Re: Implications of Tononi's IIT?
--- On Sun, 7/25/10, Brent Meeker meeke...@dslextreme.com wrote: From: Brent Meeker meeke...@dslextreme.com Subject: Re: Implications of Tononi's IIT? To: everything-list@googlegroups.com Received: Sunday, July 25, 2010, 7:10 PM On 7/24/2010 1:32 PM, Allen wrote: 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 think you're confused about Tononi's theory. He talks about generating effective information which he measures by the Kullback-Lieber difference between the potential information, what Shannon would call the bandwidth, and that which the mechanism actually realizes. So the effective information is greatest when the potential states are large and the actual ones are small. So the Mars Rover is generating a lot of effective information when it picks out a single action based on a whole range of potential inputs. For example, it choose to go around the rock - but it would have made the same choice if dozens of pixels in it's camera switched digits. It would have chosen to go around a hole as well as a rock. I would have chosen to go around the rock if it were night or day - even though the camera image would have been quite different. Brent Brent, For some reason this message didn't make it's way to my inbox until today (Or yesterday). I had been trying a new email client until yesterday. It was not a success. I was confused about Tononi's theory, when I read the specific portion of the text regarding effective information, I made an unfounded mental leap, putting something there that didn't belong there. Now that you've cleared it up, I can't even remember fully what that phantom was, I just know it wasn't what you've stated here. I have a few textbooks on information theory, most are beyond my ability and I've put them aside to read at a later date. I never believed I knew a lot about it, but now I see I know even less about information than I thought. Sorry to have taken so long to reply, but I do appreciate your clarification. 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 -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To post to this group, send email to everything-l...@googlegroups.com. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en. -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To post to this group, send email to everything-l...@googlegroups.com. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en. -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To post to this group, send email to everything-l...@googlegroups.com. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en.
What's wrong with this?
I've been waking up with a persistent thought again, prompted this time by the way many mainstream philosophers of mind seem to unconsciously adopt a particularly insidious form of direct realism, whilst being quite blind to it. It centres on the idea of extreme physical reductionism, which I take to be the hypothesis that all composite phenomena can be completely recast, in principle, in the form of a causally complete and closed ground level account of non- composite micro-physical events. I'm not concerned at this point whether such a restrictive view is true, or whether it is at odds with digital mechanism etc., but only that I take it to be a core assumption from which numerous people, including many philosophers, derive theories of the mental. I want to argue that the consequences of such a view are perhaps more radically restrictive than commonly assumed. If we could remove ourselves from the universe and take a strict reductionist-god's eye view (which means having to drop all our usual mental categories - a very hard thing to achieve imaginatively) then, strictly adhering to the above hypothesis, all that would remain would be some ground-level physical machine grinding along, without the need for additional composite or macroscopic posits. Take your pick from current theory what is supposed to represent this machine, but that needn't necessarily be at issue for the purpose of the argument. The point is that removing everything composite from the picture supposedly results in zero difference at the base level - same events, same causality. I should stress, again, I'm not personally committed to this view - it seems indeed highly problematic - but it is what the recipe says. Now, just to emphasise the point, when I say it's a hard thing to do this imaginatively, I mean that it isn't permissible to look back from this reductionist-god's eye view and continue to conjure familiar composite entities from the conjectural base components, because reductionism is a commitment to the proposition that these don't exist. Whatever composite categories we might be tempted to have recourse to - you know: molecules, cells, bodies, planets, ideas, explanations, theories, the whole ball of wax - none of these are available from this perspective. Don't need them. More rigorously, they *must not be invoked* because they *do not exist*. They don't need to exist, because the machine doesn't need them to carry all the load and do all the work. Now, many people might be prompted to object at this point that's not reducing, that's eliminating as though these terms could be kept distinct. But I'm arguing that reductionism, consistently applied, is inescapably eliminative. The hypothesis was that base-level events are self-sufficient and consequently must be granted metaphysical (and hence physical) reality. Nothing else is required to explain why the machine exists and works, so nothing else need - or indeed can non- question-beggingly - be postulated. If we really feel we must insist that there is something metaphysically indispensable above and beyond this (and it would seem that we have good reason to) we must look for an additional metaphysical somewhere to locate these somethings. Essentially we now have two options. We can follow Kant in locating them in a metaphysically real synthetic first-person category that transcends the ground-level (which stands here, approximately, for the thing-in-itself). The alternative - and this is the option that many philosophers seem to adopt by some directly real sleight-of- intuition - is that we somehow locate them out there right on top of the micro-physical account. It's easy to do: just look damn you, there they are, can't you see them? And in any case, one wants to protest, how can one predict, explain or comprehend anything above the ground floor *without* such categories? Yes, that is indeed the very question. But the reductionist-god's eye view (if we've done it right) should convince us - weirdly, but unavoidably - that they just aren't automatically out there, metaphysically, at our disposal. If this eludes us, it can only be because we've fallen into the error of retaining these indispensable organising categories intact, naturally but illicitly, whilst attempting this imaginative feat. Unfortunately this is to beg the very questions we seek to answer. I suppose the nub of this for me is that - whether we consider ourselves monist or dualist, or amongst the ontological uncommitted - we have need of both analytic and integrative principles to account for the states of affairs that confront us. There is, as it were, a spectrum that extends from maximal fragmentation to maximal integration, and neither extreme by itself suffices. The only mystery is why anyone would ever think it would. Or am I just missing something obvious as usual? David -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group.
RE: What's wrong with this?
Dear David, Very well said! Let me add a quote from Carlo Rovelli (in the context of discussions of the notion of observation in QM) found in Quo Vadis Quantum Mechanics? (ed. Elitzur, Dolev and Kolenda): My main suggestion is to forbid ourselves to use the point of view of God. Do not compare two different observers, unless you are, for instance, a third observer who interacts with the two. In order to make this comparison you have a quantum mechanical interaction. So, very simply, the answer is like that of special relativity: I am telling you that, with respect to this observer, this comes first and this comes second. Intuitively one might think that this cannot be. But really there is no contradiction. It seems to me that the assumption of the *observer at infinity* in modern physics (and its intersections with mathematics and philosophy) and/or the ansatz of context-free and/or coordinate-free plays essentially the same role as God did in classical era thought. I claim that it is the failure to critically examine the logical consequences of this tacit assumption or postulate that is a source of problems and paradox in our attempts to move understanding of our Universe forward. Like it or not, there is a reality to *what it is like to be an observer* in our world and any denial of its reality, however illusory or epiphenomenal that might be, does not help our understanding. Failure to confront the Hard Problem with eliminatist propositions is thus argued to be at best intellectual timidity. http://www.drfrenzo.com/2007/09/intellectual-timidity.html Kindest regards, Stephen -Original Message- From: everything-list@googlegroups.com [mailto:everything-l...@googlegroups.com] On Behalf Of David Nyman Sent: Thursday, August 26, 2010 12:38 PM To: Everything List Subject: What's wrong with this? I've been waking up with a persistent thought again, prompted this time by the way many mainstream philosophers of mind seem to unconsciously adopt a particularly insidious form of direct realism, whilst being quite blind to it. It centers on the idea of extreme physical reductionism, which I take to be the hypothesis that all composite phenomena can be completely recast, in principle, in the form of a causally complete and closed ground level account of non- composite micro-physical events. I'm not concerned at this point whether such a restrictive view is true, or whether it is at odds with digital mechanism etc., but only that I take it to be a core assumption from which numerous people, including many philosophers, derive theories of the mental. I want to argue that the consequences of such a view are perhaps more radically restrictive than commonly assumed. If we could remove ourselves from the universe and take a strict reductionist-god's eye view (which means having to drop all our usual mental categories - a very hard thing to achieve imaginatively) then, strictly adhering to the above hypothesis, all that would remain would be some ground-level physical machine grinding along, without the need for additional composite or macroscopic posits. Take your pick from current theory what is supposed to represent this machine, but that needn't necessarily be at issue for the purpose of the argument. The point is that removing everything composite from the picture supposedly results in zero difference at the base level - same events, same causality. I should stress, again, I'm not personally committed to this view - it seems indeed highly problematic - but it is what the recipe says. Now, just to emphasize the point, when I say it's a hard thing to do this imaginatively, I mean that it isn't permissible to look back from this reductionist-god's eye view and continue to conjure familiar composite entities from the conjectural base components, because reductionism is a commitment to the proposition that these don't exist. Whatever composite categories we might be tempted to have recourse to - you know: molecules, cells, bodies, planets, ideas, explanations, theories, the whole ball of wax - none of these are available from this perspective. Don't need them. More rigorously, they *must not be invoked* because they *do not exist*. They don't need to exist, because the machine doesn't need them to carry all the load and do all the work. Now, many people might be prompted to object at this point that's not reducing, that's eliminating as though these terms could be kept distinct. But I'm arguing that reductionism, consistently applied, is inescapably eliminative. The hypothesis was that base-level events are self-sufficient and consequently must be granted metaphysical (and hence physical) reality. Nothing else is required to explain why the machine exists and works, so nothing else need - or indeed can non- question-beggingly - be postulated. If we really feel we must insist that there is something metaphysically indispensable above and beyond this (and it would seem that we
Re: What's wrong with this?
Stephen Thanks for the quote and the link - and your own thoughts, of course. Yes, I've always had the queasy feeling that most of what is generally accepted to be manifest from God's perspective is actually acquired by bare-faced, if mostly unconscious, metaphysical larceny. But this theft has been so regularly and blithely perpetrated by so many people, with such impeccable credentials, that I am still inclined at times to suspect some residual misunderstanding or naivety on my own part. I suppose that evolution has equipped us with such an instinctive commitment to naturalism that it has become like one of those insidious computer viruses that resists attempts to eliminate it by immediately re-creating itself. In some ways, the notorious hard problem might be less controversially recast in the form of the question: Given the metaphysical posit of some pole of maximal fragmentation, what is the genesis and metaphysical status of its composite counter-poles? After all, nobody, even the most ardently committed eliminativist, seeks to controvert the manifest relevance of the counter-poles, even whilst being quite blind to the questions begged by their uncritical assumption. And in the absence of any intelligible possibility of an outside view, the answer, as you correctly state, must be inextricably bound up with what it is like to be an observer in our world. Under such constraint, it can hardly remain controversial that all observational evidence must somehow be obtained from the inside - after all, where else is there? Rather, what seems to require explication is how micro- and macro-scopic poles interweave in the synthesis of an apparently stable, shared composite world. David On 26 August 2010 21:37, Stephen P. King stephe...@charter.net wrote: Dear David, Very well said! Let me add a quote from Carlo Rovelli (in the context of discussions of the notion of observation in QM) found in Quo Vadis Quantum Mechanics? (ed. Elitzur, Dolev and Kolenda): My main suggestion is to forbid ourselves to use the point of view of God. Do not compare two different observers, unless you are, for instance, a third observer who interacts with the two. In order to make this comparison you have a quantum mechanical interaction. So, very simply, the answer is like that of special relativity: I am telling you that, with respect to this observer, this comes first and this comes second. Intuitively one might think that this cannot be. But really there is no contradiction. It seems to me that the assumption of the *observer at infinity* in modern physics (and its intersections with mathematics and philosophy) and/or the ansatz of context-free and/or coordinate-free plays essentially the same role as God did in classical era thought. I claim that it is the failure to critically examine the logical consequences of this tacit assumption or postulate that is a source of problems and paradox in our attempts to move understanding of our Universe forward. Like it or not, there is a reality to *what it is like to be an observer* in our world and any denial of its reality, however illusory or epiphenomenal that might be, does not help our understanding. Failure to confront the Hard Problem with eliminatist propositions is thus argued to be at best intellectual timidity. http://www.drfrenzo.com/2007/09/intellectual-timidity.html Kindest regards, Stephen -Original Message- From: everything-list@googlegroups.com [mailto:everything-l...@googlegroups.com] On Behalf Of David Nyman Sent: Thursday, August 26, 2010 12:38 PM To: Everything List Subject: What's wrong with this? I've been waking up with a persistent thought again, prompted this time by the way many mainstream philosophers of mind seem to unconsciously adopt a particularly insidious form of direct realism, whilst being quite blind to it. It centers on the idea of extreme physical reductionism, which I take to be the hypothesis that all composite phenomena can be completely recast, in principle, in the form of a causally complete and closed ground level account of non- composite micro-physical events. I'm not concerned at this point whether such a restrictive view is true, or whether it is at odds with digital mechanism etc., but only that I take it to be a core assumption from which numerous people, including many philosophers, derive theories of the mental. I want to argue that the consequences of such a view are perhaps more radically restrictive than commonly assumed. If we could remove ourselves from the universe and take a strict reductionist-god's eye view (which means having to drop all our usual mental categories - a very hard thing to achieve imaginatively) then, strictly adhering to the above hypothesis, all that would remain would be some ground-level physical machine grinding along, without the need for additional composite or macroscopic posits. Take your pick from current
