Section 5, Chapter 2 -- Method: Analysis of information representations, flows, and processing functions

The starting assumption is that good action leads to higher survival chances and thus to evolutionary advantage. The second assumption is that better information leads to better action.

We started with assuming that:

• Information to the muscles drives action
• Input from perception and feelings improve the success of action
• The utilization of learning/memory makes action more successful
• Action, perception, feelings, and memory are linked by the flow of information
• These assumptions should apply to all the species under consideration, i.e. to the whole evolutionary chain for 'inner' language.

We proceed by asking and answering a series of questions. Since the information representations, flows, and processing, is hidden from us, we speculate and conjecture to arrive at an answer. We try to find the simplest answers that fit what we know and that fulfill the requirements.

We shall follow the information flows from the outside in

• For visual perception we shall focus on the eye, and use a digital camera or a digital video recorder as analogy
• For physical action with bones, joints, and muscles we shall build a simple model, as we could not find any existing analogy that seemed suitable
• Robots tend to use motors and gears, which are not sufficiently analogous to use for this purpose
• For feelings we have to guess, but we shall focus on hunger, satiation, fear, and pain. We shall assume that they are simple parameters with low precision that only change infrequently (say every minute).

We shall be concerned with the representation of the information, with flows, and with processing functionality. We start by looking at information representation and by calculating approximate rates of flow, assuming no compression or other transformation.

• The following pages are meant to calculate rough estimates of information sizes and flows. The estimates are meant to be conservative (fairly minimal), non-controversial, and to cover most mammals, not just humans.
• The estimates are of more interest to the technical reader and may safely be skipped.