Who is Smartest, part 2, Information Resolution

What is information resolution?

Here is a comment I made in response to a comment about self-interest being everyone's main motivation.

"If everything you do is self-interest, then self-interest loses it's meaning. The point being made is that one easy way to reason is to assume everything one does is self-interested, and I get the point, it just becomes meaningless when you scrutinize it. What is it when one does something for others? Sacrifices oneself to pain and death? You can say, well you're doing it for your genes or to satisfy some dream of power. So what? That doesn't mean it's not altruistic. Altruistic cannot mean, 'done with no other motivations except to help others,' nor can self interest mean 'done with no other motivations except to help oneself,', everything is done with multiple motivations, and also, motivation is a low-resolution model of understanding human action. We know of chemical and even possible quantum things going on in the brain, yet we still speak of motivations and self-interest. This is ancient philosophy and from a time when they actually did not know about neurotransmitters, chemistry, and physics. It's folk psychology."

I said that the term 'motivation' has low information resolution.  Lower resolution than say, 'dopamine'.  What is meant by this?

It means that the term 'motivation' comes from an information system, a system of language to explain human behavior that has a a small number of not well-defined information points.  These are beliefs, desires, emotions, and words for experiences of humans.   It is a logical system that includes such words as remorse, guilt, freewill, etc.  All of these have been critiqued and they are basically ancient folk psychology and philosophy.  However, it is still how we speak and partly how we understand the world.  Hence a motivation isn't really something that exists, it is part of an interactive behavioral and information system that people use who have our language and culture.  It is easy to imagine a culture where there is no such word that really corresponds to 'motivation'.  In the language of brain science, there is basically no such term, although when we talk across information systems, motivation appears to be linked to dopamine.  However, motivation comes from a primitive information system while dopamine comes from a much more definite information system that includes chemical and atomic structure, with lots of strict definitions and data points.  This is what is meant by information resolution.

The term is borrowed from television resolution and it basically means the same thing.   A 1080p screen is 1920 pixels across by 1080down, for a total of 2,073,600 pixels.  That is 2 million information points, with each pixel being able to display various colors.  Contrast that with a screen with only 16 pixels which can display only 4 colors each.

A concept like 'motivation' is like a display on a screen with only 16 pixels, and a term like dopamine is like a display on a screen with over 2 million pixels.  There are more information points and the points are more definite.

Who is smartest?

Some people use language with low information resolution and basically speak and operate on lower information.  Some people think that language is one big information system where every word has a definite meaning that has been worked out and put in a dictionary and all of these meanings correspond to the real world.  That is akin to believing in Santa Claus but it may be the default position of persons in the western world.  It is low information resolution and faith that someone, a god-like entity, has created the world from language and named everything in English.

The smartest person uses advanced and appropriate information resolution and is aware there are different information systems aka language games at play in both colloquial and technical speech.

Next, we will talk about epistemological sophistication as it relates to intelligence.  Have fun friends.  Also, since this is a noots blog, I will look at some noots and see if they may increase intelligence.

Thanks friends.

DF Seldon.

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