On 7/23/2010 3:03 PM, Brent Meeker wrote:
I'd say the information comes from the surface of Mars - it is
integrated (which means summed into a whole) by the Rover and acted
upon. Tononi seems to be abusing language and using "integrated" when
he actually means "generated". Whether there is information generated
would depend on how you defined it and where you draw the boundaries
of the system. Shannon information is a measure of the reduction in
uncertainity - so if you were uncertain about what the Mars Rover
would do, then you could say it's action generated information. But
if you knew every detail of it's programming and memory and the
surface scene it viewed you might say it didn't generate any information.
Brent
Thanks for replying.
I hope my comments to Jason explain my difference in perspective
here. I don't think the information is "integrated" in the way Tononi
uses the term. I don't view this system as being "connected in such a
way that information is generated by causal interactions /among/ rather
than /within/ its parts." (Balduzzi D, Tononi G 2009) I think the
physical structures of the computers involved in this example exclude
the generation of additional information via re-entrant feedback between
any of the components (I don't know the proper terms to use here).
There's no component saying to its neighbour "I see you're not 'firing',
which means possibilities p & q must be excluded", everyone just goes
about their business independently. Isn't that how it works at the fine
scale, where everything is binary? Nobody checks which of their
neighbours are 0's and which are 1's?
I hope some of this is sensible. I've only ever read about these
things, this is the first time trying to explain any of them, and the
holes in my understanding have never been so blatantly obvious.
-Allen
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