In the 1980's I was a programmer analyst. At times I would spend hours trying to figure out why the logic in my program was not working. Then an odd thing happened, I found at times I would wake up at 2am and the answer would come to me. Then I took it a step further. Instead of banging my head against the wall and staying late at work, I would simply look the program over and go home at 5pm. The next day I would simply have to look at the program and something would tell me that some code or indicator needed to be taken out. The program would then work and I didn't need to bother myself as to logically why. I just went on to my next project. It made my job a lot easier to let my brain figure it out while I slept.
PS. a lot of problems can be solved this way, I call putting it into the brain queue.
Rich Hickey described very much the same approach in one of his talks about creating the Clojure language (and programming in general). I suspect people tend to underutilise this facility by overworking, as well as constantly dumping input into their brains. I'm guilty of "catching up on" Youtube videos in bed, which probably overflows that "brain queue".
I think quite a few genii in history knew the value of "cat naps." Eno slept with arm in the air so that he would only get a few minutes and i think it was Edison (umm) who had an assistant wake him up. It worked for me, first with hardware circuitry and then software (assembly code) a few hours asleep would often present the answer.
Yea Edison had some kind of special chair build that he could lean back to sleep, but if he moved even a bit it would pop forward and wake him up. If I remember correctly. By the way I had to look up philostopher ..... found the reference... very very funny!!
Re #9: in high school, I ran track and one day the coach came to me (never sure exactly why) and said we need a pole vaulter for the team. He didn’t have any experience in coaching the pole vault, so he had arranged that I would spend a couple of intensive days learning the basics with another coach at a rival HS who was experienced in teaching the event. We spent about 3 hours or so the first day and then another 3 or 4 the second. Technique-wise, the ‘trick’ to pole vaulting is getting the pole to ‘bend’, which is how you get real height. The whole thing is pretty counterintuitive: you run full speed and jab a gigantic stick into the ground, flip your body upside down while spinning 180 as the world (and your inner ears) tumble around in completely new ways. Well, the night after that second day, after I had first successfully bent the pole, was wild; in my dreams, I was ‘vaulting’ (but not even in a physically realistic way/setting) over and over again as the world contorted in all sorts of unreal ways. It was, phenomenologically, the most unusual dream I can recall. It definitely felt like my brain was trying to figure out how to navigate a new kind of physical space - which it was - very much in keeping with the overfitting hypothesis.
Re #9. Scott McCloud has an interesting example of the same effect, described in his avant-garde comic "My Obsession with Chess"; he hallucinated that his alarm clock was a chess clock, and after he stopped it's beeping in the morning he found himself paralyzed in bed because it "wasn't his move." https://www.scottmccloud.com/1-webcomics/chess/chess.html
I have some experience with this dreaming hallucinations. When I was first learning chess, not only my dreams were all about chess, but my thinking as well while falling asleep. I used to read non-fiction books in bed, and as I fell asleep my consciousness would move from thinking about the content of the book in terms of arguments and syllogisms to thinking about it in terms of chess problems that I visualized and had to solve. I also had similar experiences when, some time ago when I had more free time, I was spending eight to ten hours a day super focused on writing. Each night I had dreams whose content I visualized in terms of sentences, paragraphs and iambic pentameters that I need to "solve", to write, judge and rewrite as if they were some kind of puzzle. I even dreamed entire poems, of which only one or two lines I could remember after waking. The weirder part of this kind of experience was always at the moment I was falling asleep; because all that I was thinking about was turned into chess or writing, whose weirdness would often awake me to realize now consciously how weird it was.
Re #4: For anyone interested, I recently wrote about the relationship between quantum physics, philosophy, and consciousness in the context of Cortázar's novel Hopscotch:
Re #10: When I was still trying to learn Japanese after being captivated by Stephen Krashen's input hypothesis I was doing a small amount of anki every day but a large amount of input through podcasts and shows, at least a few hours every day. I began having dreams where people were speaking to me in Japanese but I couldn't understand a word of what they were saying.
Erik, when it comes to your "brains are for consciousness" theory - do check out the French philosopher of biology Raymond Ruyer.
He does have a rather metaphysical system (and I do think that perhaps we need funky new metaphysics to create new paradigms) but I suspect that he can be watered down a little - check out Neo-Finalism
ive been reading a side-by-side english/japanese work to try to get better at reading japanese and in this short story im reading, the word 老婆 (rouba, meaning old woman) keeps appearing and a variation of it appeared in my dream this morning, so prolly +1 to the overfitting hypothesis!
I relate to your 4/11 post on Einstein as a “lone traveler.” I often felt that way as I made my peripatetic way through life. What saved me some 40 years ago was the thought that the creative life I had set out on in my 20’s is one grand Walkabout. You never know what you might pick up along the way, put in your pocket and discover that it’s just what you need down the road.
This quote, “[they were] just indifferent to philosophy. Full stop. Quantum mechanics worked. Why worry about what it meant?” also strikes me as prescient of where we find ourselves today. The fixation on STEM education to the exclusion of Arts and Humanities leads us to Tech bros moving fast and breaking stuff, leading up to its present iteration in the proliferation of “AI dream slop.”
The other day, a writer/director colleague of mine posted on LinkedIn he felt that “AI is the glass half full and the glass half empty at the same time.” I was reminded of one of my quips that if Einstein had he been a film director his theory of relativity might be expressed as “Everything is coming together and falling apart at the same time.” Or maybe that Quantum theory.
After listening to your On Point discussion with Meghna on the “On Point” podcast, I posted this:
So, what we have now is half pot-of-gold & salvation at the end of the rainbow that leads us down the yellow brick road to OZ. But on the other hand, we have the sneaky suspicion that it’s a leap into Half Borg-Matrix-Terminator future.
And on the other, other hand, there is always a third middle path that needs to be scouted.
Therefore if anything positive is to come of it, we need to apply our creative instincts and rigorous critical evaluation to finding a future grounded in humanistic values.
You know, I'd never heard of the Tetris effect but I remember experiencing it. When I first learned to crochet as a teenager I would dream the stitches, just watching the hook go in and out and in and out of the yarn until I fell all the way asleep. It was kind of hypnotic!
I recently just learned crochet at 39 and had several nights of what seemed like hours of dreams about stitches, analysing or repeating the motions. I felt I was awake all night, and complained I had disrupted sleepy yet I didn’t feel tired the next day, or any effects of that actually being disruptive.
Now the motions are ingrained (somewhat) I don’t have the dreams unless learning a new technique, however — It now feels strange when I catch myself opening my left hand and there is no tension from yarn!— my brain almost says - wait..I’m free!
About digitizing a brain as a means to preserve its wiring diagram and thus, presumably, its consciousness: Leaving aside that the original would still die, it seems to me that when people discuss the possibility of copying their brain into a computer (mind uploading), they overlook that the brain relies heavily on its integration with the body, and that its state is continually changing from external stimuli received through the body. It almost makes no sense to imagine a normally functioning brain unconnected to a body, as such a brain would hardly function like the ones inside our skulls. And if one day we managed to replicate our brain’s circuitry in a computer, wouldn’t that copy mirror the transient mental state of the original at the time the copy was made? Why should we assume that it would continue to operate fluidly as the original without further external stimuli? If, at the time of copying, the original was suffering from a toothache or hunger, or was sleepy or drunk, or depressive because of a temporary chemical imbalance, would the digitized copy manage to overcome any of those conditions, or would it be forever trapped in such a sorry state? Or if, perhaps more alluringly, the original was experiencing some sort of bodily elation, would the copy remain in a state of perpetual bliss?
Erik, regarding the idea that the full brain scan would be "1000 times larger", than the 1mm sample -- given the brain is approximately 1300 cubic centimeters, wouldn't that figure be something like "1,300,000 times larger" ?
Considering the "weird" nature of dreams, an apt analogy is with generative AI and various "predictive processing" models -- it seems more correct to say that dreaming does not ITSELF "have a function", but that dreams are simply a phenomenal side effect -- the activity of the neurons doing what they do to function, to generate a dynamic world model and to manage self-regulation. So dreams are in part analogous to the "hallucinations" produced by our generative AI "black boxes", a view into ongoing activity that normally does not pass the final filter to "appear" to "consciousness". The word for this process and its pathologies is "confabulation".
I asked this in the previous post, but maybe it was too late. Hoping you can answer it now:
What do you think about Deacon's attempt to extend information theory beyond Shannon to semantics (signifiers, interpretation, meaning and all that)? Are effective IT and Bayesian theories missing that? Or is all of that just a trivial coupling of Shannon with evolutionary algorithms (or some other utility-maximizing algorithm like Levin and Watson's "natural induction")?
I'm sympathetic to the view that modern information theory is missing semantics, but I think one actually needs to show that, and I don't think Deacon really does. E.g., proponents of that view should be able to say "Here's a very simple system, here it is as a standard information channel, here it is but now I've added in the semantics, let's analyze what we've gained."
Agreed on what needs to be done regarding IT missing semantics.
I just thoroughly read your paper on the arxiv where you looked at several measures of causation, and several measures of causal intervention distributions. Incredible! Did you succeed in publishing it in a peer reviewed journal (I checked under same title, but perhaps you changed the title)?
Technical question: In figures 3-5, are average measures representing a time average over some long time, a convergence to a unique value, or just an ensemble average, with no time involved?
Can this be extended to Quantum Mechanics, which can't be derived from a Markovian model (ask me why if you don't know), though at some scale and with enough environmental noise it seems to reduce to one?
I wonder if there is a mathematical way to formalize your intuition of the future macrostate (of a Markovian system) constraining the present microstates in terms of maximizing measures related to entropy using Lagrange multipliers, as in equilibrium statistical mechanics/thermodynamics.
Last question: how or does this connect to discrete levels of organization in biological and social systems (e.g. organic molecules->organelles->cells->organs->multicellular organisms->families->villages->nations->UN or EU). Your coarse graining seems arbitrary. Maybe it is not.
To be more explicit about my last question: the level of coarse graining is not arbitrary, but is dictated by one's environment, which in turn depends on which level of organization one is at. To a part, that environment is dictated by the next level up (not down, assuming one's internal parts are competent to do what is needed for their and your survival, maybe not true in the case of free riding). At the highest level, it is only the external environment that matters.
Here's a preprint by Michael Ramscar laying out his discriminative theory of meaning, which I really hope will be the next big thing in semantics and linguistics in general: https://arxiv.org/abs/1904.03991
Rather than saying that it's information theory that needs to be extended to handle semantics, the pitch here is that the mainstream approach to semantics, based on compositionality (commonly gesturing at Frege and Russell as the modern originators), is wrong, and switching to a discriminative perspective easily integrates with information theory as is.
I really can't do it justice in a few words, but my metaphor of choice for compositionality (the "wrong" way to think about meaning) is Lego bricks: each word contributes a brick of meaning to a larger structure. Then of course, one has to explain how words "carry" meaning.
The discriminative perspective says they don't, they just make you discard hypotheses in your mind about what the speaker is getting at, progressively zeroing in on what she means, or also possibly something else and missing her point, or ending up empty-handed and having to start over from a broader set of initial hypotheses. My metaphor of choice here is sculpture: the addressee starts with a solid block of granite in his mind, partially pre-shaped by context, assumptions etc., and the speaker's words chip away at that block of granite.
Since they don't convey the meaning, just contribute to shaping it, no need to somehow incorporate meaning into a theory of how information is transmitted. This theory can also neatly explain how misunderstandings or generally differences in understanding can arise. Under a compositional view, if every addressee (+ the speaker) gets the same Lego structure, how can differences in understanding arise? But in the discriminative view, the difference (if only ever so slight at times) is easily located in everyone's starting slab of granite, and how the individual words interact with it.
In this sense, information theory has been integrated with semantics at least since R.V.L. Hartley's 1928 (!) paper Transmission of Information (p. 536):
> In any given communication the sender mentally selects a particular symbol and by some bodily motion, as of his vocal mechanism, causes the attention of the receiver to be
directed to that particular symbol. By successive selections a sequence of symbols is brought to the listener's attention. At each selection there are eliminated all of the other symbols which might have been chosen. As the selections proceed more and more possible symbol sequences are eliminated, and we say that the information becomes more precise. For example, in the sentence, "Apples are red," the first word eliminates other kinds of fruit and all other objects in general. The second directs attention to some property or condition of apples, and the third eliminates other possible colors. It does not, however, eliminate possibilities regarding the size of apples, and this further information may be conveyed by subsequent selections.
But even beore that -- what I'm trying to get at by contrasting compositionality vs. discrimination is a distinction people have been making for quite a while. The earliest I've been able to trace it is to Dugald Stewart, a Scottish philosopher of the late Englightenment, who wrote:
> The function of language is not so much to convey knowledge (according to the common phrase) from one mind to another, as to bring two minds into the same train of thinking; and to confine them as nearly as possible, to the same track.
(edit: I had my nestings reversed). I think this is also Deacon's perspective? That there are 3 kinds of information nested within each other: Darwin (useful for survival/pragmatic) nested within Boltzmann (referential/semantic with respect to whether physical work was done), nested within Shannon (medium capacity/syntax), and each of these is eliminative, not compositional. Darwin emerges from Boltzmann, emerges from Shannon.
But I think Erik is right that we need simple systems where we show these differences, like he did with his macro/micro scale information papers.
I would be fascinated to discover how they isolated the H5N1 virus. Do people realise that virologists don't extract viruses directly from human samples? Every 'virus' is cultured in vitro using monkey kidney cells and other toxins. From this toxic mess the 'virus' is extracted. They never prove the virus is contagious either of course. So if you go back and look at the SARS-CoV-2 debacle you won't find any control experiments proving it is contagious. I would relax if I were you and laugh at the 'experts' when they start telling us how 'deadly' the new 'variant' is once it 'jumps' to humans. The gig is up and many people are waking up to this particular scam.
Taking of scams most people still don't realise that Einstein's SR and GR were falsified years ago. If you really want to understand the level of the scam I suggest you read 'Science at the Crossroads' by Herbert Dingle, a leading UK physicist of the early 20th century and at one time leading proponent of Relativity. He knew most of the leading scientists of the day and wrote standard textbooks on the theory that were used in universities.
"Herbert Dingle was a philosopher of science and one of the most knowledgeable people on the subject of Special Relativity who, when he later realized the theory was untenable and tried to do something about it, was roundly ignored and sequestered by an establishment which refuses to hold itself to the standards it publicly espouses. Science At The Crossroads was Dingle's last attempt to get the scientific establishment to answer a simple question which, to this day, has not been answered publicly by any mainstream "scientist".
The question is very simple but you need to read the book which I know very few people will because their minds are closed.
Einstein never proved any of his theories. They are mere fantasies all starting with the completely unjustifiable ASSUMPTION the speed of light is constant in any reference frame and the Lorentz transformations were viable without any proof of course.
Edward Bernays famously wrote
"The conscious and intelligent manipulation of the organized habits and opinions of the masses is an important element in a democratic society. Those who manipulate this unseen mechanism of society constitute an invisible government which is the true ruling power of our country. We are governed, our minds are molded, our tastes formed, and our ideas suggested, largely by men we have never heard of…. It is they who pull the wires that control the public mind."
I'm fascinated by dreams, and have read many theories about them. In every case they seem obviously wrong - contradicted by dreams I've had. Your theory is the best I've seen so far, but I think it can't be the whole story because there are still some (though fewer) dreams I've had that contradict it.
One particular fascination is when "meta" things happen. Like the dream with a long series of events, one of which was taking a nap on a cot in a kitchen - yes, I fell asleep and woke up within the dream. No nested dream, tho. Another - I had a really interesting dream, woke up and thought "I have to tell my wife this one". Then fell back asleep and had a dream in which I told her about the previous dream. Woke up again and now I have 2 dreams to tell her about. Another - I had a dream where I encountered the ghost of a friend who had recently passed away. Having never seen a ghost before, I was very excited and thought carefully about what questions I had for the spirit world, but alas communication was not possible. A few days later I had another dream in which I bumped into her at a party and thought (in the dream) "hm, last time I saw her she was a ghost". Maybe there's some kind of continuity of dream consciousness?
In your book "The Revelations" there was a wonderful scene that was very alive for me. It was the scene where Kierk and his friend found themselves caught up in a protest. There was this very organic feeling to me . It was like seeing the entire protest as a living organism with almost a consciousness of it's own and at the same time seeing all of the moving parts, the people, the horses and the part that their energies played. Is this an example of causal emergence and if not can you give me a simple example?
Also when you write your next book please make sure that it is in print. I really can't curl up with a computer at night. I love books.
In the 1980's I was a programmer analyst. At times I would spend hours trying to figure out why the logic in my program was not working. Then an odd thing happened, I found at times I would wake up at 2am and the answer would come to me. Then I took it a step further. Instead of banging my head against the wall and staying late at work, I would simply look the program over and go home at 5pm. The next day I would simply have to look at the program and something would tell me that some code or indicator needed to be taken out. The program would then work and I didn't need to bother myself as to logically why. I just went on to my next project. It made my job a lot easier to let my brain figure it out while I slept.
PS. a lot of problems can be solved this way, I call putting it into the brain queue.
Rich Hickey described very much the same approach in one of his talks about creating the Clojure language (and programming in general). I suspect people tend to underutilise this facility by overworking, as well as constantly dumping input into their brains. I'm guilty of "catching up on" Youtube videos in bed, which probably overflows that "brain queue".
Thanks for that. I'll take a look at Rich Hickey. Glad to know that I wasn't the only one with the "brain queue" thing.
I think quite a few genii in history knew the value of "cat naps." Eno slept with arm in the air so that he would only get a few minutes and i think it was Edison (umm) who had an assistant wake him up. It worked for me, first with hardware circuitry and then software (assembly code) a few hours asleep would often present the answer.
Yea Edison had some kind of special chair build that he could lean back to sleep, but if he moved even a bit it would pop forward and wake him up. If I remember correctly. By the way I had to look up philostopher ..... found the reference... very very funny!!
Re #9: in high school, I ran track and one day the coach came to me (never sure exactly why) and said we need a pole vaulter for the team. He didn’t have any experience in coaching the pole vault, so he had arranged that I would spend a couple of intensive days learning the basics with another coach at a rival HS who was experienced in teaching the event. We spent about 3 hours or so the first day and then another 3 or 4 the second. Technique-wise, the ‘trick’ to pole vaulting is getting the pole to ‘bend’, which is how you get real height. The whole thing is pretty counterintuitive: you run full speed and jab a gigantic stick into the ground, flip your body upside down while spinning 180 as the world (and your inner ears) tumble around in completely new ways. Well, the night after that second day, after I had first successfully bent the pole, was wild; in my dreams, I was ‘vaulting’ (but not even in a physically realistic way/setting) over and over again as the world contorted in all sorts of unreal ways. It was, phenomenologically, the most unusual dream I can recall. It definitely felt like my brain was trying to figure out how to navigate a new kind of physical space - which it was - very much in keeping with the overfitting hypothesis.
Re #9. Scott McCloud has an interesting example of the same effect, described in his avant-garde comic "My Obsession with Chess"; he hallucinated that his alarm clock was a chess clock, and after he stopped it's beeping in the morning he found himself paralyzed in bed because it "wasn't his move." https://www.scottmccloud.com/1-webcomics/chess/chess.html
I have some experience with this dreaming hallucinations. When I was first learning chess, not only my dreams were all about chess, but my thinking as well while falling asleep. I used to read non-fiction books in bed, and as I fell asleep my consciousness would move from thinking about the content of the book in terms of arguments and syllogisms to thinking about it in terms of chess problems that I visualized and had to solve. I also had similar experiences when, some time ago when I had more free time, I was spending eight to ten hours a day super focused on writing. Each night I had dreams whose content I visualized in terms of sentences, paragraphs and iambic pentameters that I need to "solve", to write, judge and rewrite as if they were some kind of puzzle. I even dreamed entire poems, of which only one or two lines I could remember after waking. The weirder part of this kind of experience was always at the moment I was falling asleep; because all that I was thinking about was turned into chess or writing, whose weirdness would often awake me to realize now consciously how weird it was.
Re #4: For anyone interested, I recently wrote about the relationship between quantum physics, philosophy, and consciousness in the context of Cortázar's novel Hopscotch:
https://orbistertius.substack.com/p/interpreting-yonder
Re #10: When I was still trying to learn Japanese after being captivated by Stephen Krashen's input hypothesis I was doing a small amount of anki every day but a large amount of input through podcasts and shows, at least a few hours every day. I began having dreams where people were speaking to me in Japanese but I couldn't understand a word of what they were saying.
It's almost like your brain wasn't just replaying the memories of learning Japanese!
Erik, when it comes to your "brains are for consciousness" theory - do check out the French philosopher of biology Raymond Ruyer.
He does have a rather metaphysical system (and I do think that perhaps we need funky new metaphysics to create new paradigms) but I suspect that he can be watered down a little - check out Neo-Finalism
ive been reading a side-by-side english/japanese work to try to get better at reading japanese and in this short story im reading, the word 老婆 (rouba, meaning old woman) keeps appearing and a variation of it appeared in my dream this morning, so prolly +1 to the overfitting hypothesis!
Hi Erik,
Excellent! Excellent talk on WBUR today. Thank You.
Erik,
I relate to your 4/11 post on Einstein as a “lone traveler.” I often felt that way as I made my peripatetic way through life. What saved me some 40 years ago was the thought that the creative life I had set out on in my 20’s is one grand Walkabout. You never know what you might pick up along the way, put in your pocket and discover that it’s just what you need down the road.
This quote, “[they were] just indifferent to philosophy. Full stop. Quantum mechanics worked. Why worry about what it meant?” also strikes me as prescient of where we find ourselves today. The fixation on STEM education to the exclusion of Arts and Humanities leads us to Tech bros moving fast and breaking stuff, leading up to its present iteration in the proliferation of “AI dream slop.”
The other day, a writer/director colleague of mine posted on LinkedIn he felt that “AI is the glass half full and the glass half empty at the same time.” I was reminded of one of my quips that if Einstein had he been a film director his theory of relativity might be expressed as “Everything is coming together and falling apart at the same time.” Or maybe that Quantum theory.
After listening to your On Point discussion with Meghna on the “On Point” podcast, I posted this:
So, what we have now is half pot-of-gold & salvation at the end of the rainbow that leads us down the yellow brick road to OZ. But on the other hand, we have the sneaky suspicion that it’s a leap into Half Borg-Matrix-Terminator future.
And on the other, other hand, there is always a third middle path that needs to be scouted.
Therefore if anything positive is to come of it, we need to apply our creative instincts and rigorous critical evaluation to finding a future grounded in humanistic values.
Alyn Warren
You know, I'd never heard of the Tetris effect but I remember experiencing it. When I first learned to crochet as a teenager I would dream the stitches, just watching the hook go in and out and in and out of the yarn until I fell all the way asleep. It was kind of hypnotic!
I recently just learned crochet at 39 and had several nights of what seemed like hours of dreams about stitches, analysing or repeating the motions. I felt I was awake all night, and complained I had disrupted sleepy yet I didn’t feel tired the next day, or any effects of that actually being disruptive.
Now the motions are ingrained (somewhat) I don’t have the dreams unless learning a new technique, however — It now feels strange when I catch myself opening my left hand and there is no tension from yarn!— my brain almost says - wait..I’m free!
About digitizing a brain as a means to preserve its wiring diagram and thus, presumably, its consciousness: Leaving aside that the original would still die, it seems to me that when people discuss the possibility of copying their brain into a computer (mind uploading), they overlook that the brain relies heavily on its integration with the body, and that its state is continually changing from external stimuli received through the body. It almost makes no sense to imagine a normally functioning brain unconnected to a body, as such a brain would hardly function like the ones inside our skulls. And if one day we managed to replicate our brain’s circuitry in a computer, wouldn’t that copy mirror the transient mental state of the original at the time the copy was made? Why should we assume that it would continue to operate fluidly as the original without further external stimuli? If, at the time of copying, the original was suffering from a toothache or hunger, or was sleepy or drunk, or depressive because of a temporary chemical imbalance, would the digitized copy manage to overcome any of those conditions, or would it be forever trapped in such a sorry state? Or if, perhaps more alluringly, the original was experiencing some sort of bodily elation, would the copy remain in a state of perpetual bliss?
Erik, regarding the idea that the full brain scan would be "1000 times larger", than the 1mm sample -- given the brain is approximately 1300 cubic centimeters, wouldn't that figure be something like "1,300,000 times larger" ?
Considering the "weird" nature of dreams, an apt analogy is with generative AI and various "predictive processing" models -- it seems more correct to say that dreaming does not ITSELF "have a function", but that dreams are simply a phenomenal side effect -- the activity of the neurons doing what they do to function, to generate a dynamic world model and to manage self-regulation. So dreams are in part analogous to the "hallucinations" produced by our generative AI "black boxes", a view into ongoing activity that normally does not pass the final filter to "appear" to "consciousness". The word for this process and its pathologies is "confabulation".
I asked this in the previous post, but maybe it was too late. Hoping you can answer it now:
What do you think about Deacon's attempt to extend information theory beyond Shannon to semantics (signifiers, interpretation, meaning and all that)? Are effective IT and Bayesian theories missing that? Or is all of that just a trivial coupling of Shannon with evolutionary algorithms (or some other utility-maximizing algorithm like Levin and Watson's "natural induction")?
I'm sympathetic to the view that modern information theory is missing semantics, but I think one actually needs to show that, and I don't think Deacon really does. E.g., proponents of that view should be able to say "Here's a very simple system, here it is as a standard information channel, here it is but now I've added in the semantics, let's analyze what we've gained."
Agreed on what needs to be done regarding IT missing semantics.
I just thoroughly read your paper on the arxiv where you looked at several measures of causation, and several measures of causal intervention distributions. Incredible! Did you succeed in publishing it in a peer reviewed journal (I checked under same title, but perhaps you changed the title)?
Technical question: In figures 3-5, are average measures representing a time average over some long time, a convergence to a unique value, or just an ensemble average, with no time involved?
Can this be extended to Quantum Mechanics, which can't be derived from a Markovian model (ask me why if you don't know), though at some scale and with enough environmental noise it seems to reduce to one?
I wonder if there is a mathematical way to formalize your intuition of the future macrostate (of a Markovian system) constraining the present microstates in terms of maximizing measures related to entropy using Lagrange multipliers, as in equilibrium statistical mechanics/thermodynamics.
Last question: how or does this connect to discrete levels of organization in biological and social systems (e.g. organic molecules->organelles->cells->organs->multicellular organisms->families->villages->nations->UN or EU). Your coarse graining seems arbitrary. Maybe it is not.
To be more explicit about my last question: the level of coarse graining is not arbitrary, but is dictated by one's environment, which in turn depends on which level of organization one is at. To a part, that environment is dictated by the next level up (not down, assuming one's internal parts are competent to do what is needed for their and your survival, maybe not true in the case of free riding). At the highest level, it is only the external environment that matters.
Here's a preprint by Michael Ramscar laying out his discriminative theory of meaning, which I really hope will be the next big thing in semantics and linguistics in general: https://arxiv.org/abs/1904.03991
Rather than saying that it's information theory that needs to be extended to handle semantics, the pitch here is that the mainstream approach to semantics, based on compositionality (commonly gesturing at Frege and Russell as the modern originators), is wrong, and switching to a discriminative perspective easily integrates with information theory as is.
I really can't do it justice in a few words, but my metaphor of choice for compositionality (the "wrong" way to think about meaning) is Lego bricks: each word contributes a brick of meaning to a larger structure. Then of course, one has to explain how words "carry" meaning.
The discriminative perspective says they don't, they just make you discard hypotheses in your mind about what the speaker is getting at, progressively zeroing in on what she means, or also possibly something else and missing her point, or ending up empty-handed and having to start over from a broader set of initial hypotheses. My metaphor of choice here is sculpture: the addressee starts with a solid block of granite in his mind, partially pre-shaped by context, assumptions etc., and the speaker's words chip away at that block of granite.
Since they don't convey the meaning, just contribute to shaping it, no need to somehow incorporate meaning into a theory of how information is transmitted. This theory can also neatly explain how misunderstandings or generally differences in understanding can arise. Under a compositional view, if every addressee (+ the speaker) gets the same Lego structure, how can differences in understanding arise? But in the discriminative view, the difference (if only ever so slight at times) is easily located in everyone's starting slab of granite, and how the individual words interact with it.
In this sense, information theory has been integrated with semantics at least since R.V.L. Hartley's 1928 (!) paper Transmission of Information (p. 536):
> In any given communication the sender mentally selects a particular symbol and by some bodily motion, as of his vocal mechanism, causes the attention of the receiver to be
directed to that particular symbol. By successive selections a sequence of symbols is brought to the listener's attention. At each selection there are eliminated all of the other symbols which might have been chosen. As the selections proceed more and more possible symbol sequences are eliminated, and we say that the information becomes more precise. For example, in the sentence, "Apples are red," the first word eliminates other kinds of fruit and all other objects in general. The second directs attention to some property or condition of apples, and the third eliminates other possible colors. It does not, however, eliminate possibilities regarding the size of apples, and this further information may be conveyed by subsequent selections.
But even beore that -- what I'm trying to get at by contrasting compositionality vs. discrimination is a distinction people have been making for quite a while. The earliest I've been able to trace it is to Dugald Stewart, a Scottish philosopher of the late Englightenment, who wrote:
> The function of language is not so much to convey knowledge (according to the common phrase) from one mind to another, as to bring two minds into the same train of thinking; and to confine them as nearly as possible, to the same track.
(edit: I had my nestings reversed). I think this is also Deacon's perspective? That there are 3 kinds of information nested within each other: Darwin (useful for survival/pragmatic) nested within Boltzmann (referential/semantic with respect to whether physical work was done), nested within Shannon (medium capacity/syntax), and each of these is eliminative, not compositional. Darwin emerges from Boltzmann, emerges from Shannon.
But I think Erik is right that we need simple systems where we show these differences, like he did with his macro/micro scale information papers.
I would be fascinated to discover how they isolated the H5N1 virus. Do people realise that virologists don't extract viruses directly from human samples? Every 'virus' is cultured in vitro using monkey kidney cells and other toxins. From this toxic mess the 'virus' is extracted. They never prove the virus is contagious either of course. So if you go back and look at the SARS-CoV-2 debacle you won't find any control experiments proving it is contagious. I would relax if I were you and laugh at the 'experts' when they start telling us how 'deadly' the new 'variant' is once it 'jumps' to humans. The gig is up and many people are waking up to this particular scam.
Taking of scams most people still don't realise that Einstein's SR and GR were falsified years ago. If you really want to understand the level of the scam I suggest you read 'Science at the Crossroads' by Herbert Dingle, a leading UK physicist of the early 20th century and at one time leading proponent of Relativity. He knew most of the leading scientists of the day and wrote standard textbooks on the theory that were used in universities.
https://www.amazon.co.uk/Science-at-Crossroads-Herbert-Dingle/dp/0856160601/
From one of the reviews
"Herbert Dingle was a philosopher of science and one of the most knowledgeable people on the subject of Special Relativity who, when he later realized the theory was untenable and tried to do something about it, was roundly ignored and sequestered by an establishment which refuses to hold itself to the standards it publicly espouses. Science At The Crossroads was Dingle's last attempt to get the scientific establishment to answer a simple question which, to this day, has not been answered publicly by any mainstream "scientist".
The question is very simple but you need to read the book which I know very few people will because their minds are closed.
Einstein never proved any of his theories. They are mere fantasies all starting with the completely unjustifiable ASSUMPTION the speed of light is constant in any reference frame and the Lorentz transformations were viable without any proof of course.
Edward Bernays famously wrote
"The conscious and intelligent manipulation of the organized habits and opinions of the masses is an important element in a democratic society. Those who manipulate this unseen mechanism of society constitute an invisible government which is the true ruling power of our country. We are governed, our minds are molded, our tastes formed, and our ideas suggested, largely by men we have never heard of…. It is they who pull the wires that control the public mind."
Indeed.
I'm fascinated by dreams, and have read many theories about them. In every case they seem obviously wrong - contradicted by dreams I've had. Your theory is the best I've seen so far, but I think it can't be the whole story because there are still some (though fewer) dreams I've had that contradict it.
One particular fascination is when "meta" things happen. Like the dream with a long series of events, one of which was taking a nap on a cot in a kitchen - yes, I fell asleep and woke up within the dream. No nested dream, tho. Another - I had a really interesting dream, woke up and thought "I have to tell my wife this one". Then fell back asleep and had a dream in which I told her about the previous dream. Woke up again and now I have 2 dreams to tell her about. Another - I had a dream where I encountered the ghost of a friend who had recently passed away. Having never seen a ghost before, I was very excited and thought carefully about what questions I had for the spirit world, but alas communication was not possible. A few days later I had another dream in which I bumped into her at a party and thought (in the dream) "hm, last time I saw her she was a ghost". Maybe there's some kind of continuity of dream consciousness?
Here is question that I have been wanting to ask:
In your book "The Revelations" there was a wonderful scene that was very alive for me. It was the scene where Kierk and his friend found themselves caught up in a protest. There was this very organic feeling to me . It was like seeing the entire protest as a living organism with almost a consciousness of it's own and at the same time seeing all of the moving parts, the people, the horses and the part that their energies played. Is this an example of causal emergence and if not can you give me a simple example?
Also when you write your next book please make sure that it is in print. I really can't curl up with a computer at night. I love books.