilgrimage down the complex and winding road of rational inspection. Along the way the miracles of science that shape our lives have been found, all through the guidance of Bacon's words that ring true across three centuries. Today we stand at a crossroads, where the information about reality has created a synthesized world of its own, yet the nature of this world still seems to have been described by Bacon's philosophies. The causation is uncertain, but the correlation between Bacon's philosophy and the developments of the information age are eerily ostensible. The effort to reduce nature to her finest fragments, to comprehend her most tightly guarded secrets has been the strategy of many minds, the first of which was Francis Bacon.