This is a reprise of an old post: "Why Code is a Bad Analogy for the World".
Our nervous system and brain actually work in parallel. Information flows in all the time and is processed all the time. Our visual system works in parallel too, though our eyes seem to be structured to focus on specific things since the density of cells on our retina varies from most dense at the center to less dense at the periphery. Our language using brain works serially, however, and even formal languages, like computer languages have only cumbersome and stupid methodsd of representing parallelism and simultaneity.
Codes, i.e. formal languages, actually can't represent how the world stores information. Natural information always connects to and reflects the whole. For example, if a fallen leaf is sitting on a pond where a stream flows in so it spins and spins around a little circle, it is actually encoding information. For creatures living in the water, the leaf creates an alternating light/dark cycle as it passes around and around. For a human observer, the leaf traces a circle in the water current and makes it into a visible pattern that can get a name, but obviously the name is not the thing.
The natural information of mass, or moving water, or rotational motion is built into us at the bone level in nature's terms. If it is possible to make models of the world that match those notions and put them in a computer, then those concepts will be similarly irreducible to language terms for us as they are now.
No comments:
Post a Comment