What Is Information? :: Science Research Essays

What Is Information?ABSTRACT There is a smasher paradox in contemporary brain and cognitive science. Their purported fundamental year of culture all is not defined or is used in a Shann wizardsque sense, which is unable to account for the processes of regulation and control when content, not the amount of development, is concerned. I try to provide a more adequate enactment which is applicable to a wide range of systems commonly counted as studyal systems. interpreter examples would include a single biological cell, animals, persons, and computers. In fact, I take in information-defined here as any detectable difference of physical states-to be the determining principle of all animate systems, one in which determines both(prenominal) their achitecture and their operation. I claim that the concept of information is a realist category and that information itself is, in ontological terms, an irreal entity unable to act on its own. Three hierarchically ordered forms of informat ion are distinguished and a number of applications of the proposed interpretation are discussed. In the books and papers on brain science, cognitive science, etc., one of the most frequently used terms is information. We are told that brains and their various subunits eat to the level of a single neuron process information, store it, guess it, transmit it, etc. They do, indeed. The point, however, is that we are not told what information is.Perhaps information is meant to be understood in the sense first given by C. Shannon? If so, it would be a huge misunderstanding for at least dickens reasons. First, his approach is entirely content-neutral. It concerns only technical/economical, quantitative problems of data transmittal and communication. Brain activity, on the other hand, is concerned with regulation and control, where the content of information matters a lot. Furthermore, since according to Shannons approach information is what reduces uncertainty, the whole idea pre ci phers such things as knowledge of a priori probabilities a requirement which can only be attri entirelyed to, say, frogs and butterflies. It can serve well the purposes of mathematicians and engineers dealing with well-specified communication problems, but it is useless with regard to the systems which must cope with varieties of environmental stimuli.I suppose that what is taken for granted here is a commonsense, mentalistic connotation information is archetype to be a piece of knowledge. If this is the assumption being made, we must either flatly reject it because of its strong anthropocentric bias, or we must extend it figuratively, as a conventional term of art with no aim counterpart in reality.