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What Kind of Information is Brain Information?

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Abstract

Neural systems process information. This platitude contains an interesting ambiguity between multiple senses of the term “information.” According to a popular thought, the ambiguity is best resolved by reserving semantic concepts of information for the explication of neural activity at a high level of organization, and quantitative concepts of information for the explication of neural activity at a low level of organization. This article articulates the justification behind this view, and concludes that it is an oversimplification. An analysis of the meaning of claims about Shannon information rates in the spiking activity of neurons is then developed. On the basis of that analysis, it is shown that quantitative conceptions of information are more intertwined with semantic concepts than they seem to be, and, partially for that reason, are also more philosophically interesting.

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Notes

  1. Versions of this idea are supported, for example, in Skyrms (2010), Harms (2006), Godfrey-Smith and Martínez (2013), and Calcott and Griffiths (2017).

  2. For a discussion of this issue, see Chapter 8 of Dennett (2017).

  3. Notice that this strategy entails, but is not entailed by, the necessary condition for the attribution of semantic properties mentioned above. This places Dennett’s approach to semantic information within the naturalistic tradition.

  4. But see Rathkopf (2017) for a recent exception.

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  1. Iona College, 715 North Avenue, New Rochelle, NY, 10801, USA

    Charles Rathkopf

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  1. Charles Rathkopf
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Correspondence to Charles Rathkopf.

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Rathkopf, C. What Kind of Information is Brain Information?. Topoi 39, 95–102 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11245-017-9512-6

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11245-017-9512-6

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