Azhir Mahmood  🚀 🤖 🧬 🧠 🪐

Now Tim, philosophers are literally paid to make problems out of non-problems by engaging in confusing language games... they're only doing their jobs, be nice.

There's a lot of subtle and useful philosophical work on representation that is worth a look.

A problem is construing this as a debate about "usage". It's not in the 1st instance. Was Shannon legislating usage when he defined "information"? He did serious formal work to tell us what information is. Once we accepted that, yes, usage is fixed, becomes technically useful.

Totally cool with formalising the word. Just don’t change it into something else (like causality), and don’t make definitions that make our lives harder (because they can’t be tested).

My question is whether "information" in some defined sense can do all the theoretical work needed in neuroscience, "representation" then being a synonymous term. Or, if not, what more is implied by using "representation"? That last task is philosophical, not wordsmithing.

I would agree that "information" and "representation" are largely synonymous. I don't think representation implies something above and beyond what we mean when we say "carries information about".

I was totally expecting to look at this thread and find a philosopher talking about thermostats. Give them time, I guess

People moved on to compasses for a while...