An interesting theory of consciousness that has popped up rescently is the information integration theory. It is actually not a theory explaining consciousness per se, but rather in which situations one might expect to see consciousness arise. What is great about this theory, is that it manages to neatly fall into existing research on the matter. The way I have understood it, is that the thalamus, which sits in the scenter of the brain, integrates the processed information from the corti into a well formed impression. And yes, please don't take my word for the brain stuff if you want to tell this on. Even if I am basically right, it's too simplified to be correct.
The information integration theory states that how conscious we are is a function of the number of states possible together with hour ability to integrate these impressions. A simple example is: Imagine that you have a few crayons and a sheet of paper. If you had only one crayon, red, the number of different drawings that could make would be more limited than if you had both red and green. Especially since this information has to make sense. If something makes sense, it means it has already been integrated, so we're kind of doing both parts of the theory at once here, mkay? So for each crayon added, the number of different sensible drawings you can make increases. The crayon example can be compared to our eyes and brain. Our eyes and our brain together can make billions of different combinations of images, and then integrate them into a sensible picture.
There is a point to be made when it comes to the internet. From the last post I realized how easy it is to tranfer concepts from two different information systems onto one another. Information is basically what the net is filled with, and the sorting of material has become a crucial part of intelligent websurfing. Some of our most important internet services are merely compilation services for different kinds of information. News sites are compiling important real world events. Metacritic compiles movie reviews into usable information. Deviantart is a nexus for amateur and professional creative output. Our success on the web is dependent on the ability of the web to contract at some places and give us the short- version for sorting reasons. And while our own sorting ability is important, it's not nearly has important as everybodies sorting ability put together. People are the sorting mechanism of the metainformation. Never forget that. Never forget to look for the mechanisms behind thing. In the case of the net, it is the millions of contributions of laypeople.
There are a few intersting views to superinpose on the previous text and information in general. Above I'm talking about shape - about nexi. But are there other ways and shapes we could use to understand the information on the web? Certainly. Metainformation can be seen as a smaller, more compact version of it's referent. In that case one can say that the metainformation is an abstraction of the content below. The shape we are looking for is a hierarchical one. For some simple services such as metacritic, this certainly seems to be true. We know that the metacritic score is based on an algorithm that calculates the result from many sources. But in general I find this "shape" very hard to believe in. To see why let us have a quick look at agrippas trilemma.
The trilemma was originally a proof that no information is certain. There are three kinds of arguments. The circular one, i.e, God is good because the bible says so, and the bible is true because God says it is. Then there is the regression arguemnt; every fact rests upon the foundations of another fact and so on. (I call this the why- why- why, chain). And then there is the axiomatical argument, in which all facts are concepts working together.
The problem of the hierarchical shape when it comes to information integration is that it rests on the foundation that there is a linear tracable expanding regression, where presumably at some point we will get to the roots of it. But this presumption is not nessesarily true. There may be one or more circular roots baked into the shape of the tree of knowledge. Concepts may be used multiple times, dependencies across generations may be there.
In the brain this would be the color red being used to refer to both blood, ocre and tomatoes and connections like this. On the web it might be a houdreds of different news sites use reuters, which is in turn a compilation of real world attitued to events, which are in turn shaped by those very same news outlets. What effects our impressions, wether they are delivered to us in our consciousness or on our news- outlets, it is hard to tell their origin.
Just as in our brain, on the net truth becomes floating and subjective. And also the abstracted information and extrapolatied information has different values to us. Just as we think about something twice before we do an action with grave moral implications, we should use the net as an external memory, and duck in and out of nexi, up and down the hierarcical chain to really see if a circular arguemnt is hiding there, or if something is just plain wrong.
Update:
This article also has connections to other things I have written.
- A few words on how we interact with the world around us in a social sense.
- An argument for searching seeking the foundations of our thought, a hierarchical model.
