http://nicoletedesco.wordpress.com/2011/07/07/cognitive-entropy-and-cognitive-informatics/

- Lots of stuff isn’t reversible, stuff more fundamental than behavior, right? Deterministic video games (by definition computable?) can’t really be run backwards from save points, thus you have journaling saves (which runs a game forward) or waypoint saves. So does “computable” = “reversible”?
- Induction is very limited in what it can do, formally anyhow, as you note. Deduction is much more powerful.
- Superstitions are wildly advantageous and I think you underestimate their importance in learning and survival, while you do clearly recognize the problems they cause. We humans are obsessive pattern finders and false positives are rarely as harmful as missing a pattern that kills you or causes you to lose big money. Again, as you note, finding a pattern (superstition) is magnitudes easier than divesting (paring) yourself of that false pattern.

(Sorry if this driveby is just incoherent rambling…but you did get me thinking, so thanks!)

Update here: http://nicoletedesco.wordpress.com/2011/07/04/cataloging-cognitive-phenomena-using-reversibility-criteria/

I am struggling with this pet hypothesis of mine. An informational entropy analysis might be useful, but it may be nothing more than a loose metaphor. I don’t want to be fooled by confirmation bias and all that, so I am trying hard to keep a more objective frame of mind.

I am going to read some texts in behavioral economics next and see what I come up with.

At every die, there is a fraction of copper that gets scraped / sticks to the die surfaces / gets lost. At the end of the draw, slightly less mass exits as wire than came in as ingot. The “lost” mass has of course been conserved – somewhere in the wire plant – and if it were doped with radioactive trackers, could almost entirely be located.

I agree that information loss is fundamental to cognition. There’s research showing that we learn by deleting neuronal connections, similar to the way an old school punch card works. There’s an informational entropy theory of gravity … IT may end up being the grand theory of how thigns work.