Category: Cybernetics

  • Kinds of Information

    Kinds of Information

    There is a well developed physical theory of information that equates information with microstates — the position and momentum of all the particles in a system. The amount of information needed to fully describe a system varies. The more ordered the system, the less information is required. The amount of information required turns out to…

  • Causal Dualism

    Causal Dualism

    Cars stream through an intersection. A traffic light turns red. The cars approaching the intersection stop. Clearly the red traffic light caused the cars to stop. Not directly; red light can’t in and of itself stop a car the way, say, a boulder can. The red light causes the cars to stop by communicating information…

  • What Does A Photon Know?

    Imagine that you are transported to a completely dark and silent place.  You have no idea where you are.  A single photon with a wavelength of 7,000 angstroms — a red photon — reaches your eye, and you see it. (Recent research shows that the human eye can in fact see a single photon under the…

  • Knowledge and Moral Realism

    In an essay entitled Causation of Beliefs, my philosopher friend Rick Allen approaches the question of moral realism by way of causal stories: What is the relationship between: (1)  Why did the man rescue the downing child? and (2)  Why did the man say “The cup is on the table.”? Both questions lend themselves to…

  • Cybernetic Convergence

    One of the properties of cybernetic systems is that they lead to the convergence of world lines. (See the preceding post for an explanation of world lines and what it means to converge.) Consider a thermostat set at 20 degrees Celsius.  Assume the system is in proper working order. If each possible state of the…

  • The Physical Power of Logic, part 2

    In the previous post I posed a question: does logic have physical power with universal reach?  I explored the question by comparing logic to two other abstract systems with physical manifestations, one parochial and one universal: language and mathematics.  The result was inconclusive, due to the impossibility of proving a logical principle by using that…

  • A Critical Revision: State, Not Action

    I’ve come to the conclusion that there is a problem with the cybernetic formula as I have presented it up until now. The problem is not with the formula itself, but in the definition of one of its terms.  Here is the formula (terms rearranged slightly, which is inconsequential to the logic): ε(p) & ε(m)…

  • Life, Mind and Engineering

    The general view among materialists, physicalists and scientific realists has been that, while physics does ultimately explain everything, the physical explanations get exceedingly messy, sloppy and effectively incomprehensible once you get to life sciences, mind sciences and beyond. Life and mind may reduce to the dynamics of molecules, but that is not at all the…

  • Knowing the Future

    For the last several weeks I’ve been working on something that started as a post, grew steadily into an essay and is now threatening to approach a monograph level of voluminosity. The paper describes a cybernetic model of mental causation which elides the whole problem by shifting it to pure physics and the multiverse —…

  • A Cybernetic Theory of Representation

    When it comes to mental representation, I think the teleosemanticists are largely right, except that they are overfocused on biology and evolution rather than the more general underlying principles that I believe are in play. Teleosemantics is a theory of representation that says that mental representations reference the external world via their purpose, not their…