Information and Sāṅkhya

Alfred Borgmann’s Holding On To Reality opens with the provocative words:

Information can illuminate, transform, or displace reality. When failing health or a power failure deprives you of information, the world closes in on you; it becomes dark and oppressive. Without information about reality, without reports and records, the reach of experience quickly trails off into the shadows of ignorance and forgetfulness.

This is a very interesting and provocative passage, but I picked it up because of its uncanny resemblance to a famous verse from Īśvarakṛṣṇa’s Sāṃkhyakārikās:

prīty-aprīti-viṣādâtmakāḥ prakāśa-pravṛtti-niyamârthāḥ |
anyônyâ-’bhibhavâ-’’śraya-janana-mithuna-vṛttayaś ca guṇāḥ ||

“The three guṇas [which constitute all non-sentient reality] have the respective natures of joy, non-joy, and sorrow; they act to illuminate, transform, and restrain, respectively; and they have the capacity to ground, produce, combine, and suppress one another.”

I need to bone up on my Sāṃkhya and my Borgmann further before I stretch this analogy, but at least at first glance, it appears as if there is something potentially illuminating lurking in the shadows here. (One thing that strikes me: the three guṇas of Sāṅkhya are regarded as entirely distinct from the individual persons, puruṣas, who alone are conscious observers and actors. This suggests that information itself isn’t enough: it presupposes the existence of conscious observers who can recognize something as being information.)