"The realization of this experiment opens interesting perspectives for controlling quantum systems. Instead of freezing their evolution, repeated measurements could provide information used to channel them towards tailored quantum states by active feed-back operations." - Bernu et al., Phys. Rev. Lett., 101: 180402 (2008). (here)
Don't look now, but something got me thinking...
When last we discussed how I was going to take a wild stab at modeling physics to include 5 dimensions of experience, I was fixated on the quantum zeno effect, which is perhaps the most direct example of a physical system being impacted by measurement. (I am still absorbing information on QZE and the particular observations and problems that gave rise to the idea of quantum decoherence. This will take awhile.)
While reading this blogpost, my thoughts went to another article - one on non-local observation. In this experiment "[t]he experimenter asked each participant either to imagine that he or she could intuitively sense the presence of the photons in a specific area of the interferometer... or to withdraw that intuitive perception and allow the photons to pass through the same area unimpeded." (My emphasis.) In this experiment, the participants were not directly observing the laser/Michelson interferometer system. The hypothesis was that if "such [non-local] observation were possible, it would theoretically perturb the photon's quantum wave functions and change the pattern of light produced by the interferometer." A significant decrease in overall level of illumination was present in the non-local observation condition, as predicted by the behavior of the same system when the interference pattern has collapsed due to attempts to gain information about the path of the photon.
Is quantum decoherence compatible with non-local observation? Or would it make more sense to map observation effects (like QZE) onto certain cognitive parameters associated with observation? It's interesting to me that in Radin's study the "result was primarily due to nine sessions involving experienced meditators". This suggests that cognitive attributes of a particular observer are associated with the degree and nature of 'observation' that they can bring to bear on a system. This in turn reminded me of Schmidt's article, discussed lo these many months ago, which also suggests a continuum of observation based on factors such as the 'alertness' of the observer.
And I began to wonder... Where are the studies that map cognitive attributes such as absorption, and neurological properties such as visual cortex activation, onto effects of observation such as the QZE?
Thursday, January 1, 2009
Tuesday, November 25, 2008
What If It's ALL Pattern?
"Congratulations. You have swamped the probabilities of chance with your mind." - Ghost, by Alan Lightman (2008). (Yes, that Alan Lightman. A most enjoyable read!)
This is going to have to be quick, as yours truly is currently swamped with more mundane things to do.
There seems to be something in the air that makes people want to discuss patterns. I concede that our ultimate understanding of the universe may always include an element that is not understood. Call it 'noise', 'randomness', or whatever else you like.
I just think that it's possible to understand a whole lot more of that 'noise' in terms of a pattern or set of underlying causes. I don't hold this opinion because I can't stand the idea that some things are simply unexplainable; in fact, I tolerate that idea quite well. But, having seen the potential to crack one previously untouchable 'code' (that of the origins of dreams), I can't help but think that it might be possible to crack more of the 'code' of consciousness.
Cracking the code of conscious experience will involve a grand synthesis of many lines of research, including those on rarer types of conscious experience. I also see the multiple-observer question as a necessary line of inquiry for understanding the interplay of consciousness with the observable world. The code of a self-contained consciousness that is isolated from outside influences is (hypothetically) much easier to crack. But the code of a consciousness that is dependent in some way on other observers will likely be much more complicated.
This challenge merits only the following response - Bring it on! ;)
This is going to have to be quick, as yours truly is currently swamped with more mundane things to do.
There seems to be something in the air that makes people want to discuss patterns. I concede that our ultimate understanding of the universe may always include an element that is not understood. Call it 'noise', 'randomness', or whatever else you like.
I just think that it's possible to understand a whole lot more of that 'noise' in terms of a pattern or set of underlying causes. I don't hold this opinion because I can't stand the idea that some things are simply unexplainable; in fact, I tolerate that idea quite well. But, having seen the potential to crack one previously untouchable 'code' (that of the origins of dreams), I can't help but think that it might be possible to crack more of the 'code' of consciousness.
Cracking the code of conscious experience will involve a grand synthesis of many lines of research, including those on rarer types of conscious experience. I also see the multiple-observer question as a necessary line of inquiry for understanding the interplay of consciousness with the observable world. The code of a self-contained consciousness that is isolated from outside influences is (hypothetically) much easier to crack. But the code of a consciousness that is dependent in some way on other observers will likely be much more complicated.
This challenge merits only the following response - Bring it on! ;)
Saturday, November 15, 2008
Journal Club #5
"It is like hearing an echo from a long way off." - said of telepathy.
Venkatasubramanian, et al, Investigating paranormal phenomena: Functional brain imaging of telepathy, International Journal of Yoga, 2008 (here)
I'm all for studies which aim to link hard neurological data to psi activity. To date, there appear to be three other such studies which involve functional brain mapping techniques. Two of the three previous studies examined subjects with telepathic ability, whereas the third dealt with "distant intentionality." Only the study on distant intentionality (healing at a distance) used fMRI.
I'm commenting on this study because it indicates that the telepathic subject/receiver, who performed the telepathy task while being scanned, displayed activation in the parahippocampal gyrus when asked to engage in the task of 'receiving' the telepathically-transmitted image. The parahippocampal gyrus is typically associated with memory encoding and retrieval, which begs the question - why would an area of the brain whose primary function seems to be memory encoding and retrieval be implicated in telepathy?
Granted, the parahippocampal gyrus has been implicated in many things - from panic attacks to the perception of sarcasm. It's not an entirely implausible stretch to relate the need for perceiving social context when identifying sarcasm with the ability to 'detect' what another person is thinking. It can all be related to Theory of Mind. Telepathy just seems to bypass a few of the more conventional information-gathering steps.
So I'm uber-curious to know why the authors of this study think that the parahippocampal gyrus might have a legitimate connection to telepathy. The previous studies using SPECT, EEG, and MRI seem to claim only that a larger activation was seen in the right cerebral hemisphere. The telepathic subject's fMRI data was analyzed by comparing periods of 'activation' with periods of 'rest'. Periods of 'activation' represented active attempts to 'send' an image on the part of the sender/investigator and active attempts to 'receive' on the part of the subject. The images being 'sent' were abstract geometric figures of low complexity, hand-drawn by the investigator.
The control subject also displayed a differential activation in another area of the brain that is associated with Theory of Mind - the left inferior frontal gyrus. So what's going on here? The key to successful telepathy is in the degree of correspondence between the 'received' data and the original target. Emotional content (which implicates the hippocampus more directly) is non-existent in this particular task and in specific target material chosen for the task. (Right about now you should open the article and look and the two sets of 'received' images, if you haven't already done so. I confess that I am hard-pressed to call one drawing the result of telepathy when compared to the other.)
The discussion section of this article talks quite a bit about the role of the hippocampus in processing emotion, though it's hard to tell how this line of thinking corresponds to this particular study. The authors also digress to mentioning sensitivity to magnetic field energies though, again, the reasons for doing so in the context of this study are unclear. (But we're noting the relevant references for later.) The paragraph that links the parahippocampal gyrus with magnetic fields via their common association with schizophrenia and psychosis makes me cringe. The implication is that magnetic fields are the mechanism of telepathy and the parahippocampal gyrus is a 'hot' center for processing those signals, but the leaps in thinking to link these two ideas are extreme.
So what, if any, other plausible explanations exist for the why the parahippocampal gyrus might be implicated in this act of telepathy? (It really is a stretch to think that it has to be implicated in every act of telepathy.) Without a successful replication of this task using similar stimuli, it's impossible to conclude that this parahippocampal activation was not simply an anomaly that has no relevance to the task. All that being said, I mention this study because it brought to mind a theory about telepathy that I think has received far too little attention. Now that I think about, there are actually two theories that can come into play here...
The first theory (and you'll pardon me if I can't properly attribute it to a source) is that telepathy works by activating existing memory traces. That is, I perceived your message to me in terms of ideas, images, events, and emotions that I've already experienced. My challenge is then to correctly 'connect the dots' and decode the messages by correctly interpreting the relative strength of the memory activations. To be completely honest, I like this theory because it jibes with my own experiences and the anecdotal evidence I've collected from others. Remote viewers also discuss the difficultly they encounter in correctly interpreting their perceptions.
The second theory (again, I beg pardon for lack of attribution) is that instances of ESP such as are purported to have occurred in this task may actually be the result of the mind/brain accessing its own future observations. In other words, the telepathy was not mind-to-mind contact (in this case), but the brain accessing what it will see during the feedback stage of the experiment. The brain accessing future memory traces, if you will.
By implicating memory traces in the 'telepathic' act, via either of the two theories I just described, you have a much more plausible reason to suspect that the parahippocampal gyrus activation is a significant find.
Though I remain, as ever, an appropriately skeptical scientist who awaits the validation of replication with eager anticipation.
Venkatasubramanian, et al, Investigating paranormal phenomena: Functional brain imaging of telepathy, International Journal of Yoga, 2008 (here)
I'm all for studies which aim to link hard neurological data to psi activity. To date, there appear to be three other such studies which involve functional brain mapping techniques. Two of the three previous studies examined subjects with telepathic ability, whereas the third dealt with "distant intentionality." Only the study on distant intentionality (healing at a distance) used fMRI.
I'm commenting on this study because it indicates that the telepathic subject/receiver, who performed the telepathy task while being scanned, displayed activation in the parahippocampal gyrus when asked to engage in the task of 'receiving' the telepathically-transmitted image. The parahippocampal gyrus is typically associated with memory encoding and retrieval, which begs the question - why would an area of the brain whose primary function seems to be memory encoding and retrieval be implicated in telepathy?
Granted, the parahippocampal gyrus has been implicated in many things - from panic attacks to the perception of sarcasm. It's not an entirely implausible stretch to relate the need for perceiving social context when identifying sarcasm with the ability to 'detect' what another person is thinking. It can all be related to Theory of Mind. Telepathy just seems to bypass a few of the more conventional information-gathering steps.
So I'm uber-curious to know why the authors of this study think that the parahippocampal gyrus might have a legitimate connection to telepathy. The previous studies using SPECT, EEG, and MRI seem to claim only that a larger activation was seen in the right cerebral hemisphere. The telepathic subject's fMRI data was analyzed by comparing periods of 'activation' with periods of 'rest'. Periods of 'activation' represented active attempts to 'send' an image on the part of the sender/investigator and active attempts to 'receive' on the part of the subject. The images being 'sent' were abstract geometric figures of low complexity, hand-drawn by the investigator.
The control subject also displayed a differential activation in another area of the brain that is associated with Theory of Mind - the left inferior frontal gyrus. So what's going on here? The key to successful telepathy is in the degree of correspondence between the 'received' data and the original target. Emotional content (which implicates the hippocampus more directly) is non-existent in this particular task and in specific target material chosen for the task. (Right about now you should open the article and look and the two sets of 'received' images, if you haven't already done so. I confess that I am hard-pressed to call one drawing the result of telepathy when compared to the other.)
The discussion section of this article talks quite a bit about the role of the hippocampus in processing emotion, though it's hard to tell how this line of thinking corresponds to this particular study. The authors also digress to mentioning sensitivity to magnetic field energies though, again, the reasons for doing so in the context of this study are unclear. (But we're noting the relevant references for later.) The paragraph that links the parahippocampal gyrus with magnetic fields via their common association with schizophrenia and psychosis makes me cringe. The implication is that magnetic fields are the mechanism of telepathy and the parahippocampal gyrus is a 'hot' center for processing those signals, but the leaps in thinking to link these two ideas are extreme.
So what, if any, other plausible explanations exist for the why the parahippocampal gyrus might be implicated in this act of telepathy? (It really is a stretch to think that it has to be implicated in every act of telepathy.) Without a successful replication of this task using similar stimuli, it's impossible to conclude that this parahippocampal activation was not simply an anomaly that has no relevance to the task. All that being said, I mention this study because it brought to mind a theory about telepathy that I think has received far too little attention. Now that I think about, there are actually two theories that can come into play here...
The first theory (and you'll pardon me if I can't properly attribute it to a source) is that telepathy works by activating existing memory traces. That is, I perceived your message to me in terms of ideas, images, events, and emotions that I've already experienced. My challenge is then to correctly 'connect the dots' and decode the messages by correctly interpreting the relative strength of the memory activations. To be completely honest, I like this theory because it jibes with my own experiences and the anecdotal evidence I've collected from others. Remote viewers also discuss the difficultly they encounter in correctly interpreting their perceptions.
The second theory (again, I beg pardon for lack of attribution) is that instances of ESP such as are purported to have occurred in this task may actually be the result of the mind/brain accessing its own future observations. In other words, the telepathy was not mind-to-mind contact (in this case), but the brain accessing what it will see during the feedback stage of the experiment. The brain accessing future memory traces, if you will.
By implicating memory traces in the 'telepathic' act, via either of the two theories I just described, you have a much more plausible reason to suspect that the parahippocampal gyrus activation is a significant find.
Though I remain, as ever, an appropriately skeptical scientist who awaits the validation of replication with eager anticipation.
Thursday, September 18, 2008
What Remains To Be Discovered
"They both had serious reservations about the direction quantum physics was taking, but stepped out of the fray into another place altogether - the fifth dimension." - The Quantum Ten, by Sheilla Jones (2008). ;) Per the nuggets of good advice that popped up today in the blogosphere, I create/blog about my current muddled state of thought.
"Consider how the problem will be solved..." Recapping: The big problem I have is this - What laws govern a system that produces all aspects of classical physics experience and the consistently observed exceptions to those laws? (Auxiliary problems abound.)
Unfortunately, all indicators right now are pointing to the need to study consciousness and the mechanisms that give rise to the various aspects of conscious experience. (I say 'unfortunately' because mentioning 'consciousness' is often enough to cut your audience by at least half.) But this is also a problematic perspective because, in order to produce something scientifically useful, you end up attempting to map elements of subjective mental experience onto external knowledge structures. 'Why is that problematic?', you ask.
Consider: If I want to say that the mechanisms involved in object classification might give rise to our experience of gravity, then with what structures do I identify those mechanisms? If gravity isn't an absolute external force, then how can I justify introducing neurons or neurochemistry into the model? When does external knowledge reflect something that is absolute? (Rabbit hole!)
What remains to be discovered is whether or not I can extricate myself from this predicament and preserve something that has validity beyond a subjective perspective...
"Consider how the problem will be solved..." Recapping: The big problem I have is this - What laws govern a system that produces all aspects of classical physics experience and the consistently observed exceptions to those laws? (Auxiliary problems abound.)
Unfortunately, all indicators right now are pointing to the need to study consciousness and the mechanisms that give rise to the various aspects of conscious experience. (I say 'unfortunately' because mentioning 'consciousness' is often enough to cut your audience by at least half.) But this is also a problematic perspective because, in order to produce something scientifically useful, you end up attempting to map elements of subjective mental experience onto external knowledge structures. 'Why is that problematic?', you ask.
Consider: If I want to say that the mechanisms involved in object classification might give rise to our experience of gravity, then with what structures do I identify those mechanisms? If gravity isn't an absolute external force, then how can I justify introducing neurons or neurochemistry into the model? When does external knowledge reflect something that is absolute? (Rabbit hole!)
What remains to be discovered is whether or not I can extricate myself from this predicament and preserve something that has validity beyond a subjective perspective...
Monday, September 8, 2008
A Wizard Should
"Above all else, a Wizard knows himself - what drives him, and his weaknesses, for without this knowledge, he is not a Wizard at all."
You didn't really think that I just read books on physics, did you? ;)
Contributed by Katlyn Breene to Grimoire for the Apprentice Wizard (2004)...
A Wizard Should...
You didn't really think that I just read books on physics, did you? ;)
Contributed by Katlyn Breene to Grimoire for the Apprentice Wizard (2004)...
A Wizard Should...
- Be a constant student of life.
- See the Divine in Nature and Nature in the Divine.
- Not say a word and be clearly heard.
- Lead without force and teach without pride.
- Take the most mundane things and surrounding, sense their inner magick, and be able to open that window for others.
- Stare into the dark infinity of the night sky and feel it as an awesome source.
- Love the beauty of paradox and always be able to see the cosmic humor in the darkest times.
- Be a shapeshifter to blend in or be invisible if needed... and make those around feel safe, and heard.
- Maintain his calm center and clear mind when all around him is chaos.
- Open his inner eyes and really see.
- Say 'I don't know...' and realize that is great wisdom, that is okay.
- Have compassion for all beings, and know when to be a healer and when to be a witness.
- Know that the secrets of magick are bestowed upon the open-hearted.
- Speak to the Gods and know he is heard.
- Cast a sphere of protection and light.
- Make up his own mind, walk his own path, and never follow another blindly.
- Know the courage and power of nonviolence and the swift strength of a keen mind.
- Conjure a tale or myth that the moment requires to be understood. ;)
- Know the plants and creatures of the wild enough call them friends and allies.
- See the God and Goddess within all and everyone.
- Have a spirit that glows in the dark.
That's good advice regardless of how you feel about magick.
Wednesday, August 20, 2008
The Impossible Leap (Pt II)
"What I do is me. For this I came."
Well, I'm catching a break on rent next month, so for now there is coffee. :) (And apparently I have no shame about asking for money to continue this experiment in 'science as performance art'.)
Where were we?
Ah, teleportation. And this would probably be a good time to further explain why I'm skeptical about Observable Teleporation ever being achievable on human beings. Naturally, I have a story for this.
One night, many years ago, I was alone in a lab at work. Suddenly I became disoriented and slightly nauseated. The most accurate way to describe the feeling is that it was as though the entire universe had shifted and left me behind. Swearing up and down that I would never eat Swedish meatballs again, I was able to collect myself and make it through the rest of my shift. The next day I learned that my grandmother, who had been in a coma for several months, had died at the same time as I was contemplating the wrath of the Swedish meatballs.
One experience proves nothing, of course, but I subsequently had other experiences of a similar nature. They were enough to make me curious about what kind of fundamental connected-ness we might have to each other. Which brings us back to teleportation...
What would happen if a person were to be 'destroyed' in a manner consistent with Observable Teleporation, and then not 'recreated' until the classical signal (which tells what type of measurement to make of the entangled system) arrives and is put to use? What state, if any, would that person exist in? What would happen if the classical signal were never utilized and the teleported person were never 'recreated'? Would existence in the entangled 'information only' state (however temporary) represent a disturbance or disruption in our connected-ness, noticeable to 'sensitives' in a manner similar to what they notice upon the death of person?
Let's just say that I don't want to be among the first to test this idea...
Well, I'm catching a break on rent next month, so for now there is coffee. :) (And apparently I have no shame about asking for money to continue this experiment in 'science as performance art'.)
Where were we?
Ah, teleportation. And this would probably be a good time to further explain why I'm skeptical about Observable Teleporation ever being achievable on human beings. Naturally, I have a story for this.
One night, many years ago, I was alone in a lab at work. Suddenly I became disoriented and slightly nauseated. The most accurate way to describe the feeling is that it was as though the entire universe had shifted and left me behind. Swearing up and down that I would never eat Swedish meatballs again, I was able to collect myself and make it through the rest of my shift. The next day I learned that my grandmother, who had been in a coma for several months, had died at the same time as I was contemplating the wrath of the Swedish meatballs.
One experience proves nothing, of course, but I subsequently had other experiences of a similar nature. They were enough to make me curious about what kind of fundamental connected-ness we might have to each other. Which brings us back to teleportation...
What would happen if a person were to be 'destroyed' in a manner consistent with Observable Teleporation, and then not 'recreated' until the classical signal (which tells what type of measurement to make of the entangled system) arrives and is put to use? What state, if any, would that person exist in? What would happen if the classical signal were never utilized and the teleported person were never 'recreated'? Would existence in the entangled 'information only' state (however temporary) represent a disturbance or disruption in our connected-ness, noticeable to 'sensitives' in a manner similar to what they notice upon the death of person?
Let's just say that I don't want to be among the first to test this idea...
Tuesday, August 5, 2008
Relative Entropy
"Workin' on a mystery,
Goin' wherever it leads"
[ASIDE: This may come to naught, but I get something from forcing myself to try and explain what I'm thinking, especially if I am hung up on a particular idea. I'm also violating my unwritten 'one post a day' rule, but I'm trying to capture these thoughts while they are still semi-coherent. Bear with me...]
We'll pretend for the moment that I didn't just google the phrase 'relative entropy' and discover that it refers to something that I'm fairly sure I don't understand. :)
Today I had a moment of clarity (yes, 'clarity' is relative) while reading Teleportation:The Impossible Leap, by David Darling (2005). In the chapter called 'Dataverse', Darling gives a clear and coherent description of Shannon entropy, as well as a description of thermodynamic entropy, and he relates the two to each other. Somewhere in this description, I get sidetracked by the following line of thought...
Darling uses the analogy of a jar of black and white marbles. When all the white marbles are at the bottom of the jar and all the black marbles are at the top of the jar, the jar is in a state of low entropy. When the marbles appear to be randomly mixed, it has a larger value of entropy. So far I am board with this, until I start to wonder...
What happens if we use a jar of red and green marbles instead? And what happens if the person who is looking at the jar of marbles is color-blind? To that person, there is no discernible difference between the 'ordered' state of marbles (where all red are on the top and all green are on the bottom) and the 'chaotic' state of marbles (where red and green marbles are randomly mixed together). (If you want to nitpick about the red/green colorblind analogy, look here for additional examples of how the amount of information available changes depending on the tools one has for accessing it.) "Compared with low entropy states, high-entropy states contain very little information." At this point there is a demonstrable difference in the amount of information available, depending on the perceptual limitations of the person who is looking at the marbles.
"A highly chaotic state, which is far more likely to occur than an orderly one, corresponds to a large value of entropy." What defines 'chaos', as opposed to 'order'? There is 'order' if I am able to identify a pattern within the information. The ease with which I can identify the pattern(s) within any given set of information can vary, can change over time, and appears to be dependent on my existing knowledge structures. If I have a well-developed filter for processing a specific type of information, then that particular data set appears more 'ordered' to me than it does to someone who has no experience with that type of data.
Hmm... Time to cross-check our sources. ;) "Entropy is the number of different microstates that correspond to the same macrostate." I guess the egg illustration didn't make it into the online edition of this article, but the analogy was basically 'There are more ways for an egg to be broken than for it to be unbroken, therefore the state of 'broken-ness' has a higher entropy and the system will favor a transition from unbroken to broken over a transition from broken to unbroken.' I'm very tempted to point out that broken/unbroken is a completely arbitrary way to divide a set of perceptual experiences. It may be a highly logical way to classify eggs, because of the utility of the egg differs when it is broken as opposed to unbroken, but the classification is still a purely arbitrary cognitive tool. I have managed to bring this argument back to object classifications and boundaries, which are my pet hypotheses right now for how we will identify dynamics to explain classical physics in 5-dimensions. :) What I really need now is a good analogy to drive home this point... (thinking) (thinking)
Some things you just can't do without coffee.
So I'll end this post by transcribing some of the notes I jotted on a piece of paper. Perhaps in the morning, I'll see this argument in a different light. Or perhaps someday I'll be able to link the idea of relative entropy with the thermodynamics of neural information processing. This notion of relative entropy should be supported by corresponding differences in the energy expended in cognitive processing...
Transcribed from notes:
Goin' wherever it leads"
[ASIDE: This may come to naught, but I get something from forcing myself to try and explain what I'm thinking, especially if I am hung up on a particular idea. I'm also violating my unwritten 'one post a day' rule, but I'm trying to capture these thoughts while they are still semi-coherent. Bear with me...]
We'll pretend for the moment that I didn't just google the phrase 'relative entropy' and discover that it refers to something that I'm fairly sure I don't understand. :)
Today I had a moment of clarity (yes, 'clarity' is relative) while reading Teleportation:The Impossible Leap, by David Darling (2005). In the chapter called 'Dataverse', Darling gives a clear and coherent description of Shannon entropy, as well as a description of thermodynamic entropy, and he relates the two to each other. Somewhere in this description, I get sidetracked by the following line of thought...
Darling uses the analogy of a jar of black and white marbles. When all the white marbles are at the bottom of the jar and all the black marbles are at the top of the jar, the jar is in a state of low entropy. When the marbles appear to be randomly mixed, it has a larger value of entropy. So far I am board with this, until I start to wonder...
What happens if we use a jar of red and green marbles instead? And what happens if the person who is looking at the jar of marbles is color-blind? To that person, there is no discernible difference between the 'ordered' state of marbles (where all red are on the top and all green are on the bottom) and the 'chaotic' state of marbles (where red and green marbles are randomly mixed together). (If you want to nitpick about the red/green colorblind analogy, look here for additional examples of how the amount of information available changes depending on the tools one has for accessing it.) "Compared with low entropy states, high-entropy states contain very little information." At this point there is a demonstrable difference in the amount of information available, depending on the perceptual limitations of the person who is looking at the marbles.
"A highly chaotic state, which is far more likely to occur than an orderly one, corresponds to a large value of entropy." What defines 'chaos', as opposed to 'order'? There is 'order' if I am able to identify a pattern within the information. The ease with which I can identify the pattern(s) within any given set of information can vary, can change over time, and appears to be dependent on my existing knowledge structures. If I have a well-developed filter for processing a specific type of information, then that particular data set appears more 'ordered' to me than it does to someone who has no experience with that type of data.
Hmm... Time to cross-check our sources. ;) "Entropy is the number of different microstates that correspond to the same macrostate." I guess the egg illustration didn't make it into the online edition of this article, but the analogy was basically 'There are more ways for an egg to be broken than for it to be unbroken, therefore the state of 'broken-ness' has a higher entropy and the system will favor a transition from unbroken to broken over a transition from broken to unbroken.' I'm very tempted to point out that broken/unbroken is a completely arbitrary way to divide a set of perceptual experiences. It may be a highly logical way to classify eggs, because of the utility of the egg differs when it is broken as opposed to unbroken, but the classification is still a purely arbitrary cognitive tool. I have managed to bring this argument back to object classifications and boundaries, which are my pet hypotheses right now for how we will identify dynamics to explain classical physics in 5-dimensions. :) What I really need now is a good analogy to drive home this point... (thinking) (thinking)
Some things you just can't do without coffee.
So I'll end this post by transcribing some of the notes I jotted on a piece of paper. Perhaps in the morning, I'll see this argument in a different light. Or perhaps someday I'll be able to link the idea of relative entropy with the thermodynamics of neural information processing. This notion of relative entropy should be supported by corresponding differences in the energy expended in cognitive processing...
Transcribed from notes:
- Can entropy be defined by object relationships, classifications or categories?
- Do relationship(s) to existing knowledge determine whether a state is perceived to have 'low' or 'high' entropy?
- One's ability to extract of identify information is based on existing knowledge structures and paradigm recognition patterns.
- The same state can give different amounts of information depending on the predispositions or perspectives of the person accessing it. Does that change its entropy value?
- Is entropy relative? Is entropy a measure of mis/match to existing knowledge? Can entropy be mitigated or altered by using different sets of pattern classifications?
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