Giulio Tononi - What is Information?

Information is a common word but has technical meanings so important that our entire world depends on them. What are the kinds of information? How about the scientific definitions of information? How does information figure in the fabric of the world?

[eddieking]

Am I the only one who thinks Tononi looks like a Bond villain?🤔

[golemtheory]

Information as a concept is NOT helpful

[darrelllatham]

The reality of his theory is information is intertwined with the very fabric of a system....yes. Some will say this seems a bit like stating the obvious & developing a theory around that common truth. I do not. It seems as if consciousness is as he says, geometric and can be described with numbers & expressed in known or yet-to-be discovered mathematical operations. At the quantum level, we see that shape is quite important & it can be described in such math terms, these are the very elemental (sorry pun) foundation of matter and thus reality. I find this both interesting as well as intriguing.

[Pheer]

He reminds me of Michael Fassbender playing Steve Jobs

[curlykipper]

Isn't trying to understanding the mind or consciousness a bit like the snake consuming itself?

[havenbastion]

Everything can be described mathematically to the extent it can be quantified, that doesn't mean everything IS math.

[uremove]

I love Integrated Information Theory, as a brave attempt to measure consciousness (as Phi) and model it in terms of logic gates and information integration. However, it leaves unanswered the fundamental ‘Hard Problem’ of how a multi-dimensional topology in information space is also eg. the smell of a rose, or the blue of the sky. Until there are bridging laws to explain how one maps onto the other, we haven’t really solved the mystery of consciousness.

[weirdsciencetv]

I think Tononi is on the right track. Basically information is useless and meaningless without the system that acts on it. It’s like opcodes without the CPU. The cpu and the information together forms the cause-effect relationships that actually does something. With brains, the information and processing is tightly integrated.

[davidlongshanks]

Mathematics is merely the language with which we interpret what 'exists', whether in consciousness or manifest as the implicate order [properties] AND extrinsic physical attributes. It is an abstraction and as such, surely has only explanatory power, NOT creative power

[suncat]

OK, what's the geometry or mathematical structure of my EXPERIENCE of the color green? It's impossible to describe my EXPERIENCE of the color green with any shape or number. THAT is the so-called hard problem of consciousness.

[andrewburzynski]

Mathematics describes the universe. Consciousness predates the universe. You poor atheist. One day you learn... in the end

[علي-شثب]

*This field is not for scientists, it's for prophets and holy people*

[havenbastion]

Sounds like he just described a feedback loop. Yes, consciousness is a feedback loop in our theory of mind. The interesting question is anthropological; how did that come about?

[ScientificReview]

ITT says consciousness is the learned memory, and that's not true at all. How such a theory to be remarkable?

[benbarkerdreaming]

If you look at the eye as an example of conscious behaviour, it was developed to absorb information through light where at singularity it's quantified by a conscious entity ....
Black holes seem to me to be the first eyes of the universe taking in all the information that enters it and quantified at a singularity where a conscious entity uses the information...
If all things are conscious and everything is conscious energy and we are a conscious entity at this level .. then that would infere that the blackhole may well be an eye for a larger consciousness

[Paulus_Brent]

Information without consciousness is meaningless. It is just a set of differences.

[CeurComplex]

What constrains the system is part of the system. It's part of the definition of what it can and can not do. So this reasoning is circular: The system defines the system. Everyone who has ever drawn a system map as well knows that there is a choice as what to add to this map, and this choice is a qualitative judgment, not a clear yes or no. I guess practical "qualitatice" problems will arise from questiobs like: if a neuron answers only 1 perecent of the time to the rest of the system should it still be counted as part of the system? If it answers only 1000 of a time? And so on.

[AfsanaAmerica]

Consciousness grows, evolves, and transcends. A person's subjective conscious experience becomes more intense and it has an effect in reality and perception.

[xspotbox]

So reality have a shape and mathematics can describe geometry, nothing magical about it.
No matter how i try, i can't force myself to visualize a perfect circle, a straight line and an infinetelly small dot, just can't. It is not possible to stuck small juggling ball in a curved space, and circle is a same problem, but on steroids. Worst is infinite dot. Where is it? How do we know is really there? Forget about it, it's nothing, we will never be able to calculate everything there is, or is not. Maybe we don't need to, good approxiamations are enough for solving most hard problems, like how much atoms are in our galaxy and how a single photon contribute to charge in darkness of our minds.

[tajzikria]

Godel's Incompleteness theorems disproves that mathematics can be complete and consistent.