Shannon information and integrated information: message and meaning

Fuente: arXiv
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Hauptverfasser: Zaeemzadeh, Alireza, Tononi, Giulio
Format: Preprint
Veröffentlicht: 2024
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author Zaeemzadeh, Alireza
Tononi, Giulio
author_facet Zaeemzadeh, Alireza
Tononi, Giulio
contents Information theory, introduced by Shannon, has been extremely successful and influential as a mathematical theory of communication. Shannon's notion of information does not consider the meaning of the messages being communicated but only their probability. Even so, computational approaches regularly appeal to "information processing" to study how meaning is encoded and decoded in natural and artificial systems. Here, we contrast Shannon information theory with integrated information theory (IIT), which was developed to account for the presence and properties of consciousness. IIT considers meaning as integrated information and characterizes it as a structure, rather than as a message or code. In principle, IIT's axioms and postulates allow one to "unfold" a cause-effect structure from a substrate in a state, a structure that fully defines the intrinsic meaning of an experience and its contents. It follows that, for the communication of meaning, the cause-effect structures of sender and receiver must be similar.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2412_10626
institution arXiv
publishDate 2024
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Shannon information and integrated information: message and meaning
Zaeemzadeh, Alireza
Tononi, Giulio
Neurons and Cognition
Information Theory
Information theory, introduced by Shannon, has been extremely successful and influential as a mathematical theory of communication. Shannon's notion of information does not consider the meaning of the messages being communicated but only their probability. Even so, computational approaches regularly appeal to "information processing" to study how meaning is encoded and decoded in natural and artificial systems. Here, we contrast Shannon information theory with integrated information theory (IIT), which was developed to account for the presence and properties of consciousness. IIT considers meaning as integrated information and characterizes it as a structure, rather than as a message or code. In principle, IIT's axioms and postulates allow one to "unfold" a cause-effect structure from a substrate in a state, a structure that fully defines the intrinsic meaning of an experience and its contents. It follows that, for the communication of meaning, the cause-effect structures of sender and receiver must be similar.
title Shannon information and integrated information: message and meaning
topic Neurons and Cognition
Information Theory
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2412.10626