[Self][Choe] The information theory of individuality

Dec 25, 2020

An interesting paper that talks about individuality (self), based on an information theoretical argument. The approach is based on a process philosophical framework (according to the authors). The main idea is that the measure of individuality (in an organism) is how much information it transmitted from the past to the future in the organism’s system (mutual information between previous and next system state I(S_t+1; S_t). “If the information transmitted forward in time is close to maximal, we take that as evidence for individuality.” They also talk about nested individuality, colonial individuality (as in an ant colony), and environmentally determined individuality (this concept is a bit hard to grasp). https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s12064-020-00313-7 This is somewhat related to my own work on internal brain state predictability and consciousness, which appeared in the International Journal of Machine Consciousness: http://faculty.cs.tamu.edu/choe/ftp/publications/choe-ijmc12-preprint.pdf

https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s12064-020-00313-7

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