Three types of information in the brain (and perhaps other platforms), and (coming soon) why we should care
Before I make some remarks, I would recommend Leonard Susskind’s (for those who don’t know him already – though most folks in here probably do—he is a physicist at the Stanford Institute for Theoretical Physics) very accessible 55 min YouTube presentation called “The World as Hologram.”
It is not as corny as it might sound, but is a lecture on the indestructibility of information, black holes (which is a convenient lodestone for him to discuss the physics of information and his debate with Hawking), types of information, and so on. He makes the seemingly point that, “…when one rules out the impossible, then what is left, however improbable, is the best candidate for truth.” One interesting side point that comes out is his take on why computers that are more powerful have to shed more “heat”. Here is the talk:
http://youtu.be/2DIl3Hfh9tY
Okay, my own remarks. One of my two or three favorite ways to “bring people in” to the mind-body problem, is with some of the ideas I am now presenting. This will be in skeleton form tonight and I will come back and flesh it out more in coming days. (I promised last night to get something up tonight on this topic, and in case anyone cares and came back, I didn’t want to have nothing. I actually have a large piece of theory I am building around some of this, but for now, just the three kinds of information, in abbreviated form.
Type One information is the sort dealt with, referred to, and treated in thermodynamics and entropy discussions. This is dealt with analytically in Newton’s Second Law of Thermodynamics. Here is one small start, but most will know it: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Second_law_of_thermodynamics
Heat, energy, information, the changing logical positions within state spaces of entities or systems of entities, all belong to what I am calling category one information in the brain. We can also call this “physical” information. The brain is pumped—not closed—with physical information, and emits physical information as well.
Note that there is no semantic, referential, externally cashed-out content, defined for physical, thermodynamic information, qua physical information. It is—though possibly thermodynamically open an otherwise closed universe of discourse, needing nothing logically or ontologically external to analytically characterize it.
Type Two information in the brain (please assign no significance to my ordering, just yet) is functional. It is a carrier, or mediator, of causal properties, in functionally larger physical ensembles, like canonical brain processes.
The “information” I direct attention to here must be consistent with (i.e. not violate principles of) Category One informational flow, phase space transitions, etc., in the context of the system, but we cannot derive Category Two information content (causal loop xyz doing pqr) from dynamical Category One data descriptions themselves.
In particular, imagine that we deny the previous proposition. We would need either an isomorphism from Cat One to Cat Two, or at least an “onto” function from Cat One to Cat Two (hope I wrote that right, it’s late.)
Clearly, Cat one configurations to Cat Two configurations are many-many, not isomorphic, nor many to one. (And one to many transformations from cat one sets to cat two sets, would be intuitively unsatisfactory if we were trying to build an “identity” or transform to derive C2 specifics, from C1 specifics .
It would resemble replacing type-type identity with token-token identity, jettisoning both sides of the Leibniz Law bi-conditional (“Identity of indiscernibles” and “Indiscernibility of Identicals” --- applied with suitable limits so as not to sneak anything in by misusing sortal ranges of predicates or making category errors in the predications.)
Well, this is a stub, and because of my sketchy presentation, this might be getting opaque, so let me move on to the next information type, just to get all three out.
Type Three information, is semantic, or intentional content, information. If I am visualizing very vibrantly a theta symbol, the intentional content of my mental state is the theta symbol on whatever background I visualize it against. A physical state of, canonically, Type Two information – which is a candidate, in a particular case, to be the substrate-instantiation or substrate-realization of this bundle of Type Three information (probably at least three areas of my brain, frequency coupled and phase offset locked, until a break in my concentration occurs) is also occuring.
A liberal and loose way of describing Type Three info (that will raise some eyebrows because it has baggage, so I use it only under duress: temporary poverty of time and the late hour, to help make the notion easy to spot) is that a Type Three information instance is a “representation” of some element, concept, or sensible experience of the “perceived” ontology (of necessity, a virtual, constructed ontology, in fact, but for this sentence, I take no position about the status of this “perceived”, ostensible virtual object or state of affairs.)
The key idea I would like to encourage people to think about is whether the three categories of information are (a) legitimate categories, and mainly (b) whether they are collapsible, inter-translatable, or are just convenient shorthand level-of-description changes. I hope the reader will see, on the contrary, that one or more of them are NOT reducible to a lower one, and that this has lessons about mind-substrate relationships that point out necessary conceptual revisions—and also opportunities for theoretical progress.
It seems to me that reducing Cat Two to Cat One is problematic, and reducing Cat 3 to Cat 2 is problematic, given the usual standards of “identity” used in logic (e.g. i. Leibniz Law; ii. modal logic’s notions of identity across possible worlds, and so on.)
Okay, I need to clean this up. It is just a stub. Those interested should come back and see it better written, and expanded to include replies to what I know are expected objections, questions, etc., C2 and C3 probably sound like the “same old thing” the m-b problem about experience vs neural correlate. Not quite. I am trying to get at something additional, here. Hard without diagrams.
Also, I have to present much of this without any context… like presenting a randomly selected lecture from some course, without building up the foundational layers. (That is why I am putting together a YouTube channel of my own, to go from scratch, to something like this, after about 6 hours of presentation… then on to a theory of which this is one puzzle piece.
Of course, we are here to discuss Bostrom’s ideas, but this “three information type” idea, less clumsily expressed, does tie straightforwardly to the question of indirect reach, and “kinds of better” that different superintelligences can embrace.
Unfortunately I will have to establish that conceptual link when I come back and clean this up, since it is getting so late. Thanks to those who read this far...
Three types of information in the brain (and perhaps other platforms), and (coming soon) why we should care
Before I make some remarks, I would recommend Leonard Susskind’s (for those who don’t know him already – though most folks in here probably do—he is a physicist at the Stanford Institute for Theoretical Physics) very accessible 55 min YouTube presentation called “The World as Hologram.” It is not as corny as it might sound, but is a lecture on the indestructibility of information, black holes (which is a convenient lodestone for him to discuss the physics of information and his debate with Hawking), types of information, and so on. He makes the seemingly point that, “…when one rules out the impossible, then what is left, however improbable, is the best candidate for truth.”
One interesting side point that comes out is his take on why computers that are more powerful have to shed more “heat”. Here is the talk: http://youtu.be/2DIl3Hfh9tY
Okay, my own remarks. One of my two or three favorite ways to “bring people in” to the mind-body problem, is with some of the ideas I am now presenting. This will be in skeleton form tonight and I will come back and flesh it out more in coming days. (I promised last night to get something up tonight on this topic, and in case anyone cares and came back, I didn’t want to have nothing. I actually have a large piece of theory I am building around some of this, but for now, just the three kinds of information, in abbreviated form.
Type One information is the sort dealt with, referred to, and treated in thermodynamics and entropy discussions. This is dealt with analytically in Newton’s Second Law of Thermodynamics. Here is one small start, but most will know it: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Second_law_of_thermodynamics
Heat, energy, information, the changing logical positions within state spaces of entities or systems of entities, all belong to what I am calling category one information in the brain. We can also call this “physical” information. The brain is pumped—not closed—with physical information, and emits physical information as well.
Note that there is no semantic, referential, externally cashed-out content, defined for physical, thermodynamic information, qua physical information. It is—though possibly thermodynamically open an otherwise closed universe of discourse, needing nothing logically or ontologically external to analytically characterize it.
Type Two information in the brain (please assign no significance to my ordering, just yet) is functional. It is a carrier, or mediator, of causal properties, in functionally larger physical ensembles, like canonical brain processes. The “information” I direct attention to here must be consistent with (i.e. not violate principles of) Category One informational flow, phase space transitions, etc., in the context of the system, but we cannot derive Category Two information content (causal loop xyz doing pqr) from dynamical Category One data descriptions themselves.
In particular, imagine that we deny the previous proposition. We would need either an isomorphism from Cat One to Cat Two, or at least an “onto” function from Cat One to Cat Two (hope I wrote that right, it’s late.) Clearly, Cat one configurations to Cat Two configurations are many-many, not isomorphic, nor many to one. (And one to many transformations from cat one sets to cat two sets, would be intuitively unsatisfactory if we were trying to build an “identity” or transform to derive C2 specifics, from C1 specifics .
It would resemble replacing type-type identity with token-token identity, jettisoning both sides of the Leibniz Law bi-conditional (“Identity of indiscernibles” and “Indiscernibility of Identicals” --- applied with suitable limits so as not to sneak anything in by misusing sortal ranges of predicates or making category errors in the predications.)
Well, this is a stub, and because of my sketchy presentation, this might be getting opaque, so let me move on to the next information type, just to get all three out.
Type Three information, is semantic, or intentional content, information. If I am visualizing very vibrantly a theta symbol, the intentional content of my mental state is the theta symbol on whatever background I visualize it against. A physical state of, canonically, Type Two information – which is a candidate, in a particular case, to be the substrate-instantiation or substrate-realization of this bundle of Type Three information (probably at least three areas of my brain, frequency coupled and phase offset locked, until a break in my concentration occurs) is also occuring.
A liberal and loose way of describing Type Three info (that will raise some eyebrows because it has baggage, so I use it only under duress: temporary poverty of time and the late hour, to help make the notion easy to spot) is that a Type Three information instance is a “representation” of some element, concept, or sensible experience of the “perceived” ontology (of necessity, a virtual, constructed ontology, in fact, but for this sentence, I take no position about the status of this “perceived”, ostensible virtual object or state of affairs.)
The key idea I would like to encourage people to think about is whether the three categories of information are (a) legitimate categories, and mainly (b) whether they are collapsible, inter-translatable, or are just convenient shorthand level-of-description changes. I hope the reader will see, on the contrary, that one or more of them are NOT reducible to a lower one, and that this has lessons about mind-substrate relationships that point out necessary conceptual revisions—and also opportunities for theoretical progress.
It seems to me that reducing Cat Two to Cat One is problematic, and reducing Cat 3 to Cat 2 is problematic, given the usual standards of “identity” used in logic (e.g. i. Leibniz Law; ii. modal logic’s notions of identity across possible worlds, and so on.)
Okay, I need to clean this up. It is just a stub. Those interested should come back and see it better written, and expanded to include replies to what I know are expected objections, questions, etc., C2 and C3 probably sound like the “same old thing” the m-b problem about experience vs neural correlate. Not quite. I am trying to get at something additional, here. Hard without diagrams.
Also, I have to present much of this without any context… like presenting a randomly selected lecture from some course, without building up the foundational layers. (That is why I am putting together a YouTube channel of my own, to go from scratch, to something like this, after about 6 hours of presentation… then on to a theory of which this is one puzzle piece.
Of course, we are here to discuss Bostrom’s ideas, but this “three information type” idea, less clumsily expressed, does tie straightforwardly to the question of indirect reach, and “kinds of better” that different superintelligences can embrace.
Unfortunately I will have to establish that conceptual link when I come back and clean this up, since it is getting so late. Thanks to those who read this far...