Path: utzoo!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!cs.utexas.edu!samsung!munnari.oz.au!comp.vuw.ac.nz!massey!ARaman From: ARaman@massey.ac.nz (A.V. Raman) Newsgroups: comp.ai Subject: Re: Entropy and the human brain Message-ID: <538@massey.ac.nz> Date: 6 Feb 90 20:17:01 GMT References: <523@massey.ac.nz> <940@watserv1.waterloo.edu> Reply-To: ARaman@massey.ac.nz (A.V. Raman) Organization: Massey University, Palmerston North, New Zealand Lines: 22 In article hwajin@ganges.wrs.com (Hwa Jin Bae) writes: >It's also not clear what he means by "entropy" here as he doesn't clarify >what he considers "entropy" or "negative-entropy". Claude Shannon was >knowned to have said that he was urged to use the word "entropy" in his >information theory by Von Neuman who asserted that he should use it because >no one really knows what it means. By negative entropy, here, I meant the situation where every event in the universe, started reversing. This includes events in the sub-atomic scale as well as the macro-cosmic scale. Perhaps, as you say, the word `entropy' is a misfit here; but the idea was to convey the question that if time started reversing, would the human mind be capable of finding that out. Since what we think at any instant is determined by the structure of the brain at that instant, when time starts reversing suddenly, we would still think exactly what we thought during the period of `positive entropy' when we had that brain structure. As a result of which, we may never know whether `entropy' in the Universe is actually increasing or decreasing, only that our brains are oriented in the direction of `positive entropy'. &/..