Do you know what information is? No worries if you don't. Clarity on the concept is apparently hard to come by. In a May cover story, New Scientist wondered, "What is information?" The answer: "a mystery bound up with thermodynamics" that "seems to play a part in everything from how machines work to how living creatures function." Plausible enough—genomes, immune systems, and brains all seem to process information.
Yet published the next week was an essay on Aeon by Robert Epstein, a senior research psychologist at the American Institute for Behavioral Research and Technology, explaining, "Your brain does not process information" (emphasis mine). "We are organisms, not computers. Get over it. Let's get on with the business of trying to understand ourselves, but without being encumbered by unnecessary intellectual baggage. The IP [information-processing] metaphor has had a half-century run, producing few, if any, insights along the way. The time has come to hit the DELETE key."
Has it, though? I'm not sure I want to "get over" my identity as an information processor just yet. Epstein's conclusion did provoke some unambivalent comments. Sergio Graziosi, for example, a molecular neurologist turned software engineer, felt,…
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