Entropy

IX. Science as Information-Processing.

IX. Science as Information-Processing.

Information theory introduced the image of system boundaries as implicitly projecting “input categories” upon reality, parsing it into “variables” with an associated space of possible outcomes. 

VII. Randomness, Probability, Compression and Redundancy

VII. Randomness, Probability, Compression and Redundancy

“Order” and “disorder”, we have seen, are observer-dependent categories of a dynamical system’s state space. What characterizes disordered states, relative to any observer, is that different disordered states do not differ in any meaningful way.

VI. Thermodynamic Entropy

VI. Thermodynamic Entropy

Shannon’s measure of information is actually known as “entropy”, a word better known from thermodynamics, whose famous second law states that, in a closed system, it always increases to a maximum

V. Basic Information Theory

V. Basic Information Theory

Most psychologists studying perception and cognition today argue that Gibson’s radio-metaphor is flawed because a brain, unlike a radio, identifies a “signal” not directly, but in a memory-dependent way.