TITLE: Data Compression and the Complexity of Consciousness
AUTHOR: Eugene Wallingford
DATE: April 28, 2017 11:27 AM
DESC: bew
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BODY:
Okay, so this is cool:

Neuroscientists stimulate the brain with brief pulses
of energy and then record the echoes that bounce back.
Dreamless sleep and general anaesthesia return simple
echoes; brains in conscious states produce more complex
patterns.  Then comes a little inspiration from data
compression:

<BLOCKQUOTE><EM>
 Excitingly, we can now quantify the complexity of these
 echoes by working out how compressible they are, similar
 to how simple algorithms compress digital photos into
 JPEG files.  The ability to do this represents a first
 step towards a "consciousness-meter" that is both
 practically useful and theoretically motivated.
</EM></BLOCKQUOTE>

This made me think of Chris Ford's StrangeLoop 2015 talk about
<A HREF="http://www.cs.uni.edu/~wallingf/blog/archives/monthly/2016-06.html#e2016-06-27T14_12_15.htm">
   using compression to understand music</A>.
Using compressibility as a proxy for complexity gives us
a first opportunity to understand all sorts of phenomena
about which we are collecting data.  Kolmogorov complexity
is a fun tool for programmers to wield.

The passage above is from
<A HREF="https://aeon.co/essays/the-hard-problem-of-consciousness-is-a-distraction-from-the-real-one">
   an Aeon article on the study of consciousness</A>.
I found it an interesting read from beginning to end.
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