Real World Information Processing

As libraries have moved from paper card catalogs to electronic, some have decried the loss of the physical artifacts that cards in a card catalog represented (Baker, for example). If information is something separate from reality, why not just convert everything from physical form to its essential symbology and be done with it? The answer may go deeper than just sentimentality. Our own on-board information processing system, which is our entire nervous system, not just our brain, relies on external cues from more than just the symbol-processing that occurs when we read.

From my own experience, language seems to allow us to pull, from our inventory of prior experiences, memories of things. Even abstract concepts like "the future" seem to bring to mind a more primal memory of how I felt when I anticipated something (whether good or bad). So, all these language symbols we use may just be ways for us to play games with our deeper physical and emotional memories, in ways that are fairly fast and seemingly natural.

There is evidence that reading itself is essentially an auditory process, that through time the auditory component can be skipped as new neural paths open up. If this is true (and it seems reasonable to me) then the pure, abstract symbols of language boil down to a proxy for spoken language, which is a proxy for memory retrieval, which is a proxy for experience in the moment.

Our bodies process a lot more information than symbols alone:

• Peripheral nervous system stuff, like our unconscious breathing and heart beating and glands.
• Our internal emotional state, including whether we are calm, alarmed, angry, etc.
• Our internal energy state, including whether we are tired, alert, full, hungry, strong, weak, etc.
• Sensory information, including the five senses (vision, skin sensation, auditory, smell, taste) plus kinesthetic body positioning sensations.  Note that you can experience all of these simultaneously, of course, and the unique simultaneous external sensations become a unique piece of information to your nervous system.
• Internal memory associations, such as "oh, that reminds me of..."
• Internal anticipatory information, such as "what we expect will happen next"
• Internal predispositions to receiving information, such as someone combing a beach for shells more easily seeing shells than someone who is combing a beach for rocks to skip, who will notice the flat rocks instead.
• Current state goals and personal priorities
• Beliefs, which are a category of their own because these beliefs affect our reactions to other information

Now, take your card catalog, the old one with the physical cards. Pull out the hand-typed old card with the frayed edges, the one that is so worn that it almost feels like it's cloth, and look at it. It has smudges from people's hands. If it refers to a children's book, it might have some red sticky bits on it. If it's an adult book, you might catch a whiff of cologne or perfume. It might have some added handwriting.

Even without the sentimentality of the old ways of doing things, think about this from an informational point of view, especially taking into account how your body really is set up to gather information. The physical artifact just simply has more information than just a few symbols on a page.

We also always get our reality fully in context, which is something that pure data in a computer cannot give us. Imagine again pulling a card from the catalog. This time, it's a relatively fresh, new card. The typing on the card looks like it came from a laser printer. We take this physical artifact in the context of the rest of this card catalog and we know that: either this is a new book in this library, or it is a book whose old card was lost or replaced for some reason.

An information system that reflects reality would account for the ways we really move through the world and the ways that reality really provides information to us.

© Copyright 2005 Steve Land. Last update: 4/21/2005; 8:22:07 AM.