What is the Big Idea, Anyway?

In the previous note I write that Information is not what I thought it was.

Here is a clarification.

Maybe there is Information in the Universe, and the Laws of Nature, are the Laws of Information. My point is that before we get there, we have to understand how is it that we think?

I had this gut feeling for a long time, but could not pin point it, until I read the work of the two senior creators, Humberto Maturana, and Terrence Sejnowski. I am lucky enough to know Terry personally. Maturana lives in Chile ( too bad they lost today to Brazil 3-0 in the World Cup in South Africa), and I do not have the privilege to have met him.

My uneasiness came from the two meanings of Information. Claude Shannon was specifically asked about human communication since he worked for Bell Labs. Ludwig Bolzmann was not concerned about a dropped call in a cell phone! Those are the two meanings of Information: Human, and the rest.

Of course it is a long tradition of physics to posit that the Universe is one, and what applies to an apple, applies to the moon. Nevertheless we are talking about two distinct aspects of reality. In, and out, reality. Rather, the way the real object in our head constructs meaning. That meaning did not exist until human beings appeared on the face of the Earth. An electron does not need meaning to move around, and its magnetic moment is the result of a relationship of each electron and everything around it.

The new idea is: Each neuron interacts with other neurons and produces a system in dynamic equilibrium. Those neurons interact with the eyes and other sensing systems, and produces another hierarchy in dynamic equilibrium; and so on and so forth until we have a mind intertwined with the world outside. That part outside, for Homo sapiens, is much more integrated this way with the matter inside our cranium, than is the case with other primates.

There is never an Information already given that shapes our brain, like the burning of a DVD, it is an organic construction of reality, or rather of meaning of the interactions with what is outside the cranium.

The meaning allows humans to act for survival; taking into account these multiple layers of interacting systems.

What Sejnowski et al. have been doing is studying the anatomy of the nervous system with new instruments, and checking them through neural network models inspired by those measurements.

We do construct the actual connections that make our In-formation about the world outside. We do this with the help of our family and social group that guide us in this human made universe we call culture.