From: mshute@cs.man.ac.uk (Malcolm Shute)
Newsgroups: bionet.info-theory
Subject: Re: More wacky theory
Date: 9 Sep 92 10:40:06 GMT
Distribution: bionet
Organization: Dept Computer Science, University of Manchester, U.K.

In article <1992Sep8.140304.24664@hellgate.utah.edu> tolman%asylum.cs.utah.edu@cs.utah.edu (Kenneth Tolman) writes:
>[...] Therefore, I am going to
>present the theory from a different vantage point, to try to generate more
>criticism.
OK, I'll rise to this (since no other followups have arrived yet, at the
time of posting, from the States).  But, my comments are *requests for
clearing up hazy points*, rather than critism.

>  Information is directly linked to causality.    If I cause something,
>I am "informing" the event.  That which is information will cause future
>effects.  The information content of the universe at the present
>is a reflection of past causal actions.  
OK

>  An individual consists of many memories and experiences, and each of those
>things which influence them in some way "inform" that person.  The culture
>as a whole represents a great deal of past experiences and developed 
>attitudes, all of which are part of its information.
OK, these are Richard Dawkins' "memes".

>  Events which propagate themselves forwards through time are information,
>and those that do not are lost information.
So... gaining and losing information come at the same cost? and in fact
occur simultaneously?  (A flip-flop which is being 'set' at this moment
is gaining the information of what I want it to store, but is destructively
overwriting its old contents).

> A piece of DNA represents 
>many random mutations, and those which survive are information in the
>future.  Events can be remembered by an organism through behavioral
>inheritence (for more complex organisms) as it passes on lessons learned
>to its offspring.
Genes and memes again, fine.

>  The very first events in the universe which propagated themselves forwards
>were quantum fluctuations in the original hot plasma.  These created density
>inhomogeneities which allowed for (or precipitated) the formation of the
>galaxies and star systems.  The universe became more complex because of the
>formation of the stars, and these initial informational events have lasted
>through to the visible sky today.

Am I right in concluding that complexity = information content?
(Human DNA is more complex than Mouse DNA, which is more complex than Amoeba DNA).
Does your theory cope with Bell&Newell's ascertion (1973, Computers: Structures
and Examples) that a computer is more complex than a World War II battleship,
despite having fewer components?
Does your theory cope with Dawkins' ascertion (1988, The Blink Watchmaker)
that a mouse (or whatever he used as his example) is more complex than Mont Blanc?
That what makes Mont Blanc "Mont Blanc" is not its exact makeup (a particular
nugget of granite here, of this size, shape and mass, placed on top of this
piece of limestone here, of this size, etc) but its overall makeup (a region of
this type of rock here, and one of this type there, in the overall envelope
that we know of as "the outline of Mont Blanc")?

Information content appears to be a moving target.
Although you could fool me with an exact replica of Mont Blanc, even though
you didn't go to the detail of making exact replicas of each stone fragment,
it wouldn't fool an ant-sized creature which lived on one of the stones of
the original Mont Blanc.

Indeed, could it be instead that information content is proportional
to the *observers* memory capacity?  (I have a map of Mont Blanc, the
rest of the world, plus the rest of the universe (to varying levels of
detail) stored in my 10^10 neurons... the ant has a map of its square
metre of Mont Blanc stored in its (however many) neurons, but to a greater
level of detail than I do for that particular square metre).

Or is this perceived information content?
How is it related to actual information content?

My sandwich has a spec of sand on it... I don't notice, and eat the whole
sandwich as if it were 100% food.  A fly, though, would steer away from
attempting to eat the sand grain, and would concentrate on the bread.
The positional information of the sand causes more of an event for the
fly than for me.

--

Malcolm SHUTE.         (The AM Mollusc:   v_@_ )        Disclaimer: all
Newsgroups: bionet.info-theory