Interactions (2)

The mind-body problem is about how mind-stuff relates to body-stuff. Body-stuff is the stuff we all know about (tables, chairs, molecules, planets, billiart-balls), whereas mind-stuff describes the knowing itself: the thoughts, ideas, opinions, beliefs, desires, cravings and intentions that make up the mental realm.

The mind-body problem is essentially the question of how to make a thought out of a kilogram of brain matter. The question itself is already 'strange', imagine how the (ultimate and correct) answer would look like.

Now to turn to my previous discussion on interactions (here); the difference between interaction on the communicative level (between two active agents) and interaction on the physical level (between two physical systems), is not unlike the difference between mind and body.

When we say that two human beings 'interact', what we mean by the word interaction is a transmission of messages in, to take Fodor's term, the language of thought. Human beings do so by physically moving about their bodies (which is detected by the other's visual system) and emitting sound-waves (which is picked up by the nerve cells in our ears), but these physical changes are not crucial to the interaction that is taking place. In order to understand the interaction we have to look at all these events on a meaningful level, and the meaningful level, whenever human interaction is concerned, is on the "informational level". And with information it is meant: messages that are passed from one mental system to another.

When we say that two physical systems interact (for example, one nerve cell's nerve impuls ignites, via a chemical transmission system, another nerve cell that is connected to it), the meaningful level *is* the physical level. Physical levels (there are lot's of them, with their own translation problems between them) have a general description in terms of energy. I'm not that much of a phycisist, but as I understand it one of the laws of thermodynamics states that "things" (physical systems) over time generally get more and more disorderly. When a system has less order, it also contains less energy. The energy leaks out, and the system 'falls apart', so to speak. Any sand-castle will eventually become a flattend pile of sand again. We all turn to dust, someday. The disorderly-ness of a system is measured by its "entropy". Lot's of noise in a system means a high entropy. Lot's of rigidness/structure in a system means low entropy.

Now the funny thing is that although there is a huge theoretical gap between "people talking to one another" and "nerve cells talking to one another", there is a very straightforward way in which the concept of "information" is related to the concept of "entropy". Shannon equated information with uncertainty in this article, and since uncertainty can be - sort of - equated with entropy, information is entropy! Which seems paradoxical but that is because I'm being overly blunt here, see a discussion on this topic.

Now at first I thought this might be interesting because a theoretical closure between what they call thermodynamics and information theory via the concept of entropy might be, in effect, a solution to the mind body problem. Thermodynamics is about stuff, and information theory is about communication, about agents sending messages to one another (this is really the level at which Shannon speaks about it in the article and in his writings there is always a 'sender' and 'receiver' involved, how are not machines, but are considered to be sentient active agents)

However, I quickly found out that *within* entropy theory there is a lot of discussion about what the concept really means. For instance, it is only a matter of wordchoice that Shannon chose entropy to equal certain concept in his theory that he needed a name for. On the above website it is said:

"The story goes that Shannon didn't know what to call his measure so he asked von Neumann, who said `You should call it entropy ... [since] ... no one knows what entropy really is, so in a debate you will always have the advantage'" (see reference)

Still, all of this has to go into my thesis. If you want to know even more about it, read this book, by Ashby, one of the founders of cybernetics.

This last cybernetics link is also very interesting and funny with many anecdotical references. In it, it is described that Heinz von Foerster allegedly has said the following:

"FEEDBACK: An unpoetic inexpressive word that shrieks for replacement. Correct use of the word would refer to eating your own vomit. ".