Perception

A Computational Intuition On Perceiving Our Surroundings

Some weeks ago, I was attending my usual sets of Biology lectures during the morning hours. The course was in its inception phase, where we ( or at least I ) was introduced to Biological Macromolecules for the very first time. As the instructor dived into the last classification of macromolecules; namely Nucleic Acids, he made mention of the various nucleotides that make up the DNA double helix. Adenine, Guanine, Cytosine and Thymine; Stuff that sounds like every doctor’s go-to prescription drugs for a nasty cold. But here’s the interesting bit of it all, Every single cell of your body can read the ‘instructions‘ carved in your DNA using just the singular language of these four nucleotides. Broadly speaking, you knew how to read long before you ever knew how to read. It was further pointed out that all these instructions are coded into you using specific sequences of these nucleotides, twisting and turning into the various pages of information that makes you, you. The effect of interpretation leads me to the cause: that DNA is in-fact an information warehouse. It’s been storing information over eons of time, generation after generation just for you, waiting to be deciphered at the right time by the right cells.

Fast-forward to CSF111, another course in the same semester i.e., An Introduction To Computer Science with Computer Programming. As with any initiatory course on Computers, we started from the bottom at binary. The computer only understands the language of 1s and 0s so we use different sequences of these binary digits to represent information. (keyword being represent)
0000 is 0, 0001 is 1, 0010 is 2 and so on. Once again we’re storing and retrieving information based on various sequences of just two entities or two different states, so to speak. 1s and 0s are just paintings or ‘glyphs’ which we drew to express two different values. But again, if you notice the pattern, different arrangements of these two states just provided us with information itself, and information is important. The communication of information to and from objects is the very essence that makes up our entire universe. Be it planets interacting through gravity or atoms interacting through electrostatics, It’s all under the bottom line of transmission and reception of information.

Anyway, 0s and 1s provided us with distinct meaning. The only difference is with A,C,G,T we needed four base “alphabets” to convey the same and here we require only 0 and 1 to write our infinite array of meaning. We attach value to objects all the time. A paper with Franklin’s face on it will have value, whereas your common writing paper won’t carry even a tenth of the value as the Franklin bill. But this is quite obviously superficial, of course money ( being paper ) will only have the value which we attach to it and a bit ( being a glyph ) will carry the value we assign to it. What about everything else? Just take a moment and think about every single time you had to process information. Think about why you don’t look at a row of apple trees in an orchard and derive from it, the same information as a row of 1s (11111….) on a computer system. Why is it that when you were playing with lego blocks, even with your massive imagination, there was always only one apparent way or one ‘sequence‘ to make a toy car. Just a bunch of blocks in that specific arrangement provided information that equalled toy car. Neither would arranging blocks the same way give you different results every time nor would arranging the blocks differently give you the same result every time.

So what’s going on here? Why are we under the limitation that only a specific sequence or arrangement of data means anything to us, but others do not? Can we perceive information without any sequencing involved? Or is sequencing a necessary aspect of perceiving information? How is our DNA able to use a mere four building blocks for information flow across generations which essentially carry the information about life itself?  We never assigned these values, they came along with us into this world. So here it is: A dive into information theory.

“You never know if the music is beautiful or not, you only ever know if it’s right.”

Firstly, I believe that everyone’s entitled to have the fundamental question answered. Why does interpreting information matter? So what if it’s sequenced or not?
Well, deciphering information is so trivial to us that we do it in a near self-regulated level. It’s one of those minor details in your day to day life that’s extremely easy to overlook. We’ve been recognising patterns and adapting to our world since birth. This adaptation has lead to an automation whose process we are unconcerned with anymore. The real problem arises when you start getting it wrong. For example, the first thing in your field of view when you opened this article was a blue-tinted palm on the screen. What you may not have noticed was that the palm was not made up of five fingers. It was six fingers.

Another aspect of why it’s easy for information and details not to matter is because they are commercially “abstracted” from us. Abstraction is the process of hiding the background details and representing only the essential features of an object to the user. It’s like how driving a car requires absolutely no knowledge of the mechanism of an internal combustion engine. Abstraction is details hiding in plain sight. What should be of importance in our case is the very different approach of using abstraction to decipher complex information, just by dent of fact that we know it’s there.

THE INFORMATION THEORY:  A mathematical study of the coding of information in the form of sequences of symbols, impulses, etc. and of how rapidly such information can be transmitted, for example through computer circuits or telecommunications channels.