This is not a matter of information leaping from one form of hardware to another, but of the slow organic growth of culture making sense and giving meaning. Bigger will almost always mean worse, even when it comes in a smaller package. The value of an encyclopaedia is determined as much by what it excludes as by what it contains. So the boundaries of a library are not set by technology but by the human labours of the indexers and the compilers and even the writers. The differing arts and sciences must fit reasonably well together: they must also be presented to the same sort of reader in the same kind of tone.
The word itself brings this to light, for the root of it is the Greek idea of “a circle of arts and sciences essential to a liberal education.”Circles may spread. An encyclical letter is meant to cover the whole round world But they are essentially harmonious There is a concord within them. This reflection suggests an answer to the question I first started with: how big can an encyclopaedia be? The answer is that the size has nothing to do with physical limits, nor even with the number of facts inside it It is constrained by tone and by indexing. The limitless mind of God – should it exist – may be able to apprehend the world as pure information.
But all mortal or created beings see the world in the light of their limited purposes. Without a common web of purpose binding the reader and the writer we might as well use all these CDs as bird-scarers – when of course, they convey an urgent message to the birds they frighten. What’s more, they regard this hope as scientific.The point is not just that human beings aren’t software, though we aren’t It’s that software isn’t software either in that sense. It’s all embodied and what it contains is not information, but meaning.
People who would reject the idea of an immortal soul as a religious superstition treasure the hope that they are really software which just happens to be running on fleshy machines but whose nature is to be immortal and capable of running on anything. DNA can also be understood as a sequence of numbers; in human DNA there are about 3.5 billion of them. This is close enough to the number of holes on a compact disc: in the library of the future you could fit each reader in among the CD-Roms he reads. I put this idea to show its absurdity, though it is one of the most influential myths around. In fact none of these discs are worthwhile for the “information” they contain, any more than animals are valuable for their genes. Does it contain the same amount of information as the Encyclopaedia Britannica, as the video disc of The Chant of Jimmy Blacksmith (which I have never managed to make play) or as is contained in two Beethoven piano sonatas? And how could any of these be compared with the English Poetry CDs from Chadwyck Healey, or they with the Duke Nukem 3D Platinum Edition? In another rack, one disc containing 21 Bible translations nestles against the catechism of the Catholic Church.Here is all the knowledge necessary for salvation But it isn’t information. The hard drive on my ancient laptop holds a third as much information as a compact disc.
