Event Description
Contemporary information theory distinguishes between “information transfer” and “information content.” While both notions have been successfully applied to the brain, they come with differing theoretical assumptions and allow insight into different processes. This talk draws from a digital philosophy of science, mixed-methods study of a corpus of over 1 million articles across life and cognitive sciences. The data allows me to show that “information transfer” captures the most straightforward understanding of neuronal interactions. However, this term introduces significant idealizing assumptions. These assumptions are lifted by the framework of “information content,” but at the cost of changing the explanatory and descriptive focus. Using examples from the corpus, this event shows how researchers navigate these constraints and how “information,” across these distinctions, plays analogous epistemic role: highlighting causal patterns in phenomena and motivating theory development. The functional level of description afforded by “information” offers an integrative way of thinking about neural structure and function.
Event Information
Free and open to the public; registration required.
Hosted by the Mortimer B. Zuckerman Mind Brain Behavior Institute at Columbia University.
