A fascinating thing for me is that the amount of surprise (i.e. information) is like the creating of a *knowledge gradient* that compares in an interesting way to energy gradients within thermodynamics. And one might suggest that *observation* can counter-act the 2nd Law of Thermodynamics by transforming an energy gradient into observational/informational one. E. g., the observation of a fire-cracker exploding confers a large amount of information to the conscious observer/listener (especially if they never knew of such things) whilst the physical energy in the system has been dissipated. This new type of gradient can't really be measured in the physical sense as the brain has stored it as a *pattern*, so it sits orthogonal to the physical one. Further, this new [informational] gradient now affects the behavior of the participant, so one might ask (again) what is the relationship between consciousness and the evolution of the universe?
Also, each fire-cracker explosion, whilst seemingly the same each time, must be an exceedingly novel event at some level of perception finer than cognition, otherwise it wouldn't seem that we would continue to repeat it hundreds of times. So the brain seems to be parsing an enormous amount of information from each explosion.... There's probably a better example than a fire-cracker.... Marcos On Sat, Jun 11, 2011 at 7:09 AM, Tom Johnson <t...@jtjohnson.com> wrote: > I certainly would be interested. I have issues with Claude's work and what > I think is its misconstrued application and definition, at least beyond > physics. > > -tj ============================================================ FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College lectures, archives, unsubscribe, maps at http://www.friam.org
