🚀 go-pugleaf

On 14 Feb 1996, Michael Weiss wrote:

> John Baez writes:
> 
>     I was only interested in building a person, not a
>     *particular* person
> 
> Now, if you could just define that a little more precisely...
> 
> You have an equivalence relation lurking in the background.  You want
> to know how much information is needed, and not supplied by the DNA,
> after modding out by this equivalence relation.


One place to start addressing the question of "Information per Organism" is 
the selection of the needed probability distributions.

Information theory (IT) presupposes a fixed (invariant?) probability 
distribution.  From you perspective, what are you interested in distributing?
What attributes of human beings do you select for analysis?  

Since each human being develops a conscious state from their experiences, 
you may wish to consider a second distribution for the accumulated  set of 
expereinces.  

Since the expereinces of individuals seems to change character as they 
move from one environment to another, you may wish to consider developing 
a third probability distribution which represents the varing ecosystems 
which influence the experiences of the individual.


The development of the probabilities for plugging into Shannon's IT formula 
may not be intractable, but does present a substantial challenge.  :-)

Methods to integrate the dynamic interactions between the three IT 
probability distributions may eventually be developed by mathematicians.
(Indeed, if I read some of the earlier postings on this newsgroup 
correctly, such methods are not completely intractable.   :-)  )

Jerry  LR Chandler

"As simple as possible, but not simpler"