Abstract

Recent advances in the realm of conceptual tools have enabled us to handle confidently entities that were, at the same time, very strange, and very common. Very strange, because their properties did not fit our classical measurement schemes, and stubbornly resisted any attempts at rigorous quantification. Very common, because they have always been around us, and represent essential aspects of nature. At the same time, our capability of generating material entities that are almost identical to each other, such as cars, windows, or tennis balls, was perceived as a power-confirming achievement. Now we experience an era that is allegedly able to produce not just similarity, but true identicalness – which was found in the past only at the microscopic level or in the world of mathematics. The paper explores our evolving relationship to information, in confrontation with similarity, identicalness, and self-affinity in a changing world.