--- 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.
