Total uncertainty corresponds to what the authors call ‘novelty’ in the Model of Pragmatic Information. If I can’t know what the ‘right’ answer is, or rather if I can’t know if I asked a meaningful question in the first place, then I am clearly not any better off in terms of ‘certainty’.

Prigogine and Stengers (1984) speak of ‘an irreducible plurality of perspectives’ and the way in which the rational mind works (the only way it can work, in fact) is to choose one perspective out of this plurality and thoroughly ignore all the rest. Without seeing that this is what we are doing, we are making sure that the only type of information we are going to receive is information that confirms that our perspective is the correct one.

The psychological consequence of this operation is a virtually unshakable sense of the rightness of our way of looking at things. To say that this is an easy trap to fall into is to completely understate the matter – we can’t take a step (thinking-wise) without falling into this hole. Furthermore, the ‘trap’ inherent in all rational thinking is very convenient indeed as far as our unacknowledged need for manufactured certainty goes – because of this neat little trick manufactured certainty is available in unlimited quantities to anyone who wants it, with zero expenditure of effort.

This is far weirder than it sounds though – the trick of making all information that doesn’t agree with our initial choice in how to see the universe invisible to us is responsible for the way in which everything we ‘know’ (i.e. everything we believe we know) seems self-evidently true. When I only receive information that I have secretly intended to be true in the first place, then the information that I am receiving isn’t actually information at all because it isn’t ‘new’.

Instead of being essentially unpredictable – which is what information ought to be for it to be truly called information – it is tautological since it was already decided right from the start, and for this reason what we are talking about is not information, but the reciprocal (or ‘reverse’) of information, which is entropy.

Thus, certainty (the certainty which we rely on so completely for the functioning of our everyday minds) is a product of entropy. In a nutshell - the edifice of positive knowledge which means so very much to us, and which we are so inordinately proud of, is nothing more than ‘disguised redundancy’.