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Informavore
The term informavore (also spelled informivore) characterizes an organism that consumes information. It is meant to be a description of human behavior in modern information society, in comparison to omnivore, as a description of humans consuming food. George A. Miller coined the term in 1983 as an analogy to how organisms survive by consuming negative entropy (as suggested by Erwin Schrödinger). Miller states, "Just as the body survives by ingesting negative entropy, so the mind survives by ingesting information. In a very general sense, ''all higher organisms are informavores''." An early use of the term was in a newspaper article by Jonathan Chevreau where he quotes a speech made by Zenon Pylyshyn. Soon after, the term appeared in the introduction of Pylyshyn's seminal book on Cognitive Science, ''Computation and Cognition''. More recently the term has been popularized by philosopher Daniel Dennett in his book ''Kinds of Minds'' and by cognitive scientist Steven Pinker ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Information
Information is an abstract concept that refers to that which has the power to inform. At the most fundamental level information pertains to the interpretation of that which may be sensed. Any natural process that is not completely random, and any observable pattern in any medium can be said to convey some amount of information. Whereas digital signals and other data use discrete signs to convey information, other phenomena and artifacts such as analog signals, poems, pictures, music or other sounds, and currents convey information in a more continuous form. Information is not knowledge itself, but the meaning that may be derived from a representation through interpretation. Information is often processed iteratively: Data available at one step are processed into information to be interpreted and processed at the next step. For example, in written text each symbol or letter conveys information relevant to the word it is part of, each word conveys information rele ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Omnivore
An omnivore () is an animal that has the ability to eat and survive on both plant and animal matter. Obtaining energy and nutrients from plant and animal matter, omnivores digest carbohydrates, protein, fat, and fiber, and metabolize the nutrients and energy of the sources absorbed. Often, they have the ability to incorporate food sources such as algae, fungi, and bacteria into their diet. Omnivores come from diverse backgrounds that often independently evolved sophisticated consumption capabilities. For instance, dogs evolved from primarily carnivorous organisms ( Carnivora) while pigs evolved from primarily herbivorous organisms (Artiodactyla). Despite this, physical characteristics such as tooth morphology may be reliable indicators of diet in mammals, with such morphological adaptation having been observed in bears. The variety of different animals that are classified as omnivores can be placed into further sub-categories depending on their feeding behaviors. Frugivor ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
George Armitage Miller
George Armitage Miller (February 3, 1920 – July 22, 2012) was an American psychologist who was one of the founders of cognitive psychology, and more broadly, of cognitive science. He also contributed to the birth of psycholinguistics. Miller wrote several books and directed the development of WordNet, an online word-linkage database usable by computer programs. He authored the paper, "The Magical Number Seven, Plus or Minus Two," in which he observed that many different experimental findings considered together reveal the presence of an average limit of seven for human short-term memory capacity. This paper is frequently cited by psychologists and in the wider culture. Miller won numerous awards, including the National Medal of Science. Miller began his career when the reigning theory in psychology was behaviorism, which eschewed the study of mental processes and focused on observable behavior. Rejecting this approach, Miller devised experimental techniques and mathematical ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Entropy
Entropy is a scientific concept, as well as a measurable physical property, that is most commonly associated with a state of disorder, randomness, or uncertainty. The term and the concept are used in diverse fields, from classical thermodynamics, where it was first recognized, to the microscopic description of nature in statistical physics, and to the principles of information theory. It has found far-ranging applications in chemistry and physics, in biological systems and their relation to life, in cosmology, economics, sociology, weather science, climate change, and information systems including the transmission of information in telecommunication. The thermodynamic concept was referred to by Scottish scientist and engineer William Rankine in 1850 with the names ''thermodynamic function'' and ''heat-potential''. In 1865, German physicist Rudolf Clausius, one of the leading founders of the field of thermodynamics, defined it as the quotient of an infinitesimal amount of hea ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Erwin Schrödinger
Erwin Rudolf Josef Alexander Schrödinger (, ; ; 12 August 1887 – 4 January 1961), sometimes written as or , was a Nobel Prize-winning Austrian physicist with Irish citizenship who developed a number of fundamental results in quantum theory: the Schrödinger equation provides a way to calculate the wave function of a system and how it changes dynamically in time. In addition, he wrote many works on various aspects of physics: statistical mechanics and thermodynamics, physics of dielectrics, colour theory, electrodynamics, general relativity, and cosmology, and he made several attempts to construct a unified field theory. In his book ''What Is Life?'' Schrödinger addressed the problems of genetics, looking at the phenomenon of life from the point of view of physics. He also paid great attention to the philosophical aspects of science, ancient, and oriental philosophical concepts, ethics, and religion. He also wrote on philosophy and theoretical biology. In popular culture, ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Zenon Pylyshyn
Zenon Walter Pylyshyn (; 25 August 1937–6 December 2022) was a Canadian cognitive scientist and philosopher. He was a Canada Council Senior Fellow from 1963 to 1964. Pylyshyn's research generally involved the theoretical analysis of the nature of the human cognitive systems behind perception, imagination, and reasoning. He also continued to develop his visual indexing theory (sometimes called the FINST theory) which hypothesizes a preconceptual mechanism responsible for individuating, tracking, and directly (or demonstratively) referring to the visual properties encoded by cognitive processes. Early life and education Pylyshyn was born in Montreal, Quebec, Canada. He obtained a degree in Engineering Physics (BEng 1959) from McGill University and in control systems (MSc 1960) and experimental psychology (PhD 1963), both from the Regina Campus, University of Saskatchewan. His dissertation was on the application of information theory to studies of human short-term memory. Ca ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Daniel Dennett
Daniel Clement Dennett III (born March 28, 1942) is an American philosopher, writer, and cognitive scientist whose research centers on the philosophy of mind, philosophy of science, and philosophy of biology, particularly as those fields relate to evolutionary biology and cognitive science. , he is the co-director of the Center for Cognitive Studies and the Austin B. Fletcher Professor of Philosophy at Tufts University in Massachusetts. Dennett is a member of the editorial board for ''The Rutherford Journal'' and a co-founder of The Clergy Project. A vocal atheist and secularist, Dennett is referred to as one of the "Four Horsemen of New Atheism", along with Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris, and the late Christopher Hitchens. Early life, education, and career Daniel Clement Dennett III was born on March 28, 1942, in Boston, Massachusetts, the son of Ruth Marjorie (née Leck; 1903–1971) and Daniel Clement Dennett Jr. (1910–1947). Dennett spent part of his childhood in Le ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Steven Pinker
Steven Arthur Pinker (born September 18, 1954) is a Canadian-American cognitive psychologist, psycholinguist, popular science author, and public intellectual. He is an advocate of evolutionary psychology and the computational theory of mind. Pinker is the Johnstone Family Professor of Psychology at Harvard University, and his academic specializations are visual cognition and developmental linguistics. His experimental subjects include mental imagery, shape recognition, visual attention, children's language development, regular and irregular phenomena in language, the neural bases of words and grammar, as well as the psychology of cooperation and communication, including euphemism, innuendo, emotional expression, and common knowledge. He has written two technical books that proposed a general theory of language acquisition and applied it to children's learning of verbs. In particular, his work with Alan Prince published in 1989 critiqued the connectionist model of how children ac ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Information Age
The Information Age (also known as the Computer Age, Digital Age, Silicon Age, or New Media Age) is a historical period that began in the mid-20th century. It is characterized by a rapid shift from traditional industries, as established during the Industrial Revolution, to an economy centered on information technology. The onset of the Information Age has been linked to the development of the transistor in 1947, the optical amplifier in 1957, and Unix time, which began on January 1, 1970 and serves as the basis for Coordinated Universal Time and the Network Time Protocol. These technological advances have had a significant impact on the way information is processed and transmitted. According to the United Nations Public Administration Network, the Information Age was formed by capitalizing on computer microminiaturization advances, which led to modernized information systems and internet communications as the driving force of social evolution. Overview of early development ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
