Filtering by the Maxim

<Cognitive Axioms 05_3> and <Cognitive Axioms 05_4> pinned down where neighboring theories part ways with the governor concept. Pinning down where they part and judging which one stays are different jobs. This piece judges, using the pragmatic maxim and the information theory beneath it.

1. Information is used to set the scale of an axis

Cognitive computation goes in steps (<Cognitive Axioms 04_1>). A purpose appears, the purpose picks the items to examine, an axis goes up for each item, and only after each axis's base scale is sharp is the object's coordinate measured. Information in the information-theory sense is used at the third step. Shannon's information is a reduction of uncertainty (entropy), and it can be read as the number of twenty-questions questions it takes to fix an axis's scale as finely as needed. How finely to fix the scale is decided by the purpose.

Peirce's maxim defines the meaning of a concept by the observable effects it produces. Observable effects aren't measured in thin air. They are measured by whether a coordinate moves on an axis a purpose has raised. If the predicted coordinate on an axis raised by the purpose differs depending on whether a proposition P is true or false (H(coordinate|P=true) ≠ H(coordinate|P=false)), then P carries information for that purpose. If the prediction is the same on every axis, the information is zero, and by the maxim the proposition is meaningless.

Information is measured against a purpose (<Cognitive Axioms 02_3>). The same proposition moves the scale on one purpose's axis and moves nothing on another's. All the testing in this piece rests on that relativity. The purpose set here is handling the matter at hand, and the axes to test are those that measure how cognitive computation actually runs when faced with a matter at hand.

2. Which axis's scale does a proposition move?

Test the sakshin-Brahman identification. Whether the claim "I have reached the sakshin and become one with Brahman" is true or false, the predicted coordinate doesn't change on any axis of handling the matter at hand. The scale moves on none of the axes, behavior, response or outcome, so the information is zero.

Apply the same standard to the governor concept itself. If its proposition were "after the avatar dies, the governor persists in time," it would move no axis of handling the matter at hand and would drop out just like the sakshin proposition. That is not the governor concept's proposition. Its proposition is "when second-order representation is at work, no time axis or boundary axis is set up and only the here-now is observed." This proposition separates the coordinates before and after the trigger sentence on the axes of handling the matter at hand. Responsiveness to the sense that something is off, distance from memeplexes, and the degree of attachment to the temporal stories of regret and anxiety are those axes, and a third party can observe the difference between the before and after coordinates. In League of Legends it shows up as movement on a separate axis, the team's macro decisions, apart from the axis of precision in local fights. The information is not zero.

3. Verdicts on the three lines

The test in this section has a single criterion: take out any proposition that can't move the scale on an axis a purpose has raised. Peirce's maxim is the philosophical justification of this cutoff line, and Shannon's information is the tool for measuring the cutoff in units of an axis's scale.

Rechecked by this criterion, the sakshin-type propositions (including Gnosticism, Kabbalah and Sufism) fail at the points where they posit a substance and a place, since those move no axis. Dzogchen's rigpa moves an axis with the structure of recognition itself, but it carries surplus terms: the master's mediation and the definition of an absolute. Damasio, Metzinger, Graziano, higher-order theory and Kim Joo-hwan's background self all carry information. The axes on which they carry it are axes raised by their own purposes: explaining brain damage, the conditions for consciousness to arise, and training self-regulation. Those axes stand on space-time coordinates as a premise. The governor concept raises its axes for the purpose of handling the matter at hand, and sees space-time coordinates not as one of those axes but as the handler's survival settings. The difference between the two lines is not whether they carry information but a difference of purpose and axis. The governor concept sets up no substance, no place and no mediation, and produces information solely from the coordinate difference that the trigger sentence makes on the axes of handling the matter at hand, so it sits closest to the cutoff line.

Checked separately, the background self theory moves a coordinate on the axis of whether self-regulation succeeds (whether the remembering self manages to control the experiencing self) depending on whether the background self notices, so its information is not zero. The purpose of that axis is the training result called mind strength. The axis the governor concept measures is an immediate switch by a single trigger sentence, and the two theories measure axes set by different purposes.