Culture and Information - Sir Francis Bacon

Culture and Information - Sir Francis Bacon

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 contempor...

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...l 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.