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
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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