Thread by @touchmoonflower

because i am still having a vacation from my vacation, and am temporarily alone with my laptop, i'm going to explore this a little more in a thread!
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https://twitter.com/4770698088/status/1964019738277007686

Shannon information, as I never tire of pointing out, is a mathematical formalism which can quantify the similarity between two messages, basically. It has no concept of "flow" from one message to the other.

Our intuitive use of the word information is different. We want to talk about information "about" the world. Shannon information has no "about." It just takes two blobs of stuff which are presumed to contain "information," and compares their content.

So, for the sake of argument, let us imagine that we do have two such blobs: The world, and the mind. And that they both contain "information," and that we want to know if it is the *same* information; if one contains information "about" the other.

(With the important caveat that even if we could do this, from a Shannon perspective we cannot know if the world contains information about our minds, or our minds about the world. Shannon information is purely symmetrical. But anyway! Onward.)

Presuming (again, for the sake of argument) that our "minds" are in our brains and contain "information" -- all ideas I categorically reject btw -- how can we measure that information? There is no device that even comes close. MRIs are blunt instruments. So...

...let us use our imaginations.

Let us imagine some kind of device that could measure every nerve impulse in the entire brain at a given moment in time. We would then want another device that could measure the behavior of all the neurotransmitters; and the endocrine system.

We would quickly discover that "brain" is an abstraction -- that there is no way to draw a bright line around the brain. Nerve fibers extend down the spinal cord, and thence ramify throughout the body; hormones travel everywhere in blood.

Neurotransmitters, too, are found throughout the body, performing many functions known and unknown; in fact new neurotransmitters are regularly discovered. So we will have to discover them all, and map their behaviors.

We will have to deal with the fact that most serotonin is found in the gut -- and with the troublesome interactions between gut flora and the vagus nerve, and no doubt much more besides.

(To be conservative, I am setting aside here the question of pheromones. Last time I checked, pheromones were still strictly theoretical, a hypothesis yet to be disproven, their nature and mechanisms still speculative. It is undeniable that hormonal chemicals

also exist outside the body. But we don't as yet know what they are doing there.

I will merely point out that if we had to map pheromones as well to understand the information content of our minds, the whole project would immediately become ridiculous. More ridiculous.)

We would then no doubt realize that the state of this system at a single point in time tells us nothing; that its information content is a process, not a state. Electrons move down nerve fibers, neurotransmitters build up and flow. So we would need to take a movie.

And we would then discover that there is no simple way of quantizing the internal state of this "mind" we are mapping. Is its state legible in a second? An hour?

A lifetime?

No matter. In our imaginations we are free! We will make a complete map, from the moment of conception to death. Maybe even decomposition, to be on the safe side.

It's not really clear whether "information" is passed from parents to children in utero, or where it goes after death, but we have to draw the line somewhere ... I guess.

And finally, having completed this Herculean endeavor, we are in a position to ask whether the information we have catalogued is the same or different from that in the world.

But what is the world?

And what kind of device can we imagine that could catalog *its* information?

At first, we are stymied. Must we count all the particles, their movement and relative positions, and all the energy, from the dawn of time? This really seems like a bit much.

But then, inspiration hits us. This mind, whose information content we now know, has only ever experienced a subset of the universe. In fact, the world it has known is only the world it could perceive. It cannot see beyond the visible spectrum; cannot hear above 20,000 Hz.

It cannot be imagined to contain information about the distant past or far future, planets or even countries it has never visited.

In fact, the only "world" this being, whose mind we now know so well, has ever had access to is the world inscribed by the input of its senses; the world it has touched, tasted, seen, heard.

And we have access to that data! We need merely sum up the sensory nerve impulses, the electrons traveling down the optic nerve, the pressure data, the experiences of magnetoreceptors and olfactory organs, and we will have the complete picture of the subjective experience

of this being! Which is, we can all agree, the "world" it has experience of -- the only world to which it has ever had access.

Something troubles us about this neat solution however. We already *have* all the sense data. They were, in fact, recorded as part of our grand analysis of everything that made up the "mind" of this person.

And they were, in addition, only a small part of that mind, dwarfed by the myriad internal processes that responded to and processed these "data."

We have made a map -- but the territory appears to be a tiny subset of the map.

This cannot be.

Recoiling from this Borgesian paradox, we return to the drawing board. We have reached an epistemological conclusion: If a tree falls in the forest, it must be heard to be said to make a noise. Alright. But what if its existence -- its "information content" -- is produced

in the moment of its being perceived by *anyone*?

Or any thing?

A project reveals itself before our awestruck eyes. To determine the information content of the world, we must analyze, not just the sensory experience of a single being, but that of all beings.

We must know, not just how the world appeared to all the people who have ever lived, but how it appeared to all the bats.

All the bees, all the nematodes, the killer whales and mantises -- their myriad sense apparatuses transmit the subjective experience which, summed

across some massive integral, will give us a true picture of the information content of the world --

-- and finally we will know whether the information content of a single mind resembles it in any way we can point to.

The End

Thanks for reading