Thought and Information

The fact that we communicate using information is also not a logically sufficient basis to assume that our brains use information as their internal neural basis for the representation of thought. People must communicate with each other using information with fixed encodings to establish a shared basis for understanding via communication using a common alphabet and language. However, the neurons in our brain do not communicate directly with neurons in other people’s brains. Our neurons do not communicate with anything other than the other neurons inside their own nervous system. The nervous system is a closed representational system. Neurons have no need to establish or maintain a public shared basis for the internal communication of information. They are free to use their own private language and their own private encoding. In fact, by removing the fixed encoding constraints required for external communication, neurons can vary their encoding as a function of that which they represent to minimize code length and storage space. They can use a relative relational encoding unique to the current state of knowledge stored in each individual’s brain. They can use a representation that is direct and indirect, instead of one that is only indirect. In fact, neurons must use a representation that is both direct and indirect. Without a basis in direct representation, there is no basis for the first person direct representation and understanding of meaning. Meaning cannot be grounded indirectly. Neurons have physical existence. Existence is a direct representation. Our neurons operate from the first person direct perspective of existence, but because they represent and implement the ontology of abstraction, they also allow us to represent things indirectly, and to communicate indirectly using information. Neurons convert the indirect external representation of information into the direct representation of thought for internal processing. They convert the internal direct representation of thought back into the indirect representation of information for external communication. While this conversion may seem complex or difficult when viewed from the perspective of information, it is a simple matter for the representation of thought[1].

The brains internal knowledge representation operates much faster and much more efficiently when we do not make ourselves think in terms of information. I would like you to try a quick little experiment. Look out your window. See how fast you can recognize all the objects, all their relationships, all the textures, all the colors and understand what you are seeing? Now try to describe the same scene in words and see how many words it takes to describe it to the same level of detail you could perceive, recognize and understand in less than a second. Now give that description to somebody else and see how long it takes him or her to understand the contents of the scene. See how much information was lost in the conversion to information. Now try to describe the same scene using mathematical equations. See how long it takes somebody to understand that, see how much could not be represented using mathematics, and see how much information was lost in the process. That will give you a good feel for the relative efficiency of the brains internal knowledge representation vs. the representation of information. The brain uses the same knowledge representation and computational model for seeing and understanding that scene out your window as it does to think and reason using symbolic information. The difference in efficiency is almost entirely due to the inefficiency of the representation of symbolic information. When we try to represent and understand the universe in terms of symbolic information, we force our brain to continuously translate back and forth between the indirect representation of information and the brains direct native representation it uses internally to reason and think. That slows the brains native thought process tremendously. It also loses just as much information as the difference between looking out your window and understanding the scene in less than a second vs. trying to describe the scene in words or equations and understand it. Humans have a huge untapped potential to increase the speed and depth of comprehension of abstract knowledge and increase intelligence. To unlock this potential, we need to learn the brains’ native representation of thought and teach ourselves to use it directly. Until we do that, we will continue degrading our innate mental capacity by forcing our brain to think indirectly in terms of what for it is a terribly inefficient, complex, symbolic, foreign representation of information.

[1] A paper that describes this transformation in detail is in preparation.