Infocognition. Like Particles, but With More Drugs Needed
This week we look briefly at §4.6.16, The Principle of Infocognitive Monism. Summary first. This section seems to imply the CTMU reduces the substance of reality to transducer, or acceptor, information quanta. A transducer, briefly described in §4.7, is a tuple (S, Q, G, d, w) (notation adapted). S is a finite, non-empty input alphabet. Q is a finite, non-empty state set. G is a finite, nonempty output alphabet. d is a state transition function d:SxQ -> Q. The function d transforms the input to the transducer and the current state to the next state. w is an output function w:SxQ -> G transforming the current state and input into output. After the brief overview of transducers, Langan has a brief overview of acceptors. An acceptor is a tuple (S, Q, A, q0, d). S, Q, and d are the same as for transducers. A is a subset of Q and is the set of accepting states. An acceptor accepts an input x belonging to S* if d(q0, x) is in A.
Langan appears to prefer acceptors, but why? Well, infocognition is both the information and the information processing so there is no need for output. It suffices for the acceptor itself to remain. As a programmer my - very smol - brain constantly wants to write new concepts into software and that seems to present a problem: What are the elements of S, Q, A? What is q0? What are the strings x? These questions seem far less urgent if one accepts that infocognition is a fundamental substance, and these transducer/acceptor descriptions are just that, descriptions. If quanta of infocognition are the magic from which everything is built, then there is no need to try to construct their behavior from prior components. (Note: in the CTMU infocognition appears to be only close to the fundamental building block… telesis appears to be prior. More on that later. For now, infocognition = justifiable magic).
The argument for infocognition starts from the principle of linguistic reducibility. Langan states: “Where Language consists of information and information has linguistic structure, the Principle of Linguistic Reducibility implies that information is as fundamental as language.” Since the language of reality (SCSPL) must be self-processing, since there is nothing external to process it, so must the information of which it consists. Does it really? Could it not be that information is not self-processing but information processing? Meaning the information does not process itself but is instead processed by all the information in its surrounding neighborhood? This would avoid the troublesome self-reference that most mathematicians seem to find dubious. Either way, Langan says the recognition that the self-processing language must be composed of self-processing information.
Langan argues that information has structure, it could not be informative otherwise. Structure is attributive meaning it must follow the laws of logic. In short information must have enough self-processing capacity to maintain its own structure. In Langan’s words: “Because it necessarily incorporates attributive syntax, it has enough native self-processing capacity to maintain its intrinsic structure, which is precisely what it must do to qualify as “informational”.” Must it though? Could not that structure be entirely maintained by the other information in its local environment?
A couple objections to my objections. First, there’s probably some argument from duality that being processed by everything but the object itself, and an object being processed by itself, are equivalent. I can’t really show either yes or no on that speculation. Second, this is information we’re talking about. Pick an ‘information’ surrounded by other ‘informations’. Without that specific information, there is an unavoidable ambiguity introduced to the system that wasn’t there before, and that cannot be resolved by the other information since you’d be trying to resolve (for sake of argument) 10 bits of uncertainty with only 9 bits of information.
Anyway, through these arguments Langan arrives at a dual-aspect monic substance he calls infocognition. (He uses more arguments, but seriously, bro, explaining this in a way that’s neat and comprehensible is hard. Understanding it is at least as tough. And I’m sure I’m getting plenty wrong since I am not running the O.G. Galaxy Brain in my skull). The dual aspects correspond to transduction and being transduced - hence the above reference to transducers and acceptors.
Ugh…
