Information Storage, Transmission, Operations On Multiple Scales

Data and his "brother" Lore

One of the most powerful teaching and learning tools is the thing that's "not there". Commander Data in Star Trek is a great example of that method of learning through stories. He's the man who's not human. His role in the story of TNG is to create a void that can never be filled even with repeated asking of: "what does it mean to be human?"

Computers and formal language systems serve a very similar role in improving understanding. In an effort to make simulacra of intelligence, they create similar voids that beg the questions of "what is intelligence and what is information?"

Formal language systems like computer programs are like an obsidian mirror reflection of natural systems of information storage and transmission. (Maybe they're derived from systems of representation in our brains which are apart from the primary information storage in our brain.) By studying the formal langauge system in natural information terms, and vice versa, it might be possible to come up with a third mode that fixes the deficiencies in formal language systems.

If we start with the premise that information and intelligence are omnipresent, then the woods on our property must have their own intelligence, but it's also extremely unlikely that we could understand that intelligence in its own or its full terms. That said, there are probably some aspects of intelligence that are universal and that can be aped with formal language models.

One of the big problems we have before we can even get started on such a model is to understand the time (really inverse time: frequency) and spatial scale that something like a woods stores information so you can represent it with a symbolic version of the same.