If physics is an information science, what is an observer?

Interpretations of quantum theory have traditionally assumed a "Galilean" observer, a bare "point of view" implemented physically by a quantum system. This paper investigates the consequences of replacing such an informationally-impoverished observer with an observer that satisfies the requirements of classical automata theory, i.e. an observer that encodes sufficient prior information to identify the system being observed and recognize its acceptable states. It shows that with reasonable assumptions about the physical dynamics of information channels, the observations recorded by such an observer will display the typical characteristics predicted by quantum theory, without requiring any specific assumptions about the observer's physical implementation.Comment: 30 pages, comments welcome; v2 significant revisions - results unchange

Message-Passing Protocols for Real-World Parsing -- An Object-Oriented Model and its Preliminary Evaluation

We argue for a performance-based design of natural language grammars and their associated parsers in order to meet the constraints imposed by real-world NLP. Our approach incorporates declarative and procedural knowledge about language and language use within an object-oriented specification framework. We discuss several message-passing protocols for parsing and provide reasons for sacrificing completeness of the parse in favor of efficiency based on a preliminary empirical evaluation.Comment: 12 pages, uses epsfig.st

Culture and generalized inattentional blindness

A recent mathematical treatment of Baars' Global Workspace consciousness model, much in the spirit of Dretske's communication theory analysis of high level mental function, is used to study the effects of embedding cultural heritage on a generalized form of inattentional blindness. Culture should express itself quite distinctly in this basic psychophysical phenomenon, acting across a variety of sensory and other modalities, because the limited syntactic and grammatical 'bandpass' of the topological rate distortion manifold characterizing conscious attention is itself strongly sculpted by the constraints of cultural context

Exploring the concept of interaction computing through the discrete algebraic analysis of the Belousov–Zhabotinsky reaction

Interaction computing (IC) aims to map the properties of integrable low-dimensional non-linear dynamical systems to the discrete domain of finite-state automata in an attempt to reproduce in software the self-organizing and dynamically stable properties of sub-cellular biochemical systems. As the work reported in this paper is still at the early stages of theory development it focuses on the analysis of a particularly simple chemical oscillator, the Belousov-Zhabotinsky (BZ) reaction. After retracing the rationale for IC developed over the past several years from the physical, biological, mathematical, and computer science points of view, the paper presents an elementary discussion of the Krohn-Rhodes decomposition of finite-state automata, including the holonomy decomposition of a simple automaton, and of its interpretation as an abstract positional number system. The method is then applied to the analysis of the algebraic properties of discrete finite-state automata derived from a simplified Petri net model of the BZ reaction. In the simplest possible and symmetrical case the corresponding automaton is, not surprisingly, found to contain exclusively cyclic groups. In a second, asymmetrical case, the decomposition is much more complex and includes five different simple non-abelian groups whose potential relevance arises from their ability to encode functionally complete algebras. The possible computational relevance of these findings is discussed and possible conclusions are drawn